Dancing on the Stones : Selected Essays

by John Nichols

If you've read any of John Nichols's novels or books of nonfiction, you've met a lively, funny, and very impassioned man. This new collection of essays gives you the opportunity to know him even more intimately. Taoseño, fisherman, father, author, spokesman for all underdogs, Nichols has gathered writings that span more than thirty years and range from idyllic reflections on nature to unmerciful satires on impending Armageddon. We see the author as a young man on the trip to Central America that gave him a social conscience that wouldn't quit; as a hunter, hiker, and naturalist on rivers and in mountains increasingly threatened by development; and as a novelist watching in embarrassed disbelief as his book The Milagro Beanfield War is made into a movie that succeeds in spite of Hollywood's best efforts to garble the outcome. The vitality that made Nichols a standout prep-school mischief maker and college hockey player lends irresistible high spirits even to essays about departed friends and mortal illness--subjects that are treated with compassion, bawdy irreverence, thoughtful philosophizing, and the author's intense love of life. Nichols can find a miraculous universe in a tiny stock pond, turn a rafting trip into a Keystone Kops misadventure, advocate revolution at a moment's notice, and laugh with beguiling aplomb at his own awkward pomposity. Almost everything this long-time New Mexican has to say is at once deadly serious and bright with untrammeled joy and curiosity.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

John Nichols is the author of the New Mexico trilogy, a series about the complex relationship between history, race and ethnicity, and land and water rights in the fictional Chamisaville County, New Mexico. The trilogy consists of The Milagro Beanfield War (which was adapted into the film The Milagro Beanfield War directed by Robert Redford), The Magic Journey, and The Nirvana Blues.

Two of his other novels have been made into films. The Wizard of Loneliness was published in 1966 and the film version with Lukas Haas was made in 1988. Another successful movie adaptation was of The Sterile Cuckoo, which was published in 1965 and was filmed by Alan J. Pakula in 1969.

Nichols has also written non-fiction, including the trilogy If Mountains Die, The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn and On the Mesa. John Nichols has lived in Taos, New Mexico for many years.

Reviews

[Ronald J Schulz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I preferred the 2nd half, more honest autobiographical pieces & depictions of friends, tho non mutual as I'd hoped.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like almost all collections of essays or stories, this one is a bit uneven, but I have to conclude that the six star essays balance out the three star essays and, in the end, this is a great collection. Written from the 1960s to the late 1990s, the essays range from flyfishing and hiking, to the politics and pragmatics of getting books published and movies made of those books, to Nichols' own radical politics from his awakening in the mid-60s to the movements of the late 90s. The middle essays drag a bit, but the outdoor writing, ruminations on friendship and, as he ages, on life itself, are terrific. And then there is this, on the penultimate page, that almost knocked me out of my chair; written in March 1996, in an essay on the West as an inseparable part of the greater North America:

"Do I interpret the so-called West with dishonest eyes because I bring such varied influences into the game? Or if we are truly one nation, indivisible under Donald Trump, with liberty and injustice for all, am I perhaps, like all the rest of us, just another addition to a much more eclectic beast?"