Curanderismo, Poetry, and How to Heal a Broken Heart with Tommy Archuleta, Santa Fe Poet Laureate
[00:00:00] Tommy Archuleta: Curanderismo is essentially a folkloric, medicinal approach to treating maladies such as stomach aches and sore throats. I was given oshá. I had terrible cramps in my legs as a kid. My grandmother would make a salve and rub it on my ankles and my knees. In terms of the book, the work seemed to be asking for remedio, for—“What do you do if your beloved that you’ve been married 58 years to dies and leaves you alone on this earth? How do you treat that?”
[00:00:39] Emily Withnall: ¡Bienvienidos! This is Encounter Culture from the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. I’m your host and editor of El Palacio magazine, Emily Withnall.
[Music rises, then fades]
[00:00:52] Emily: I first encountered Tommy Archuleta’s poetry at a reading held at Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe. The reading featured his poetry and a conversation between Tommy—Santa Fe’s current poet laureate—and Lauren Camp, the New Mexico state poet laureate. What struck me most listening to Tommy speak about his work and writing process was the way his poems cleave so closely to the way he speaks and moves through the world. He chooses his words carefully and isn’t afraid to pause and absorb the questions or information presented to him. In one poem from his collection, Susto, he writes:
what if I stay like this
going around
naming every
open grave Dolores
after the drunk lady who almost
drowned me
dolor Spanish for pain and for
the sight of her
up in the treetops
a la Teresa
de Avila.
Light blue
light coming out of
her eyes and
mouth,
But only when
the music stops.
“Susto,” a Spanish word that is roughly translated as a fright or shock, is an incantation to grief. Anyone who has experienced grief—which is to say, everyone—will understand the range of emotion Tommy captures so precisely. He makes the personal loss of his mother and the specific New Mexican cultural references a universal meditation on loss and grief and seeking comfort.
His poems are interspersed with remedios like the following:
To forgive one’s beloved for dying, pick the long, feather-like crimson flowers in early spring, when the desert is in bloom. Boil in river water only. Let cool. Drink at once. Drink when waking, at noon, and at bedtime each day for three full weeks thereafter. If resentment persists, go to your beloved’s grave daily and pray for forgiveness until sound sleep and appetite return.
These remedios are not meant as a cure, but as a balm to ease the pain. They also work to invite their reader in because grieving in communion is another balm. As a New Mexican poet, Tommy is very much of this place. Sandstone, arroyos, blackbird, wolves, and snake root are just some of the New Mexican landscape features and flora and fauna that are integral to the poems in Susto.
I was fortunate to be able to talk with Tommy about his poems and about his work as a mental health therapist and substance abuse counselor in the New Mexico Corrections Department. For Tommy, poetry and therapy are both healing practices.
Please join us for our conversation.
[00:04:19] Emily: Welcome Tommy. I’m so excited to have you here on Encounter Culture, and I have had the privilege recently to attend the conversation and poetry reading that you did with the New Mexico state poet laureate Lauren Camp at Collected Works, and that was a wonderful conversation. And then I also attended a poetry workshop that you led. But for our listeners who maybe haven’t had these experiences, can you introduce yourself?
[00:04:46] Tommy: My name is Tommy Archuleta. I was born in Santa Fe, and that had a lot to do with me applying for this post. I just thought it was maybe time for somebody from Santa Fe to be the poet laureate, and fortunately I was given the appointment. My family, both sides have been here for a while. The Archuletas got here in 1598 and the Ortizs got here a year later.
I think I might be the first generation to not only go to undergraduate work, but to achieve graduate work. A lot of that is just economics, you know. I come from families that spent much of their time tilling soil in southern Colorado. Then they migrated down here at the turn of the twentieth century and they grew chile and potatoes and they came from really large families.
And in those days in this area—and I don’t think that my Spanish heritage has a monopoly on this, but part of the reason they had big families was it’s a workforce. My father is one of ten, and now he’s the eldest because he’s only got three other siblings. My mother cut meat downtown at Safeway. Before that, she cut meat in southern California.
Because my mom and my dad eloped. So, you know, I’m an only child, not because I got rid of the others, but because it just worked out that way. I’ve gone to elementary school here, Santa Fe High School. I went to St. Catherine’s when it was still operating, had absolutely no idea of the atrocities that they befelled on the pueblo around here.
