Joshua Wheeler is an author who was born in Texas but raised in Alamogordo.He will be reading excerpts from two of his books, “Acid West: Essays” and his latest book, “The High Heaven,” Friday, December 5 at 7:30 p.m. in NMSU’s CMI Theater inside Milton Hall as part of the Nelson-Boswell Reading Series. Scott Brocato recently spoke with Wheeler about his work.
Scott Brocato:
Josh, you were born in Littlefield, Texas, and raised in Alamogordo. When did you move there?
Joshua Wheeler:
I was probably about two or three years old when we went to Alamogordo. That's where my mom's family was from for many generations. My parents had been out in Texas for college, and then we moved back there shortly after that.
Scott Brocato:
And what was growing up in Alamogordo like? You lived on a ranch, didn't you?
Joshua Wheeler:
Well, I didn't live on the ranch, but my family, my mom's family, had the White Sands Ranch for many years. We lived in town, and they ended up selling the ranch just a few years after we moved back. They'd been engaged with the government over land rights for a number of years. But they'd had it since the 1940s.
Scott Brocato:
And is that where White Sands Missile Range sits now, or the rough area?
Joshua Wheeler:
If you look at a map and you see the grayed-out area of the White Sands Missile Range, you can still see the ranch house from the White Sands Ranch, which is notched out of the White Sands Missile Range. So they took all of the grazing land, but they left, outside of the missile range, the actual ranch house. Which is still out there between the Twin Buttes, just across from the entrance to White Sands National Park.
Scott Brocato:
What drew you to writing, and about how old were you?
Joshua Wheeler:
I think I started writing when I was in elementary school. You know, I just was always interested in books and always interested in writing, and I had some teachers that were really supportive of it, and my parents were really supportive of it. And I just sort of always knew I would be a writer. I didn't know what kind of writer, though.
Scott Brocato:
Well, when you came here to NMSU, you came to study poetry, but a professor steered you in another direction. Why? Was it a reflection of your poetry?
Joshua Wheeler:
Yeah, I think I was a terrible poet. (Laughs) I knew I wanted to be a writer and I'd gone out to California to undergrad and kind of thought I wanted to write for movies. I just never really got any kind of traction with that, and also found out that movie making was not a profession that really respected the writer, you know? It's a director's and a producer's and an actor's kind of medium.
And so yeah, I just knew I wanted to come back to New Mexico and write, and the opportunity presented itself to study poetry at New Mexico State. And it ended up being really great. All the professors there: Connie Voisine, Rus Bradburd, who are still there; Carmen Jimenez, who was my poetry professor, who ended up being my editor of this new novel, “The High Heaven,” that's out now. So it ended up being a great experience for me at NMSU, even though the poetry didn't quite pan out.
Scott Brocato:
But who was the professor? Can you mention their name?
Joshua Wheeler:
That told me I was a bad poet? (Laughs) It was Carmen (Jimenez). Carmen, who is now my editor of this novel. And she wasn't mean about it. She actually was saying that I was maybe more talented in other genres. And she's the one who steered me towards writing nonfiction, which is what my first book, “Acid West,” was.
Scott Brocato:
Well, you're a professor now. The shoe is on the other foot. You're a professor now at Louisiana State University. How is that experience for you, being a professor, and have you steered other potential writers in similar directions?
Joshua Wheeler:
So I do teach in the creative writing program at Louisiana State University, and I teach mostly non-fiction. And students come into our program wanting to write fiction or wanting to write poetry. And my job is to kind of convert them to non-fiction. I get them to read all the great sort of new journalists and a lot of the great memoirists and some of the classics--
Scott Brocato:
Tom Wolfe?
Joshua Wheeler:
Sure, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, you know, all the new journalists that I really cut my teeth when I was getting interested in non-fiction. And I try to convert them. I say, “It's more fun to write about the real world than it is to make stuff up.” And they say, “Well, you got a novel now, so you've kind of betrayed us.” But I try and do it all and teach them that they can do it all too.
Scott Brocato:
But you didn't betray them seven years ago. That's when your first book, “Acid West: Essays” came out. Would you consider that non-fiction?
Joshua Wheeler:
Yeah, I think it maybe falls into the category of creative non-fiction. But it kind of spans the spectrum of non-fiction, the essay collection does. Some stuff in there is very much traditional journalism, stuff that was written for traditionally journalistic outlets like Harper's Magazine. And some of the stuff is more memoiristic, and some of the stuff is more history, and some of the stuff is speculative history. And so, yeah, I mean, it's filed under the non-fiction genre, but it's got some stuff in there that might be considered experimental.
Scott Brocato:
And what was the response when you published that? Especially among people, family, friends from Alamogordo, southern New Mexico, that the book was largely about?
Joshua Wheeler:
I think that outside of Alamogordo, people were generally just like, “Wow, this place is fascinating.” And, you know, “I don't know anything about this.”
Scott Brocato:
They didn't realize it, maybe?
Joshua Wheeler:
Yeah, they didn't realize it. They didn't know anything about it. The classical “Oh, is that part of America?” So there was that. But certainly the people from that area, I think, were generally very supportive, but also, “What's the big deal? We know about White Sands, we know about the missile range, we know about the atomic bomb.”
Though I will say one of the big things that was discussed in “Acid West” was the issue of the Trinity Downwinders, the people who were exposed to radiation after the testing of the first atomic bomb. And there was a lot of education that needed to happen even in southern New Mexico about that issue, which was surprising to me that people didn't know the ins and outs of that. And just an interesting thing to understand, how much we do and do not know about a place where we spent our whole lives.
