Land Beyond Maps by Maida Tilchen ( Savvy Press, $14.95 ) is the 2009 New Mexico Book Awards finalist in two categories: GLBT and Historical Fiction. The awards are sponsored by an impressive array of literary organizations and businesses in the state; winners will be announced at an Awards Banquet in Albuquerque Nov. 25. While searching for a publisher, Tilchen received the Arch & Bruce Brown Foundation prize for lesbian/gay historical fiction at the 2000 Lambda Awards Banquet here in Chicago.
Tilchen was a campus activist in her undergraduate days at Indiana University, Bloomington in the 1970s, and was an organizer of one of the first university sponsored gay and lesbian conferences in the nation. In 1975 she attended the 2nd Annual Lesbian Writers Conference in Chicago and presented her slide show on lesbian pulp novels as a source of our history. While she has published many essays on golden dyke oldies and lesbian history, Land Beyond Maps is her first novel. Tilchen and her wife of 23 years, Marsha ( they were married in their home state of Massachusetts in 2000 ) , have spent years following the trails of their precursors and exploring the area that became the novel's locale, from their base, a vacation condo in New Mexico.
In the last half of the 19th century, gold fever in claims from California to the Black Hills or an opportunity to reinvent oneself on homesteaded land, heralded the clarion call of "Go West, young man!" But the call to independent, young women—most of them single, many of them lesbian—wasn't heard until a generation later.
By then, railroads and the motorcar had made easier access to remnants of ancient civilizations, open spaces of quiet beauty, the spirituality of nature and matrilineal culture of pueblo peoples. The draw of the Southwest for artists, photographers, and writers after the First World War was compelling. And the attraction of the four corners area ( New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado & Utah ) was particularly strong for lesbians.
Lesbians in the Southwest
In her novels published in the early decades of the 20th century, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather wrote of near mystical experiences at the ruins of cliff dwellings in Walnut Creek Canyon, Ariz., and Mesa Verde in southwest Colorado. With her partner Edith Lewis she traveled all over northern New Mexico in the ensuing years recording some of her impressions in Death Comes For the Archbishop ( 1929 ) . Georgia O'Keefe painted iconic desert canvases in the 1930s; but a whole generation of "unknown" women like Chicago artist Nellie A. Knopf preceded her ( a recent Antiques Roadshow valued one of her desert paintings at $15,000 ) . Anthropologist Ruth Benedict learned of the Zuni men-women from her teacher Elsie Clews Parsons and would later include sections on the Zuni people she studied in her influential Patterns of Culture ( 1934 ) . Frieda Lawrence ( wife of novelist D.H. ) and author Katherine Mansfield became lovers in digs provided the novelist by New York arts patron Mabel Dodge, who became hostess to a colony of creatives at her hacienda in Taos after her marriage to Native American Tony Luhan.
Ordinary Chicago lesbians also fell in love with the Southwest. Jeannie Begg Dixon courted her partner Georgia Cole here at the 1933 Fair. In 1922, 16-year-old Jeanne had accompanied her railroad exec father in a private railway car to the opening of Yellowstone to tourists. After her father's death in 1936, she and Georgia eventually moved out west and lived out their lives together.
Another Chicago connection was hardware heiress Florence Dibel Bartlett, one of a generation of wealthy, educated local women who ( like those of Hull House ) created their own brand of philanthropy. [ Her brother Frederic Clay Bartlett was a major donor of paintings to the Art Institute and her sister Maie Bartlett Heard co-founded the museum bearing her name in Phoenix, Arizona. ] In Chicago, for decades, Florence was an executive with the Eleanor Clubs for single working women, and founder of their summer camp at Conference Point in Lake Geneva. Beginning in the 1920s she spent summers in New Mexico, eventually building "El Mirador" her multi-acre estate near Alcalde just north of Santa Fe. She hosted, along with many notables, women with" unconventional lifestyles." In 1953, the year before her suicide in Chicago, she dedicated the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe that she had created to house her private collections gleaned from years of world travel.
Fiction as history
Artist/historian Tee A. Corinne noted in her entry on photography in "Lesbian Histories and Cultures" ( Garland, 2000 ) that "During the 1930s, Laura Gilpin ( 1891-1979 ) , famous for her photographs of the American Southwest, made gentle portraits of her beloved companion, Betsy Forster ( 1886-1972 ) , a nurse working with the Navajo." Maida Tilchen has created her historical novel around the lives of these two women and the folks they met as they moved about Navajo country in the 1930s.
Land Beyond Maps opens ( and closes ) with Morna Brewster, wife of a failed artist from New York, who runs a trading post at which Laura and Betsy stop for gas and refreshments. Tilchen captures everything from questing eastern artists and photographers connected with the Art Students League and Steiglitz, to the growing market for Indian tourism—all presented with knowledge and accuracy. One character, in a scene very unlike anything in the 1942 Judy Garland/Angela Lansbury film, comes west to earn a living as a "Harvey" girl. Fred Harvey hired young, single women to staff his chain of restaurants built to nourish travelers at Santa Fe Railroad depots along western routes. Such details enrich our understanding of the area's history.
Gilpin is already the subject of a biography; but Tilchen really wanted to explore and preserve the interlocking circles of women's lives and lesbian history long-lost below the surface of America's southwest. She felt this could best be accomplished by taking liberties only fiction allowed—mixing real people with composites, imagining conversations and emotions. Her technique of moving the focus of each chapter back and forth among her characters takes a little getting used to, but the adventure, the history ( the her-story ) is worth the effort. Unusual in a work of fiction, Tilchen has also provided an exciting bibliography of her major sources.
Copyright 2009 by Marie J. Kuda