I would find that out when I went to College of Santa Fe for my undergrad work. I was fortunate to receive a full scholarship on the merit of my poems. Didn’t see that coming ’cause College of Santa Fe to me represented—it was emblematic of affluence, and I lived across the street. I used to throw stones at Fogelson Library because I hated it and as a kid, I had convinced myself I would never achieve those heights. However, I had a couple of private writing teachers that really encouraged me to go and, actually to spite them, I applied and no one was more surprised than I was when I received an acceptance letter. So, you know, academia happened and it turned out to be a cathartic experience.
I’m part of the last graduating class of College of Santa Fe. That was a very tearful—it was really hard on a lot of us. A lot of the faculty, ’cause I’m older, were my friends and they were torn and I was too, because—that experience, just, I don’t have words for it. It moved me at a level that I don’t know, I came away with Dana Levin as my mentor, established poet.
I think if Dana keeps writing the way she is, well, I don’t know if she’ll attain the heights of her mentor, Louise Glück, who we lost recently, but that’s the lineage I come from. Psychological poets, right. You know? So, it’s all an inside job, coming from the stance that we’re subservient to the work, not the other way around.
And it works good for me ’cause I’m also a Rogerian, [it’s] my theoretical orientation as a counselor and a therapist. And in my office, the client is the expert and I’m the student. And so, sort of that whole stance is a big part of my life.
[00:08:40] Emily: Can you say a little bit about where you do counseling?
[00:08:43] Tommy: I signed on to the penitentiary of New Mexico. Date of hire is March 19 of 2019. I just celebrated five years March of this year, and there are three levels of security at the penitentiary. I’ve worked them all. We have the equivalent of “supermax,” that’s level six. We have a levels four and five where a lot of the prison gangs are housed and segregated. And I have worked for the last three years at level two, so I work with men preparing to come out into society to wash our dishes and mow our lawns, and, you know, work on our cars.
I facilitate psychoeducational groups that arm the men with cognitive behavioral skills. It’s called rehabilitation, but for a lot of my clients it’s habilitation. It’s the first time that they’ve ever really looked at how their thinking informs their behavior and how when you change those two, you’re gonna get different results. And so, I give them that. I, I do what I can to provide a safe environment because they’re in one. There’s no other culture like prison. I don’t care what level you’re talking about ’cause each level of security has its own ecosystem.
Collectively, I’ve been in addictions counseling for fifteen years now. I was on the front lines of the opioid epidemic, which is still ongoing. I worked in, um, inpatient, outpatient—and in those settings, the majority of my caseload, they were on parole. So, in a sense it was maybe only a matter of time before I went to the mothership.
[Light keyboard music]
[00:10:46] Emily: I wanna ask you about the confluence of poetry and counseling, but before we do that, I want to first backtrack a little bit and ask you about how you stumbled upon poetry. When was that, and what about poetry changed your life?
[00:11:02] Tommy: Well, I didn’t call it poetry. I didn’t have words for it at age twelve or so. My maternal grandfather raised me in part and he lived and built a home in Pecos, New Mexico, and his bank was the Bank of Santa Fe on the plaza. And in those days, they wouldn’t give the kids lollipops. They would give us these little memo books with a matching pen. And I remember distinctly free writing in these memo books. I didn’t know much about punctuation or its utility. However, I just would write. It was one of my favorite toys, apart from entertaining adults, ’cause most of my friends were adults. Not to say that I didn’t have friends of my age, but you know, it’s a lot easier to fall in love with the sound of a rock going through glass when you’re alone and didn’t have kids around you.
And being a musician, a drummer for, I don’t even know how many years now, but I also wrote lyrics and I was a singing drummer. I don’t sing much anymore ’cause I don’t play excruciatingly loud music that very few people can stand. I did that long enough and now I—I play music that at least three or four people won’t leave the room. [Emily laughs]
And so, um, writing lyrics, I another just sort of accidentally discovered you could do a lot with a little. And I make it known that I’m a person of recovery. I enjoyed twenty-five years of continuous sobriety from alcohol this April and of other, um, exotic drugs. So not long before I entered and stepped onto the campus of College of Santa Fe, a friend of mine in recovery gave me a book of poems by Pablo Neruda.
