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BiographyRobert Boswell is the author of eleven books, including The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, a story collection with Graywolf Press, publish in April 2009. His novels: Century's Son, American Owned Love, Mystery Ride, The Geography of Desire, and Crooked Hearts. His other story collections: Living to Be 100 and Dancing in the Movies. His nonfiction: The Half-Known World, a book on the craft of writing, and What Men Call Treasure: The Search for Gold at Victorio Peak, a book about a treasure hunt in New Mexico (co-written with David Schweidel). His cyberpunk novel Virtual Death (published under the pseudonym Shale Aaron) was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His play Tongues won the John Gassner Prize. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, and the Evil Companions Award. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Best Stories from the South, Esquire, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Colorado Review, and many other magazines. He shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston with his wife, Antonya Nelson.
Nelson and Boswell live in Houston, Texas; Telluride, Colorado; and Las Cruces, New Mexico. 
Antonya Nelson and Robert Boswell will celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary this summer
Antonya Nelson is the author of the following story collections: Some Fun Female Trouble Family Terrorists In the Land of Men The Expendables. She is also the author of four novels: Living to Tell Nobody’s Girl Talking in Bed. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harpers, Redbook, Tinhouse, Prize Stories, the O. Henry Awards, and Best American Short Stories. The Expendables won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1990 and Talking in Bed received the 1996 Heartland Award in fiction. Her books have been New York Times notable books in 1992, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2010, and she was not long ago named by The New Yorker as one of the “twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium.” She was awarded the Rea Prize for the Short Story in 2003. Her most recent book--Bound--was named one of the best books of the year by Kirkus. Her stories appear with some regularity in the New Yorker. 
This used to be the post office. In the future (the distant future), it will be a writing retreat.
Why we did this is a mystery that we find impossible to explain, but there are a couple of streams on the property, aspen trees, pine trees, and a handful of falling down buildings. So far, we're spending a lot of time propping up one of the falling down buildings, which turns out to be very compelling work. A photo below shows the progress of the renovation.
David Schweidel and I spent more than a decade researching and writing a book about Victorio Peak. Some of the research was done on our bellies, crawling through a network of caves inside the mountain. The story of Doc and Babe Noss is one of the wildest treasure stories in the Southwest. It certainly took us for a wild ride.
Victorio Peak stands in the middle of the Jornada del Muerto, loosely translated as Dead Man’s Trail. From the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, the Jornada was the deadliest stretch of the El Camino Real, the principal route from Mexico City to Santa Fe. For more than four hundred years, virtually every trading caravan between Old Mexico and New risked falling prey to the Jornada’s brutal heat, dry water holes, roving Apaches. The peak takes its name from the Apache chief Victorio, who defeated the U.S. Cavalry in a battle fought near the peak in 1880. Treasure enthusiasts speculate that Victorio was protecting a hoard of gold and jewels hidden within the mountain, the plunder accumulated from centuries of Apache raiding. In November of 1937, unlicensed foot doctor Doc Noss found his way inside Victorio Peak. Over the course of several visits, Doc ventured down a succession of narrow walkways, squeezing through bottlenecks and fording an underground stream. Eventually, he discovered a series of small, linked caves and one large cavern that purportedly contained a treasure of fabulous proportions. The system of caves, according to Doc and Babe, held Spanish armor, statues of saints, swords, a crown, a chest of jewelry, twenty-seven skeletons, and an estimated 16,000 gold bars of various types, from primitively smelted cigar-shaped bars to uniform gold bricks stacked in boxes stamped with the Wells Fargo imprint. Eyewitnesses have since signed sworn statements declaring that they saw Doc Noss bring gold bars and other artifacts out of Victorio Peak. One witness claims to have gone with Doc into the treasure room.
Doc Noss was shot from behind by Charley Ryan after an agreement about some gold bars went south. At the murder trial, Ryan defended himself by arguing that Doc Noss was heading for his truck, and everyone knows that Doc kept a gun in his truck.
Ryan was acquitted. Doc's story and the beauty of the Hembrillo Basin got me hooked. David Schweidel and I worked 14 years on What Men Call Treasure: The Search for Gold at Victorio Peak.
The cover photo of THE HALF-KNOWN WORLD generates a lot of interest. People love it. My daughter Jade is a graduate student studying art in the MFA program at James Madison, and she took the photo. The man rising up out of the water is her husband, poet Stephen Webber.
Answer to most asked question: Yes, he really is levitating. You can see some of Jade Webber's paintings below.
This is my daughter at a gallery opening featuring her work. Before I found the photograph that we used for The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, I considered using her painting of a man with the head of a deer--which pretty much sums up the main characters in that story. The painting is featured here.
Jade's newest work is an amazing series of bears. Beautiful paintings. The photo link will take you to her website. 
My son, Noah, attends Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Roscoe
He does not respond to fan mail, but he has a Facebook page. The Ghost Town Renovation: Writers with the Wrong Tools
After many hours of hard work and amateur carpentry, the P.O. now looks like this from the outside. (The inside is still a wreck.)
From left to right: Roscoe, Rusty Boswell, Merrill Feitell, Steven Schwartz, and Toni Nelson. Steven and his wife Emily own property near us.
Merrill's story collection is called Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes. Steven is the author of Therapy, Lives of the Fathers, The Good Doctor's Son, and To Leningrad in Winter. Emily Hammond is the author of Breathe Something Nice and Milk. Rusty Boswell lives in Raton, New Mexico. 
1965 Airstream
Power Tool
Connie Voisine, author of Rare High Meadow of which I Might Dream and Cathedral of the North, and her daughter Alma Bradburd join us for happy hour.
Rob Wilder visits the worksite but vanishes when the labor begins. Wilder, author of Daddy Needs a Drink and Tales from the Teachers' Lounge, is one of our closest friends and lousiest carpenters.
In the background is a log cabin, another of the falling down structures we own. It's location near the creek has led to water infiltration, and Toni has dubbed it "the bog cabin." Anyone know how to raise such a cabin out of the muck? 
Safety First
That's my brother Rusty on the left and my brother-in-law Buddy on the right. |
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