A note from Pulitzer prize-winning author, N. Scott Momaday, discussing the GUS BLAISDELL COLLECTED book (Gus was UNM Press editor on Momaday’s second book, The Way to Rainy Mountain, published by UNM press).

Dear Nicole,The book is a clear mirror of the man. It is beautiful and moving. Gus and I made a legendary journey to Rainy Mountain in the hard weather that shapes mind and memory. It was a quest, a journey eminently worth making.With deepest thanks.Scott

In Gus’s  “Holygraph” book (a blank dummy book for Ivor Winters’s Forms of Discovery run, filled with friends poems, drawings, autographs and insights) 

Scott writes,
 
“Dear Veering,
It has been good to be 
with you on the way to Rainy
Mountain. One day you must
go to the cemetery there, to
see the gravestones of some of
these red people you must at 
times feel that you know.
And I hope that the 
weather is particularly hard
on that occasion.

N Scott Momaday 
Christmas Eve 1968"



Gus writes,

"On an Inscription in my Holygraph Book
                                                 for Scott.

We have/ been tog/ether/ now these/ many/ months
each on his way to Rainy Mountain, a journey
taken in fact, in spirit, and imagination.
It is a labor of love without loss, finding
my way, finally, to that dark stone
that bears your grandmother’s name.

You wish me the hardest weather on my visit
Such weather is the weather of my spirit,
A semiarid terrain wild with winds, and,
At evening, reason’s rage and fury flaming,
When the wind blows and wind bells ring
Or the snow falls down and no bell rings."

 N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer-Winning Native American Novelist, Dies at 89

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/29/books/n-scott-momaday-dead.html