And that was one of those other experiences where it’s just an instant connection, and I just started writing really short lines, not knowing why those were short. And before I knew it, my first publication in La Manzanita Quarterly, which doesn’t exist anymore—it was a well-respected regional journal—took a poem called, uh, “Meditations of an Ex Drunk.”
And, uh, it was this past weekend running a workshop in Taos for the Taos Writers Conference, and the students I was gifted with for that experience, we talked a lot about how much permission gives us, how we seek permission to continue. And not just writing, you know, but it’s a big deal, I think. And when we give it to each other, I think it’s a gift, and everybody wins. Because I feel good when I affirm you and what you’re doing, and hopefully you feel the same. So, I’ve been fortunate, I’ve been given these bits of permission to keep going.
[00:14:00] Emily: Mm-Hmm. When I was reading your poetry collection, I was struck by how much the poems felt like a meditation or a prayer, and they also reminded me of the poetry of Li Bai or Issa, the old, old Japanese and Chinese poets, and the ways that they invoke nature. It’s very internal, but beautiful. There’s something about it on the page that’s meditative to me.
[00:14:27] Tommy: Thanks for saying and noticing those traits. Not necessarily haiku, however, there’s a few Asian aesthetics that I’ve been drawn to for a long time. One is wabi-sabi. It celebrates the rustic and the broken and the unfinished, and accepts it as finished.
And the other Lao Tzu, and you know, a lot of the ancient haiku-ists, they would find humanity in nature. And so, the landscape of the Cochiti Reservation is a huge character in Susto. And, uh, just being there for 10 years—’cause I moved there when my mother got diagnosed with congestive heart failure and I moved there to help my father with her care—and just, you know, exploring the area, what I could, you know, ’cause not all of it is accessible, but I also knew that there were great travesties that happened not far from where we lived at the hands of Cortez, mostly, my ancestor. There were about eighty children that I know about and women that were massacred, not far from where we lived—they were tied to trees and, you know, confronting one’s own history, depending on how curious one is, it can open doors into human history, you know? And I started to just see the land in different ways and being subservient to the work.
I just tried to pay attention to what it wanted because I, not long before Dana left to head the St. Louis Poetry Center, I showed her the first draft of Susto and she said, “Tommy, this is just rough as hell. You need to keep going. No matter what.” I was telling her the experiences I was having, and still to this day when I look at that book or am asked to read, I don’t have any recollection. Maybe a couple of those poems, maybe three or four. But to be honest, I don’t recall. Uh, and I don’t recall how many drafts, but there were numerous drafts and one of the last few of drafts occurred when Covid was occurring. I myself contracted the first strain, gave it to my father, contracted it at the prison. I was hospitalized for five days. Pop was hospitalized for four. I wouldn’t return to work for three months.
[00:16:53] Emily: Wow.
[00:16:54] Tommy: And so, during that time, the work seemed to be saying this needs to happen somehow. And I didn’t know how. So, you’ll see words like “fever.”
[00:17:03] Emily: Mm-hmm.
[00:17:04] Tommy: You’ll see words like “cough.”
[00:17:06] Emily: Mm-hmm.
[00:17:07] Tommy: And it’s plain that you know that grief is everywhere. However, as with each evolution of each draft, there’s just this beauty that was coming out. Because being asked, “Why the heck do you write about death so much? My God, all of you guys.” All the way back to Dante for, you know, and it’s, I think the reason, I don’t know what his excuse is, but I think the reason is because it’s a way of embracing the present life that you do have.
You know, mostly our minds are already going when we’re in the shower of what we gotta do and gotta remember and, you know, what’s gonna happen with our country and—depending on how much you care about it. So, to be able to be conscious and living, having your, your attention at the same time be in different places, I think that’s one of the things poetry does as we’re experiencing it. It’s as if parts of us break up and we get to live in different parts of our lives. And we’re actually experiencing them through the vehicle of words, which is just never endingly fascinating to me how that can happen. Even few words.
But the tone was important. In poetry, a lot of us feel that tone is the conveyor of personality. So, the work itself, it’s a living thing. I really believe that. I think a lot of poets have said that in different ways through antiquity, because it lives in a different way than prose does.
