Songs of the Fluteplayer: Seasons of Life in the Southwest

by Sharman Apt Russell

From the flooding of southern New Mexico€™s Mimbres River in the summer, to the year-round search for community in rural America, Sharman Apt Russell recounts her experiences in creating a life for herself in the remote southwestern desert. She, along with her husband, chose to leave a faster lane in order to find a way of life not possible in a larger urban building their own adobe home, giving birth to their first child at home, and developing self-reliance and a deepening commitment to each other. Her reverence for the land, its history, and native inhabitants always informs her writing, and her intelligence and strong narrative voice ring clearly throughout this remarkable work. Like the best personal memoirs, the book is also about the events, people, myths, and emotions that define the days and seasons. Songs of the Fluteplayer, called an €enchanting book€ by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, marks an exciting literary debut.

Genres: Nature, Nonfiction

176 pages, Paperback

First published August 31, 1991

About the author

I am pleased to be considered a nature and science writer and excited that my Diary of a Citizen Scientist was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing. The John Burroughs Medal was first given in 1926, and recipients include Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Barry Lopez, John McPhee, and many others. To be in such a list.

My most recent nonfiction is What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs (Columbia University Press, 2024)--part memoir of my tracking experiences, part introduction to the basics of identifying mammal tracks, and part call to reform how we manage wildlife in North America.

My previous Within Our Grasp: Childhood Malnutrition Worldwide and the Revolution Taking Place to End It (Pantheon Books, April, 2021) combines my longtime interest in the environment with my longtime interest in hunger. I began writing about this subject some twenty years ago, believing firmly that the goals of the environmentalist and the humanitarian are aligned. Healthy children require a healthy Earth. A healthy Earth requires healthy children.

Essentially I write about whatever interests me and seems important--living in place, grazing on public land, archaeology, flowers, butterflies, hunger, Cabeza de Vaca, citizen science, global warming, and pantheism.

I like this range of subject matter. I believe, too, in this braid of myth and science, celebration and apocalypse.

A little bit of bio:

Raised in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, in 1981 I settled in southern New Mexico as a "back to the lander" and have stayed there ever since. I am a professor emeritus in the Humanities Department at Western New Mexico University in Silver City, as well as a mentoring faculty at Antioch University in Los Angeles. I received my MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana and my B.S. in Conservation and Natural Resources from the University of California, Berkeley.

My work has been translated into Korean, Chinese, Swedish, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Polish, and Italian. That is really a unique thrill: to see your words in Chinese ideograms.

Reviews

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

S. Russell has a lot of fans, but I'm not among them. She shared key experiences, but kept me, the reader, at a distance.

I liked her topics:
- The Mimbres Valley
- Illegal Aliens
- Song of the Fluteplayer (the symbolic figure & her father)
- Homebirth
- Trading Posts
- Irrigation [water issues]
- Gila Wilderness
- Range War [ranchers vs environmentalists]
- Biosphere II

One line, in the essay about ranching, addressed a topic that I've often wondered about. At this point, she has addressed the typical rancher's concerns, but then she focuses on one rancher, Bob Jacobsen.
p 134
A few years ago, he jettisoned the cowboy image. "For a long time, I thought it was the wildest, most wonderful life a person could lead," he once told me. "But a cowboy has to dress a certain way. He has to talk a certain way. He hs to think a certain way. It's a dead end. Finally, I didn't want to be that confined. I didn't want to be just what a cowboy is supposed to be."

Peer pressure? Or is he too sensitive?

[Elizabeth Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The perfect book to read while traveling through New Mexico. Light literary essays about a chosen life in the wild, rural Southwest. I especially appreciated the chapter on birth:

It would seem that I had never been so vulnerable and so dependent in all my life. Yet I remember this, a physical memory, lodged deep in the body, as a moment of power.
--Sharman Apt Russell, Songs of the Fluteplayer

[Marguerite Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author and her husband moved to rural New Mexico to create an 'intentional life'. Russell portrays the beauty and rigors of their life and the various conflicting interest groups - the ranchers, the hunters, the environmentalists, the farmers, the Hispanics, the native Americans - with insight into their needs and motivations and without taking sides.

[J.J. Amaworo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm delighted to see this book re-released on Kindle. It contains wonderfully crafted essays describing the author's attempt to forge a life close to the land. The book is really a celebration of the Southwest and of life itself. Wonderful.

[James Callan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once again, I find myself delighted, educated, and all-around fulfilled while reading another great one by Sharman Apt Russel. So rich is my experience when reading Russel that the pages, as if a spell, have me "obscurely and pre-adolescently falling in love with her."

[Carly Svamvour]

I started reading this about 10 days ago - liked it.

Very interesting about the environment of New Mexico.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This excellent collection of essays on the intersection of nature and life in the American Southwest is as poignant today as when it was written nearly 20 years ago.

[MrsAReader · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Beautiful and thought-provoking essays