a house, and change it into a home. A home can make people happy, for a while.”

Gracious Southwest poet Luci Tapahonso — the Navajo Nation’s inaugural poet laureate— wrote lyrically of her daughter giving birth in her 1997 collection Blue Horses Rush In, which won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association’s 1998 Regional Book Award for Adult Nonfiction: “Her heart pounded quickly and we recognized/the sounds of horses running: the thundering of hooves on the desert floor. . . . She arrived amid a herd of horses.”

Luminaries don’t get any brighter than Santa Fe’s own novelist, screenwriter and producer George R.R. Martin, who penned the epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, adapted into the Emmy Award-winning HBO series Game of Thrones. Time dubbed him “the American Tolkien.” He is a generous investor in Santa Fe’s cultural life, reviving the Jean Cocteau Cinema, helping launch MeowWolf’s House of Eternal Return and founding the nonprofit Stagecoach Foundation.

Magdalena-based Stephen Bodio wrote so expressively of that village in 1990’s Querencia that I once detoured off I-40 onto U.S. 60 just to drive through it— aplace where in winter, “often the peaks, 10,000 feet above sea level and four above the plain, would be invisible for days at a time, decapitated by clouds.”