[00:18:35] Emily: You’re inspiring me—I think I told you this when you led that poetry workshop that I’m a lapsed poet. I started out with poetry and you’re inspiring me to keep going, to keep trying to get back into that, so—
[00:18:49] Tommy: Yeah, I hope so. I hope you do. Yeah, it’s, it is rewarding.
[00:18:52] Emily: Yeah.
[Music + promo for the New Mexico State Library]
[00:18:57] Emily: I’ve often thought of librarians as magicians. Beyond helping you find the book you’re seeking, it seems like they always know just where to look to find the answer to any question. The New Mexico State Library is so much more than a place filled with books, though it is that too. The library’s primary mission is to promote library services and access to information to all citizens of New Mexico.
And when we say “all,” that’s a tall order, given the vast reaches of our geography. The State Library provides reading materials and research services for the blind and print disabled, for rural community members through books by mail, and our ever popular book mobiles. They also support librarians across the state with items to add to their enchanted toolkit from the tribal libraries program to summer reading programs for our youngest patrons.
And of course, let’s not forget one of my favorite realms of magic, the New Mexico State Library Poetry Center, where you can learn about our state’s poet laureate and discover even more New Mexico poetry. Explore the library’s research and digital resources. Get the bookmobile schedule Or, find your local library at nmstatelibrary.org.
Did you know the New Mexico Culture Pass is now available to purchase online? Culture Pass gives you access to each of the 15 state museums and historic sites we feature on Encounter Culture. Reserve your culture pass today at nmculture.org/visit/culturepass.
[music fades + end promo]
[00:20:56] Emily: I wanted to just ask you, too, if you could explain the title of your poetry collection, Susto.
[00:21:03] Tommy: Okay, so in the front of the book there is what I call the pedestrian—not in a bad way, but it’s the most common definition, which is “shock,” which relates also to “awe.” However, another definition of it is, what, shock and then “fright.” I had all kinds of ideas about opening that up because I try to lean more towards accessibility than difficulty.
I think there’s enough difficulty out there going on, and that’s a very long discussion in art aesthetics. So, everything got shut down by Dana and Stephanie Gershwin, the editor of Susto, and her team at the Center for Literary Publishing. I’m glad that that happened that way because that allowed the remedios—the remedies—in the book, which are working as cairns or columns or rest stops because when those started to surface, that again was in later in the draft process. And that was just done because a lot that was coming out in the language where one of the speakers has a father that’s a root hunter. And so, all of these activities of curanderismo were already there. Curanderismo, as I understand it, is essentially a folkloric medicinal approach to treating not severe maladies, but maladies, such as stomach aches and sore throats.
I was given oshá, for instance, in a tea. I had terrible cramps in my legs as a kid. And if that wasn’t happening, then my grandmother would make a salve of it and rub it on my ankles and my knees. In terms of the book, the works seemed to be asking for remedio, for “What do you do if your beloved, that you’ve been married fifty-eight years to, dies and leaves you alone on this earth? How do you treat that?” So, the book was asking, “We need these kinds of remedios,” ’cause we don’t have those.
[00:23:14] Emily: Yeah. I grew up using oshá for all kinds of things too, and chewing on a little bit of the root, like for a sore throat is better than any cough drop you can find.
[00:23:24] Tommy: Right? Yeah.
[00:23:25] Emily: Yes.
[00:23:27] Tommy: That’s wonderful. Yeah.
[00:23:28] Emily: Mm-Hmm.
[00:23:29] Tommy: And so, you know, especially after the Covid thing, the Edo started to appear and then all of a sudden I am at UNM in the MFA program. I’ve taken every workshop I can. And then they said, “Tommy, you’re gonna have to start studying Proust. And I was like, “No, I am not going to study Proust. I’m sorry. I wanna go write a book.” And they were like, “Well, you could go.” And I said, “Please give the minority scholarship to somebody else and I’ll just bow out.” And I did. And I didn’t know what to do. In career counseling, they call it happenstance theory, where people accidentally fall in love or back into their career that fulfills them, and that’s what happened to me. So, there I am getting a full ride to Highlands, the professional counseling track, and we’re studying the DSM, the bible of mental health, and it’s the fifth edition, which is the first edition that has culture bound maladies in the back. And there’s the explanation of what happened to me, the dislocation, the wanting to eat one day, and then not eating for five days, feeling like I’m on three hits of moon barrel acid.
