About Richard N. Ryan

First, the provenance of The Murder of Eddie Watchman, which began with the convergence of two ideas: an account by John Wesley Powell, in his Canyons of the Colorado, of the departure of three of his men—skeptical that they’d ever make it through the seemingly endless Grand Canyon alive—who hiked out of the canyon and disappeared. I read this back in the early 80s, at a time when we did a lot of summer camping on the shores of Lake Powell, and when the fate of those three men was not yet clearly understood. What happened to them? I imagined a tale in which they and then their descendents became, first, Colorado River pirates, and later, after Lake Powell formed behind the Glen Canyon Dam, lake pirates.

Like that idea, hatched thirty years ago, my goal of writing the book never went away. It just had to bide its time. Something always seemed to supersede my writing: raising and supporting a family, teaching, the teeming minutiae of life. For a long time I told myself that life kept getting in the way of my writing, but the longer I live the clearer I see that it was actually showing the way. I believe what my father taught me: things happen for a reason, even if we don’t always know what it is. I believe that there is a plan, albeit one that’s too enormous and complex for us to understand on a cognitive level, and that we should learn to work with what happens in our lives.

Take jobs, for instance. Fortunately, several of my jobs over the years have centered on writing: freelancing, corporate publications, journalism, all of which might be termed lemons when viewed through the prism of writing novels, but those jobs disciplined my writing and writing habits, forcing me to sharpen my focus and keep producing under the pressure of expectations and deadlines, and to become a more careful writer.

I also taught writing for a good many years, and gained the invaluable object of seeing the process through the eyes of other writers, which helped me refine my own. And there’s a lot to be learned from reading—and correcting—someone else’s bad writing. You quickly see how many ways the process can go off track, thus making it less likely that you yourself will.

So when life gives you lemons, make limoncello. But that assumes you have only bad things with which to work, whereas life often brings you good—and sometimes great—things. For example, I unexpectedly got the chance, almost ten years ago, to retire early from teaching, which gave me the opportunity to write full time. The early steps of plotting and writing the book were a collaboration among my wife, our good friend Sue Fredrickson, and myself. My father passed away in December 2013, just as I was coming around to the idea of self-publishing and its attendant expenses, putting the money I needed into my hands. Even bringing this book to publication has comprised a series of steps along which I met one person after another who helped push the process along.

Along with mining the silver linings, my feelings about where I live have played a big part in the writing of this book. Although I’ve lived in the West for 40 years, it’s only been in the past few that I’ve finally begun thinking of myself as a Westerner, even though thirty years ago my wife and I would be moved to tears driving back into the mountains of Colorado from a visit East. Ironically, this recent dawning began with our moving back East to care for my father, which threw my Western identity into such high relief that even I was able to see it. Publishing this book and writing pieces like this, which force me to describe myself to you, my readers, has also aided this process of self-discovery.

Looking back, I can see myself evolving into a Western man, first living in the Sonoran Desert, albeit in a big city, followed by life on an Indian Reservation up on the Colorado Plateau. Then back to the city, which we experienced as a sort of exile, but which gave us a greater appreciation for the country we’d left behind, followed by a second move into the boonies, where we now happily reside. It’s as if all those experiences finally coalesced into an identity that is finally and fully me.

But, oh, the place. Out here, you have all the space you need, under the blue sky mirrored in your friend’s eyes, breathing the weightless air on a mountain trail beneath the Ponderosa pines. We treasure our infrequent rivers and the small towns strung along them, our intermittent streams whose dry channels carry the debris of the ages. How to describe a canyon, when the wren calls and the sun slants down a wall as old as time itself? And touching it all, coalescing it all into one thing, is the light—is it any wonder the ancients deified the sun?—that tangible, neighborly deity that sustains everything it reaches, bracketed by sacred night, hour of lightless sleep, scavenged by coyote, who every dawn scours away its remains.

Here you can roast in the day, and chill that night. Here, on a sunny January day, in a windless nook, you can rediscover the October you thought you’d left behind. You can ski in the morning, and lie by the pool in the afternoon; hike amidst the saguaro, and shelter under the aspen from an afternoon shower.

Yes, it’s Eden, only after the fall. The garden is still there, only it’s been peopled, and, without fear of stereotyping, I can say that many of them can be reclusive, and often lack a sense of community, resulting in things like lax or absent zoning laws, leaving someone’s dilapidated trailer slap up against your McMansion. And the garden has been terribly scarred by logging and mining and the drilling for oil, with more exploitation on the way as states attempt to wrestle control of our public lands from the federal government, which, if not always a vigilant steward, at least has provided the maximum amount of good for the maximum number of people.

And, don’t mistake me, the people can be good, you just have to understand that Westerners are very much ‘live and let live’ types. They’re not particularly interested in messing in your business, and appreciate you staying out of theirs. I think the volumes of space we have out here helped shape that philosophy, just as the lack of space back East keeps everyone there more involved in what everyone else is up to.

And lest you think we’re homogeneous, understand that there remain out here indigenous peoples and deep-rooted Hispanic communities, intact and thriving, thank God. There are Navajo people living today in the Four Corners region among whom I was privileged to spend my entire teaching career, but while I was teaching them, they were teaching me: to understand, appreciate, and respect another culture, to realize that Navajos were not simply differently colored white people. I recall the possibility dawning on me, as I stood in a crowd in a school gym at a reservation school, surrounded by people speaking Navajo, that I could be anywhere in the world, and that that place, as isolated as it was, was somewhere in the world, with as much legitimacy as any other place in the world. This ‘outsider’ or ‘traveler’ status helped solidify my nascent writer’s voice, and for that I am deeply grateful. I also greatly appreciate the Navajo concept of ‘hozhoni’—literally, ‘it is nice’, conceptually, ‘balance,’ something I try to achieve—sometimes successfully—in my own life.

And in our small town of Aztec, I am on friendship terms with an Hispanic community that goes back to the land grants from the Spanish crown, when New Mexico was still part of Old Mexico. This community, as with many comprising extended families, can be clannish, but superficial politeness, in our case, anyway, quickly gave way to a true warmth that has burned steadily for years.

And speaking of Old Mexico, it has been a vacation destination for more than 30 years, and, in the belief that one should always have something out front, we hope someday to live there part of the year.

As with all writers, my reading has had a major influence on my writing. By and large, I tend to stick to the classics, especially the English and the Russian: Hardy, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Woolf, under the longstanding belief that the better writing you read the better writing you write (although I’m willing to concede I could be the exception to that rule), and they use the English language so adroitly. (Not that there isn’t as much to be learned from reading bad writing. See above.) I like the nature writers, which started way back in my college years with Emerson and Thoreau, and continued through Loren Eisely, Aldo Leopold, John McPhee, Ed Abbey, Barry Lopez, and Edward Hoagland. It may be a surprise, but I’m not much of a mystery reader, perhaps for fear of borrowing enough from them so as to render my work unoriginal, although I do occasionally self-indulge with Elmore Leonard (Rest in Peace), Carl Hiaasen and P.D. James. And then there’s Louise Erdrich, Willa Cather, Bill Bryson, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, and Ann-Marie MacDonald. How do I categorize them except under the heading of ‘Enjoyed?’

So it is all these experiences—the West and the people in it; my jobs teaching and writing; what I brought with me from the East: my upbringing, my schooling, my reading—that constitute the person who wrote this book, and, of course, the book reflects the person.