Scott Brocato:
When the book came out, you were interviewed here on our TV station for "Newsmakers.” You sat with Fred Martino and he asked if your next book would remain set in southern New Mexico. You kept your word--which brings us to your new novel, The High Heaven.” Talk about what that's about. Isn't it partly inspired by a cult?
Joshua Wheeler:
It is, yeah. So when I was writing “Acid West,” one of the stories that I was kind of interested in telling was the story about this cult in La Luz, New Mexico. They were there in the mid-1960s. They were kind of convinced that the world was going to end in 1969, and they'd built a landing strip for a UFO to come down and take them away before the end of the world, a kind of rapture. And they ended up getting sort of disbanded by the sheriff because they were caught doing some DIY mummification of members who had died that they wanted to keep their bodies around so that they could be a part of the rapture. This was a story that I knew about because one of the people that was in the cult ended up living out of my family's ranch in the 1960s after the cult was kind of disbanded.
But there wasn't a ton of information about the cult, and there was non-fiction (written) about that. You'd be writing about real people's lives. And I just felt like, it was going to be a little bit difficult for me to write about that in the way that I'd written about other things in “Acid West.”
So I kind of set that story aside. And when it came time to do some more writing, I was still thinking about it. And I was like, well, why don't I just make it up? You know, like, why don't I just write about that era in New Mexico, the 1960s in southern New Mexico, and think about what would happen if a young girl was orphaned when the cult that she grew up in was disbanded? And if the cult was a UFO cult, what would her life be like if she left the cult and then ended up in a place where they were testing rockets to go to the moon?
Scott Brocato:
And the character's name is Izzy.
Joshua Wheeler:
The character's name is Izzy Gently. Well, her name is Izzy, and she gets taken in by a group of ranchers, at a place called Twin Buttes Ranch. The rancher's named Gently.
Scott Brocato:
What were the differences in terms of process in writing this book, “The High Heaven,” a novel, your first novel, and writing the process of putting together the stories that made up "Acid West?”
Joshua Wheeler:
Well, there's a lot of research in both. “The High Heaven” starts out as a very historical novel, and it tracks the evolution of the American space race from really 1945, 1946, all the way through 2024. So there's a ton of historical research of the kind that I normally do in my non-fiction writing. So that part wasn't very different.
But there is some speculative stuff in the novel. If you read the copy on the back that tells you what the novel's about, it tells you that eventually it's about people in New Orleans who have lost the ability to see the moon. So there's this kind of Philip K. Dick sci-fi, speculative stuff that starts to filter in. That was fun for me to do, to make up that kind of stuff and think about what it would be like for a person who suddenly lost the ability to see the moon.
Scott Brocato:
Well, tonight you'll be doing a reading here at NMSU in the CMI Theater in Milton Hall, 7.30 p.m. Are you going to be reading for both works, “Acid West” and “The High Heaven?”
Joshua Wheeler:
I'll be focusing on “TheHigh Heaven,” but I might return to “Acid West” for old time's sake, since a lot of that was written when I was around here in Las Cruces.
Scott Brocato:
Well, can you read us a portion of “The High Heaven” right now?
Joshua Wheeler:
Sure. This is a little something from chapter 3, and the character Izzy has been rescued from the cult in La Luz, and along with her, she brought a radio, an Emerson Galaxy radio, which the cult had used to communicate with God. And so the rancher is thinking about this little girl with this radio that's now living at his ranch.
“She carried the Galaxy to the window in the kitchen and sat listening for God. The porch and the barn and the cutting room too, listening for God. Mornings and Oliver gave her free rein to wander the ranch with the Galaxy, exploring further from the house the more her leg healed, listening with her little ear right up to the Galaxy, listening all day for God. Sometimes she lay down in the pasture with the Galaxy for a pillow, like trying to sink her whole head into it. What would God tell this child? Oliver did chores where he could keep watch over her or keep her in earshot, in case the Galaxy did come on. He jotted marks in a pocket notebook he kept for breaking horses. It was full of careful notations about weight and teeth and foot control, peculiarities of colts learning to take the bit, annotations on the stubbornness of mustangs he'd brought in over the years to save from getting auctioned off by the army to glue factories. He made little notes about Izzy's leg and other notes when she talked scripture--He hangeth the earth upon nothing.When Maude got home from work at the hospital, she kept an eye on the child while Oliver thumbed an old Bible looking for what Izzy had said. When he found the girl's words, he wrote down the numbers of chapter and verse. Here and there he asked about the light in her eyes. She would squint and put her hands up to cover them and after a pause she said always, Still light. He would note the date and write, Still light.”
Scott Brocato:
That's from “The High Heaven.” The author is Joshua Wheeler, who will be reading from his works tonight at 7.30 at New Mexico State University's Milton Hall inside the CMI Theater. Do you have anything new that you're working on now since the publication of “High Heaven?”
Joshua Wheeler:
Mostly I'm just trying to get people to read the book. (Laughs) Yeah, it's a long book, but it's exciting.
I did recently publish a story about Smokey Bear in Alta Magazine. You can look that up. It's kind of a cultural history of Smokey Bear. who's a big part of our culture around southern New Mexico. So you can check that out if you're interested in reading some of my more recent non-fiction.