I mean, it’s complicated grief. However, in Latinx cultures, it’s called Susto. And it’s the result of trauma and emotional trauma. Physical trauma. Psychological trauma. And actually, by that time, I had almost given up the search for a title. I tried a different things, sent them out. Everybody was like, “Mm, keep looking.”
And there it was. It was accidental again. You know, I went to the back of the book, I was like, “Oh my God,”—I think I even left class that day ’cause I was like, “I’ve gotta go put this in the manuscript.”
[Light guitar music]
[00:25:26] Emily: I am wondering if you can read a poem from Susto.
[00:25:47] Tommy: I have a new manuscript that I’m working on. I brought a poem from that.
[00:25:53] Emily: Okay, wonderful.
[00:25:55] Tommy: So, can I frame this a little bit?
[00:25:57] Emily: Yes, of course.
[00:25:58] Tommy: I normally don’t, ’cause nobody likes a poet that talks more than he reads. But the title of the work is Bone Harvest. And “bone” seems to be working as a metaphor for memories that are so deep within us that they just become a part of us and some will fade and some will take on new life. The book is essentially about a speaker who, he can’t sleep because all of this is coming up, and so far the manuscript’s enjoyed some attention in getting some placement with the poems.
I’m getting ready to send this out, so I hope I don’t jinx it. So, it’s three little sections, and the title of the poem is Day Dividing Days:
Blue.
That color so rarely found in Nature, yet everywhere inside this house.
Just ask my right hand.
Ask it what happens when the left one stops trembling.
Ask it where the trembling runs to, afterwards.
*
When work becomes respite from home, eating is the first to go.
Circadian fasting, some call it.
Like the stages of dying, and sex fully clothed, meals coincide with the rising and setting of the sun.
Why o why do some fruits refuse to rot.
Others to ripen.
*
Cries sentenced never to leave the mouth.
Burn scars bred to taunt the darkest clouds.
Cracked church bells that only cornfield squatters and crows can hear.
Prodigal sons home now for good
Home, but in pieces.
[00:28:09] Emily: Wow. Earlier I described your poems in Susto as being meditative, but I think that there’s something that you do in your work and in this poem too that really asks the listener to slow down, which in our current times is a gift—so, thank you.
[00:28:29] Tommy: Oh, thanks. Yeah. I’ll admit this to you and to this audience. I played doom music for four years, actually tracked in Southern Tracks in Atlanta, Georgia.
We were the last live band to actually track in that studio. It was quite something to use the same restroom that Bruce Springsteen used. And, um, one of the huge aesthetic features of doom is, I think it’s a political statement too, it’s to slow everything down. And I’ve thought a lot about that. I’ll admit that that’s something that is important to me—is to slow down. And that’s, it’s like a personal thing. Yeah. You know, it helps me slow down.
[Electric guitar and drum music]
[00:29:19] Emily: I wanna ask you about how poetry and counseling coexist for you and how they inform each other.
[00:29:27] Tommy: Even when I received Susto in the mail and how exciting that is, it didn’t really occur to me of the connection between not only healing and poetry, but healing and art. When I was a kid, I fell in love with people and I was in love with people up until I fell in love with alcohol, which is odd because my clients in recovery circles, I don’t relate to them because a lot of them come from really, really, really challenging family systems where they were hit and, and forgotten and abandoned, and abused over and over. And I, I don’t relate to that. I often joke that my parents used a far crueler method by loving me unconditionally. I was mad at them because I couldn’t reciprocate that, not to my liking, anyway.
And so, when I got sober twenty-five years ago, slowly my love affair with humanity began again. It’s like it picked up from where it left off, you know? So, holding space for clients, I learned that in recovery, I believe. I was working with an aging social worker once. He was my client at a methadone clinic. I loved him when he came in.
