Writer, Storyteller, Chronicler: Lesley Poling-Kempes

By Jessica Rath

​​Ever since Georgia O’Keeffe settled here, the area around Abiquiú with its gorgeous rock formations and glorious colors has attracted a steady stream of visual artists whose paintings, photographs, and other artistic expressions capture its beauty and share it with the world. But there is also a rich legacy of oral history which would be all but forgotten unless somebody would collect the stories and write them down. Luckily, award-winning author Lesley Poling-Kempes did just that: she conducted countless interviews, researched numerous historical records, and collected photographs from the early 20th century. In 1997, she published Valley of Shining Stone, the Story of Abiquiú – a book that examines the history (and present time) of the area from many different angles. Legends, written history, and local families’ personal memories form a multy-faceted kaleidoscope. New to the area and planning to stay? This book will deepen your appreciation for Abiquiú and its surroundings.
 
I wanted to learn more about Lesley, her life and her work, and she kindly agreed to an interview.

Lesley grew up in Westchester County, New York. During her childhood the family spent many summer vacations at Ghost Ranch; her father came from El Paso and liked the Southwest.  When she was in college, her parents moved to New Mexico.

She would soon follow; when working at Ghost Ranch on their college staff she decided that New Mexico would become her home. She transferred from Wooster College in Ohio to the University of New Mexico, and that's where she graduated.

At Ghost Ranch she met her future husband, Jim Kempes. After graduating from Penn State, Jim started the ceramics program at the ranch which he led for 33 years. They both loved the ranch and Abiquiú and stayed and made it their home. They've lived in the Abiquiú community for more than four decades – longer than most Anglos I’ve met. They raised their children here and both their son and daughter went to Abiquiu Elementary.

“The Abiquiú area has been home for almost all of my adult life”, Lesley declared.

The following interview has been edited and condensed. My questions are in bold, to facilitate the reading experience.

Lesley’s father, Dr. David Poling, also was a writer who published at least ten books.

Did this influence her writing career, I wanted to know.

“Well he didn’t write full time; because of his profession (he was a Presbyterian minister and journalist) he only wrote part time. I did always make up stories, I really loved that. And so, when I went to the University of New Mexico, I went into the journalism department.  Tony Hillerman was its chairman, and there were only about 50 students. It was a pretty wonderful way to be introduced to writing. Tony wrote both fiction and nonfiction, and he was very personable. He was a grand teacher, and not all great writers are great teachers. He was a great teacher, a mentor. So I ended up writing stories for the rest of my life, both real and imagined”. 
 
“Do you have a preference for non-fiction versus fiction, or vice-versa?”

“I thought I was more interested in fiction when I started out. But Hillerman said to me, ‘You don't have to do either-or, you know.’ And that was kind of a revelation to me, and a relief”.

“When I first lived in Abiquiu I was writing fiction. But I also worked at New Mexico Magazine, which, of course, is nonfiction. I was right out of college and would commute into Santa Fe to work. But first I thought I would write fiction. And then my first book, which was about the Harvey Girls – this group of women who worked along the Santa Fe Railway – sort of fell into my lap. This was nonfiction, of course, and it involved about 80 interviews with people from all over the Southwest. I didn't realize it at the time, but that's how I have since worked – researched and collected primary information when I write nonfiction books. I did this with The Harvey Girls, and I did it again with Valley of Shining Stone, interviewing my neighbors. I had been here about 20 years when I wrote that book. And the book on Ghost Ranch was the same. And with Ladies of the Canyons, those women were not alive, obviously, so the primary sources were a little more removed than interviews. But either way, I just ended up telling stories, as well as writing novels”.
 
How do you find your topics and the necessary material?

“You know, I'm never really sure when I start a project whether it's a book or maybe just a magazine article. Actually, I've been lucky with the topics that I've chosen: there was always more material than I thought I would find.  Once I started digging and asking, there were far more stories and revelations than I had anticipated”.

“And then I go through a period of being overwhelmed and I stop researching because it becomes too big. For my last book, Ladies of the Canyons, I knew beforehand that the material was there. When I finished the book on Ghost Ranch, I knew about the women and their stories, but I didn't have time to tell it in the Ghost Ranch book. So I waited several years to go back and start digging into that”.

