She's Gone Santa Fe - Paperback

by Maida Tilchen (Author)

In this historical novel set in the early 1920s, the dream of a young Brooklyn Jewish woman named Ree is to live with the Indians of the Southwest, far from the sweatshop where she works. To reach that goal, she studies anthropology at Columbia University, where the professor she idolizes, Ruth Benedict, is having an affair with her fellow student, Margaret Mead. When her professors think Ree is a loose cannon and won't send her to the Southwest for her field work, she defiantly goes to New Mexico on her own. But before she reaches Navajoland, Ree works at a lesbian dude ranch that really existed; works for Boston heiress Mary Cabot Wheelwright to study Navajo culture from Hosteen Klah, a transgender medicine man; finds romance on a starlit mesa top with an elusive Navajo youth; travels in a sheepherder's cozy wagon; and tries to find her place at a trading post in a remote Navajo community. She's Gone Santa Fe tells a unique story based on real people and places of New Mexico, lesbian, and anthropology history.

Author Biography

Maida Tilchen writes primarily to preserve and/or dramatize lesbian history. Her first novel, "Land Beyond Maps," was a Lambda Literary Foundation "Lammy" Finalist and won New Mexico and Arizona book awards. A lifetime book collector, she co-wrote the first "second wave" article on lesbian pulp novels, published in Margins magazine in 1975. Her writing has been published in Gay Community News; Sojourner; Body Politic; and books including Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology; Lavender Culture; Women-Identified Women; Feminist Frameworks; Gay Press, Gay Power: The Growth of LGBT Community Newspapers in America, and includes the foreword to the bibliography The Lesbian in Literature. She served as a VISTA volunteer in southern Indiana, was promotions manager for Gay Community News (Boston), and has had many research and writing jobs in the educational field. She has visited New Mexico often since 1993. After her first trip there, wanting to continue to live in the library-rich Boston area but to keep one foot in the "land of enchantment," she started writing historical fiction set in New Mexico.