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Author & Photographer

Thanks!

Gratitude and love to the authors, teachers, friends and mentors who have borne with me through many drafts of various novels and creative non-fiction, who held my hand through the hard times when I was hungry and scared and doubting.         I especially want to thank my staunch friend and neighbor, the prolific and passionate author John Nichols who read my first novel, On the Bus, and more recently critiqued Beside the Rio Hondo, for which he wrote: “Beside the Rio Hondo is a compelling story about life in Northern New Mexico told by a vibrant and independent woman. Phaedra Greenwood has captured the essence of life in her unique village with a clear and loving prose style, a keen eye for the compassionate detail, much humor, and a heart as big as the sky over our beautiful Southwest. The river that runs through this triumphant chronicle sparkles with courage, insight, and many many bright memories".         John's letter contined:  “If that doesn’t cut the mustard with you or the Pooh-Bahs, call me and I’ll rewrite the hosanna until everybody is happy. Meantime, congratulations, don’t get a swell head, just keep working on those next three books! Cheers and love, John Nichols”         It's been a pleasure and an inspiration to know Natalie Goldberg, to write with her in her Thursday morning class in Taos back in the day. We miss her. Thanks, Nat, for taking the time to read Beside the Rio Hondo and writing this blurb: "How beautifully written--and it's about my favorite place--Taos. I thank Greenwood for giving language to life there--its rough texture, large vistas and its fallible humans. This book is a fine addition to the great legacy of New Mexico."         I’m also deeply grateful to Alex Blackburn, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Colorado Springs, who once remarked, “I had to fight for every book.” He believed in me and helped me revise Beside the Rio Hondo several times. In a letter of recommendation he wrote: “In the end she becomes, as she tells us in prose of elegant simplicity, ‘solid and rooted in who I am—a woman who stands by herself...married heart and soul to the fierce and vibrant spirit of this land.’ Beside the Rio Hondo is a source, like the river itself, of comfort and inspiration, and with its emergence from canyons of solitude comes the realization that the voice of Phaedra Greenwood may be happily joined to the voices of Annie Dillard, Terry Tempest Williams, and May Sarton.”         I owe morer than I can say to my creative writing teacher, Laurel Goldman. In was in her Thursday morning class at Duke University Continuing Education that I found my voice and sharpened my writing skills. Our peer group bonded in struggle and friendship and returned to her class year after year. I once overheard a frustrated writer say, “There’s such a long waiting list for Laurel Goldman’s class--someone has to die before you can get in.”         She told us that we were trying to do the hardest thing—write and publish literary novels. She wrote of my novel Recurring Dreams, “The thing I most regret about my written critique of your novel is that I failed to put in writing how it is truly true, strong, passionate and emotionally wrenching/crushing. I am drained of feeling by many passages, left gasping.” She believed that “Someday that novel will be published.” I hope she’s right.

Last but not least, my heartfelt love and thanks to my dear family, Sara Kay and Alexander, and my true love and faithful friend Jim Levy. Here's to the four of us and our old adobe home. May the mountain call you back again and again.         Phaedra

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Phaedra Greenwood     PO Box 388,     Arroyo Hondo,  New Mexico 87513   -   Email