He was one of the only ones that could stand to be with me for 20 minutes, and he said, “You come from good parents. I can tell.” And he, you know, he had only met me like once. So, I think when you have that kind of support, it just feels like that’s what I’m supposed to do. You know, if I can help people with art or, or just listen to them, you know, the kids nowadays have this clause, “You feel me bro? You feel me?” And I think that’s really it. It’s indicative of, ’cause I found working, especially in the prison, I used to think people wanted, they wanted to be heard. You know, who doesn’t wanna be listened to? I think more than that anymore is people wanna know that you get them. I wanna know, you get me. I feel you, bro.
You know, it’s a simpatico that it’s another exchange like that. I find the practice of poetry healing. I don’t feel very good if I leave the house not having worked on a poem. I just feel off the same way I do when I don’t meditate or I don’t do yoga. Something’s off. So, I know it’s healing. I know it’s a big part of my life.
I was just sitting this morning with a gentleman who, he was an entrepreneur before he came to prison and he dealt methamphetamine and he’s had a cathartic experience. He’s looked at his time as a big pause button in getting pressed in his life so he can take stock, and he didn’t like what he saw and so he’s rebuilding.
I listened to him for thirty-eight minutes and all I did was ask him, “How’s it going, bro?” You know? I try to make sure that I, I create environments that are safe. ’Cause it’s not safe out there in a lot of ways. I don’t think I’ll ever write a poem about being in a therapy session, but I’ve read poems of Charles Simic that reinforce my fervor for life, which is how I feel when I leave my therapist’s office. ’Cause the work really starts when you leave the office, you know?
[00:32:48] Emily: Mm-Hmm.
[00:32:49] Tommy: It’s just a bunch of reporting while you’re in there. And tea drinking. And sweater wearing. Whatever. But the real work starts when you bounce. And so, I appreciate the question.
[00:33:02] Emily: So, you don’t write poems about therapy sessions, but do you bring poetry writing into your counseling with your clients?
[00:33:10] Tommy: I do. And now I am actually literally doing it ’cause as laureate, we’re building a manuscript of poems by my clients that are participating. I also will bring poems into psychoeducational environments to start seeing if we can start looking at life in a different way. And so, uh, I’ll bring poems in.
We’ll also do free writing. I also introduce them to journaling. And then invariably we’ll talk about, “Why are poems, like, short. The line’s short. And what’s up with that?” You know we get to talk about that.
[00:33:47] Emily: Yeah.
[00:33:48] Tommy: And like, “Do you only like dead poets? Are there any living ones?” [Emily laughs] You know, it’s in the work. Yeah. And then they know that I’m the laureate now, so they’re like, “Oh, here comes Mr. Laureate.” [Both laugh] And you know what’s funny about that is, I got poets I know that, you know, will be like somewhere, see them at the theater or something. It happened recently, somebody pulled me aside and was like, “So what, what do you do as a laureate? What is, what is that?” So, it’s funny—I end up answering a lot of those kinds of questions. So yeah, it’s, it’s about being an advocate for the form. And I have a lectureship at New Mexico School of the Arts, the first liberal arts public school in the history of Santa Fe. I love that school. Next year, our book project is to work with the women at Esperanza battered women’s shelter.
[00:34:43] Emily: Oh, that’s fantastic.
[00:34:44] Tommy: I get to do a lot of really cool stuff, and I’m grateful and I get to serve my hometown.
[00:34:49] Emily: Yeah.
[00:34:49] Tommy: Oh my God. My hometown!
[00:34:53] Emily: Would you be willing to read a poem from one of your clients at the prison?
[00:34:59] Tommy: You know, there’s one really short one. And then there’s another short couplet.
This first one is called, “Myself.”
Myself
If I don’t start with me
if I don’t change for me, myself,
then my son will have to find another hero.
That was written by NMCD ID number 5 7 8 4 5 1.
[00:35:27] Emily: Wow.
Foolish Light
I can’t ignore the butterflies. They tell me sweet little lies. I try not to listen. I fight this affliction, this heart’s foolish ambition.
Through these bars, I see your soul. I curse the jailer in me day after day. I pay the toll like grains of sand through an open hand. I slowly pray for control. If I make it out alive, how will I act? What if I look at you? What if you look back? Tell me, where do you hide from the enemy inside born with a hundred thousand disguises?
That was written by NMCD ID number 7 4 8 3.
Emily: Those are incredible.
