This week's guest on REPORT FROM SANTA FE is JOHN NICHOLS, beloved New Mexico author of "Milagro Beanfield War" and "The Magic Journey." Nichols talks about his life and times, and his new book "The Annual Big Arsenic Fishing Contest!"

Nichols authored 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 a movie of the same title directed by Robert Redford),The Magic Journey, and The Nirvana Blues.

The Annual Big Arsenic Fishing Contest!, Nichols’ latest book, is described as “vintage Nichols, weaving together the strands of his early work into a rollicking account” of years of a fishing contest among 3 middle-aged writers in the upper Rio Grande Gorge.

Two of Nichols’ other novels have been made into films, The Wizard of Loneliness and The Sterile Cuckoo. Nichols also had an important, but uncredited, hand (due to a Writers Guild arbitration decision) in the Oscar-winning Best Adapted Screenplay for Costa-Gavras' 1982 film, Missing.

Additionally, he has 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 since 1969. He has published over 20 books.

QUOTE:

“Listen cousin, the way things are supposed to work out, one day the struggles of all you screwed up little underdogs will forge a permanent rainbow that'll encircle this entire earth, I should live so long.” -- John Nichols, Milagro Beanfield War