Na Bolom: House of the Jaguar (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780692758632)

A stranger and occasional customer handed me a library book one day in 1983 while I was selling burritos in the streets of Juneau, Alaska. He said I could read Quest for the Lost City (1951), a narrative written by a couple from California who had searched for a lost Maya city in the jungles of M騙ico in the 1940s. (Dana and Ginger Lamb eventually spent time with the Lacand Maya in Chiapas and found the lost city). Alaska Airlines offered a round-trip fare from Juneau to M騙ico City for $100 later that same year, a bargain too good to pass up. So my girlfriend and I took off for M騙ico. Someone told us about the artist town of San Cristal de las Casas, high in the mountains of southern M騙ico. When we tired of the beach scene, we flew into Chiapas and shared a taxi for the thirty-mile trip through the jungle-covered hills to San Cristal. One of the other passengers, a museum curator from New Mexico, told us of a place to stay called Na-Bolom that was nice, cheap, and safe, a compound surrounded by a ten-foot adobe wall. When we entered the hotel through a large, hand-carved door, I immediately noticed pictures lining the walls of the Lacand Maya in xikul, their customary white cotton tunic. Unbeknownst to me, I had been delivered to their front door. My own experiences in the area, bolstered by the Lambs' adventures, started rattling around in my head, inspiring a short story. One evening in 1988, I sat down and started writing the rough draft that is now Chapter 3 of Na Bolom. From then on, I was hooked. I didn't begin with the idea of writing a novel. Just a three- or four-page story, then another, and another. In time, it became apparent that these short stories were part of a larger tale, and I began tying them together. I never developed a storyline or outline. Na Bolom just sort of wrote itself. There was something compelling about the story coming through me and I became passionate about recording it. It was my passion for this story that drove me. Sometimes I would write for eight, ten hours day and often past midnight. At one point I was unemployed and wrote seven days a week for a year. You might say I was obsessed, or possessed. So the reason I'm a writer is because of this story-I had to get the damn thing out of my head! Born and raised in the Southwest, I currently reside in Prescott, Arizona.