Tommy: So, we’re at a place where we’re not sure how we’re going to give credit to the writer ’cause some of these writers have already been released. So, there’s probably gonna be some poems that are just numbers, yeah. Which is an amazing juxtaposition to know that there’s so much emotive energy in these pieces, but they’re attached to a number, which I think might be pretty striking for some audiences.
[Accoustic guitar music]
[00:37:22] Emily: So, we’re recording this in July, but the episode won’t be released until right before the U.S. presidential elections. And I know a lot of people right now who are listening as this is released are feeling a lot of heightened emotion and tension about the state of the country and the state of the world. And you’ve woven these remedios through Susto. So, I’m curious if you have any thoughts about remedios for people in this country right now.
[00:37:50] Tommy: Recently I did an interview with [Molly] Boyle with New Mexico Magazine, and she did this wonderful piece on curanderismo, which I highly suggest. It’s just amazing, the research she did, and she asked me, what’s my relationship with that particular mode of healing? And I’m gonna give the same answer I know from personal experience that what I call “enlightened self-interest” is another principle that I accuse of giving me the life that I, I didn’t really—I didn’t really expect this, I didn’t expect to get two lives.
Ray Carver, the great short story writer, felt the same. That’s where I stole it from. He felt he had two lives and I remember vividly praying, uh, crying, weeping with my mother when Obama won the first time because we knew something amazing had happened that had never happened before. And to go from a father of that, of that stature, to the one that followed him was a jarring experience for a lot of people.
And so, we’re at another precipice now where things could go in either way. And what I mentioned to Ms. Boyle was, I think every one of us can be a curandero when we take enough time to help somebody else, even if it’s at a bus stop and somebody drops their pencil and we pick it up and hand it to them. I’m gonna just side with Einstein. I, I think the most profound work can be done simply through the simplest acts and the simplest formulas. You know, because it’s, it’s really hard on a lot of people. That’s why I tell jokes all the time—’cause I know so many people are having a hard time.
[Tommy becomes emotional]
So, you know, I think just getting out of ourselves even for a moment to help somebody else’s need. I have to think that, that, that’s enough, maybe more than enough, when practiced continually.
About two years ago, a friend of mine said that he had been sending out love consciously from his core and his mind out into the world when he wakes up in the morning and he does it as many times as he can in the day, and I started practicing that about four months ago when I asked Kathryn Lim to date me and she said, “Yes,”—and my life is, it’s a game changer. I’ve asked my dad if we could sell the house and Cochiti many times after mom died and, and I can’t get care for Pop. He’s ninety-one. And the caregivers don’t go out there ’cause they don’t get compensated. And I said, “I think we need to sell the house.” And he said, “Let’s do it. I wanna move this stuff with you because I don’t want you to do it when I’m dead and gone, and I don’t want you to do it alone.”
So, we put the house up for market last Friday. It went live. The first showing was Sunday and we got an offer, full price, Monday morning. And that same weekend, I found us a nice two-bedroom, two-bath in town because Amber Care is here and it’s five minutes from my work. So, I couldn’t have planned that. I don’t plan these poems.
That’s why I tell people, “When you’re writing your poem, let yourself off the hook. You don’t have to know what you’re doing. You just need to do it.” So, you know, I don’t know. I think it’s just being kind. It’s just that simple, I think.
[00:42:01] Emily: Thank you.
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If you’ve enjoyed this conversation and want to read more of Tommy’s work, check out his collection of poems, Susto. And to learn more about upcoming readings and poetry workshops, visit bit.ly/tommypoetry
To request a reading or workshop, visit bit.ly/santafepoet.
The links are in the show notes.
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[00:42:44] Emily: Encounter Culture is a production of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.
Our producer is Andrea Klunder at The Creative Impostor Studios.
This season is produced and edited by Andrea Klunder and Alex Riegler with additional editing by Monica Braine.
Our recording engineers are Collin Ungerleider and Kabby at Kabby Sound Studios in Santa Fe.
Technical direction and post-production audio by Edwin R. Ruiz.
Our executive producer is Daniel Zillmann.
Thank you to New Mexico artist “El Brujo” D’Santi Nava for our theme music.
For a full transcript and show notes, visit podcast.nmculture.org or click the link in the episode description in your listening app.
I’m your host, Emily Withnall.
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