“And even then, when I began to look into the story of Carol Stanley who founded Ghost Ranch, I didn't realize that she was part of a league of women friends, and the amazing stories I would find. So that took me by surprise: it was such a big and wonderful topic. It was the most fun of all the nonfiction I've done”.

“People love talking about the Ladies. The book covered both local history of New Mexico as well as a lot of the national history of that time. It was simply fun to uncover, although it was hard to organize that much material. I didn't know this when I started. So I think it's just persistence. Intuition often plays a part, you get this sense that there's more to that nugget than you knew when you started”.

This sounds like hard work but also very rewarding.

“Yes, it is rewarding when the stories come together. In most cases, including the Abiquiu book, the stories begin to dovetail. And they make more sense once they are woven together. They begin to fit together, some piece from one story forty years apart from another story. It's an “AHA" kind of moment: NOW I understand why that happened to that person at that place”.


“I have to trust this process because I can go weeks and months where I just really wonder if this is making sense. If what I'm following and reading about and pursuing is important. You know, once in a while it's not and the material is just kind of background for my education!”

“But having done this now for so many years, the one thing I do have is the experience of getting through it. I know that if I just keep persisting with the material, the story will reveal itself and come together – out of a lot of chaos”.
 
Do you also teach writing?

I teach an informal Zoom writing workshop.  It started probably in 2010 or 2011 and used to be in-person in Abiquiu, before the pandemic. It has been ongoing ever since then, with people coming and going, but there is a core of people that have remained. They're very accomplished and committed writers, several of them have published, and they're a good support network for one another. I really enjoy facilitating that”.

“Everybody has a different process, yours may be different from mine and different from someone else's. But there's commonality too.  For example, some people outline and some people don't outline at all. People have different schedules that they stick to, and it's about finding the one that works for you. It's not universal by any means.”
“For me, it's three to four hours of writing every day.  That’s a lot of time to be in front of a screen. Three to four hours of focused, creative work; that is a good day of work”.
“I think that, maybe with some exceptions, most writers become writers because they work at it.  I don't think it's just a natural skill that you're born with. It takes time and attention and focus”. 
 
How has the development of technology influenced your work? Because 30 years ago, there wasn't even a computer, right?

“That's right. I was actually writing the Harvey Girls book in the 80s when I got my first computer. It was a revelation! I could cut and paste selections before it was printed!  Before, you had to type it out and physically cut paper apart. The computer was wonderful. It was like the Space Age for writers.”

”I think the biggest change for me, and I noticed it the most with Ladies of the Canyons and the work I'm doing now, is the internet. So many libraries and archives have digitized their collections and put them online. Where before I might have to go to the University of Austin to find a particular person's archive, now, most of it is digitized. The archivists can ask me, Is this what you want to see? Then they’ll scan it and send it to me as a digital file. It saves so much time and money. I know right away that the document exists, whereas before I would physically have to visit those archives, and pull out the drawer of material and start going through it. So that's really big”.

“Now you can find most photographs on the internet, even if they're 100 years old. You can find out who owns them and how to get permission for use without having to go to that archive. Even just 15 years ago that wasn't possible”.

So what are your projects right now? What are you working on?

“I can talk about it generally.  I have the finished sequel to my novel Bone Horses; that novel is done and I hope it will have a publisher soon. I'm working on a new book of nonfiction: it's about Santa Fe and northern New Mexico, around World War One. It's a big topic which I started during the pandemic. We were in such a difficult time. It was disturbing, the politics of the world, and then we had the pandemic.  I wondered how the creative people in Santa Fe survived the time of World War One: they had a pandemic, too, and the war was really awful, it just tore up the world, and there was a lot of suffering and horror. And there was TB, and many ill people were coming to New Mexico”.

“So there was a lot that could really squash creativity, and yet it didn't.  I just started reading their stories to find out how they (artists, writers, archaeologists who came to Santa Fe) survived such hard times. It was educational and it was comforting too, kind of a guidebook. So that grew into the project that I'm working on now”.

I will certainly be looking forward to this book; I feel we can use all the comfort we can get presently. My sincere thanks to Ms. Poling-Kempes for making the time to talk to me.