New Mexico is a place that gets into you whether you invite it or not.
I’ve lived here most of my life, and I still can’t drive through the high desert without feeling something shift. There’s a quality to the landscape — the scale of it, the silence, the way the light changes the color of everything every hour — that is not available anywhere else I’ve been. It is, in the truest sense of the word, elemental. The land here doesn’t care about you. It will outlast you, and it knows it, and there is something about that indifference that clarifies things.
Writers talk a lot about finding their place. The place that unlocks the work. For me, that place is New Mexico, and it shows up in the fiction whether I plan it or not.
The Ruined Man lives in Albuquerque — not the sanitized tourist version, but the real city, the one that’s been scraped raw by poverty and heat and a long history of difficult truths. The paranormal elements of that novel only worked, I think, because the landscape was already strange. New Mexico is a place where the ordinary and the mythic coexist without apology. The roadrunner and the rattlesnake and the petroglyphs cut into volcanic rock ten thousand years ago — they’re all here, present and matter-of-fact, the way magic is in the best fantasy writing.
Those Left Behind pushes further into the speculative, but the world of Quad carries the DNA of the Southwest: the desolation, the hardness of survival, the way communities form and break apart under extreme conditions. You can write that from imagination alone, but it helps to have grown up somewhere that doesn’t let you romanticize scarcity.
For writers working in the Southwest, or writers looking to use place more deliberately in their work, a few things I’ve learned:
Resist the postcard. New Mexico is visually spectacular, and it’s easy to fall into describing it as scenery. The landscape earns its place in the prose only when it does something — when it creates pressure, reflects character, or advances theme. The Sandia Mountains at sunset are beautiful. They’re useful to the story when a character looks at them and feels the weight of everything he hasn’t become.
Listen to the history. New Mexico has been layered with civilization upon civilization — Indigenous, Spanish colonial, American territorial, contemporary. That history is not finished. It lives in the place names, the architecture, the food, the unresolved tensions that shape how people here understand themselves. Fiction that takes this seriously is richer for it.
Let the landscape set the moral climate. This is the thing New Mexico does better than almost anywhere I know: the physical environment communicates something about the terms of existence. Life here requires adaptation, resilience, and a clear-eyed relationship with what is, rather than what you wish were true. Those are the same qualities that make characters worth following.
The Land of Enchantment. The name sounds like marketing, but it isn’t wrong. There is something here that enchants — not in the soft, fairy-tale sense, but in the older sense of the word. A spell that changes how you see. Writers who live here carry it in the work. Readers who haven’t been here catch it anyway, and don’t always know why.
That’s place doing what place does best. That’s why I keep setting stories here.