THE PORTALS OF TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES
by Jen Bryant
On my third day in Truth or Consequences, I make my way to the Giddy Up Cafe. As I wait in line, I study the ephemera hanging on the wall: a papier-mâché longhorn skull, a postcard from Boston, a Polaroid photo of an inflatable unicorn with “Celestina <3” scrawled underneath in careful red cursive. The cumulative effect is charming, cozy, and a little off-kilter, kind of like the town itself.
Underneath the skull, there’s a table piled with free copies of The Coop, a local literary zine. When I pick one up, a line catches my eye:
“The secret to enjoying T or C is slowing down, this isn’t there, it’s here, so let yourself be here and enjoy the magic it has to offer you.”
I’m here for the Wayward Writers fall camp. Our travel dispatches are due in a week. A few ideas have sparked and sputtered out, but nothing feels right just yet.
We’ve been writing about portals at camp, and it occurs to me that this quote could be an entry point—a portal of sorts—to my dispatch. After ordering, I tuck the zine into my bag and venture outside to a little patio table in the shade.
My burrito is delicious, as is the company of the writers who join me. Although we just met the night before, soon we’re in deep, discussing the psychology of loss and the dark humor that can only be found in the midst of grief.
You know, typical getting-to-know-you stuff.
*
Six days after being downsized out of a fourteen-year career, I signed up for Wayward Writers camp. I’d been thinking about attending a writing workshop for a while; this one looked like a good opportunity to deepen my practice while meeting new people. Besides, my calendar was suddenly wide open.
Untethered from the corporate world for the time being, I could now become the kind of person who books a trip to a tiny town in the middle of the desert to write with a bunch of people she’s never met instead of the kind of person who spends her days stuck in Zoom meetings, feigning interest in business minutiae while secretly daydreaming of escape.
Having never been to a writers’ retreat—or to New Mexico, for that matter—I wasn’t sure what to expect. I decided to lean into the unknown and see where it led me.
*
The portal that I step through to access the writers’ camp is a dirt-and-gravel alleyway between the Vape Queens smoke shop and La Onda, a seemingly abandoned paleteria whose dusty windows still advertise piña loca and rolled ice cream. According to the internet, La Onda was also the name of a 1960s Mexican countercultural movement, the ethos of which Carlos Monsiváis described as “a new spirit, the repudiation of convention and prejudice, the creation of a new morality, the expansion of consciousness, and the systematic revision and critique of the values offered by the West as sacred and perfect.”
In other words, it’s as good a portal as any.
Camp takes place at the Red Pelican in a space called The Loft, which is filled with funky art and soft couches that swallow me up like a hug. As I watch writers greet each other with familiarity on the first evening, I suddenly feel shy and awkward. My Airbnb beckons with the promise of solitary comfort, but I didn’t come here to be comfortable, so I draw on my Southern upbringing and start making conversation.
Let yourself be here.
Everyone’s open and friendly. Before long, my jaw unclenches and my shoulders relax. As always, being in community with a group of like-minded writers makes me feel at home in a way that’s hard to find anywhere else.
*
At camp, our days are shaped by reading, writing, wandering, and soaking in the natural hot springs that put T or C on the map.
Everyone who comes to The Loft brings something to share: a favorite playlist, an extra pen, a case of fizzy water, a stack of zines. We write to prompts and then read bits of what we’ve written aloud, which creates a feeling of instant intimacy. Make a list of things you would like to let go of. Write about making food for someone with strong emotions involved. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?
“Let your writing meander like a river,” Ariel says. I abandon my inner editor—the one who demands structure, story arcs, linearity—and allow the words to go where they will.
My notebook quickly fills with scrawled ramblings: dive bars, flat tires, stealing a pair of leopard-print gloves in fifth grade. I write the present—“I forget to watch my speed because I’m distracted by the mountains, the way they crease and fold as though someone paused midway through kneading a loaf of bread”—alongside the past: “Who the fuck visits an art museum in Akron?”
I can’t tell if what I’m writing is meaningful or terrible, but it feels good to put pen to paper, so I keep going.
One afternoon we work on round robin stories, passing folded pages around like middle-school notes. When read aloud, the finished pieces take on the qualities of a fever dream: skate parks and broken hearts, shapeshifters and paper airplanes. Like the collages we make from discarded books and old magazines, the disparate pieces somehow come together to form a whole that makes sense when the light slants in just right.
After the sun slips behind the mountains each evening, we assemble in The Loft for a series of readings. The essays, poems, stories, and songs offered up by my fellow writers are as unique as fingerprints: humor and heartbreak, sex and death, glass houses and tattoos. Holding space for each other’s words possesses a kind of alchemy that makes the still air pulse electric. When we break for the night, we’re no longer strangers, but confidantes entrusted with the vulnerabilities of the secret selves that live in our notebooks and laptops and galleys.
Despite the time difference, when I get back to my Airbnb after full days of exploring and connecting, I’m too wired to sleep. Instead, with the Family Dollar sign cresting over my shoulder like a neon moon, I sit on the patio and scribble under the stars.
*
I adhere to a strict running practice at home, but in T or C I bring my pour-over coffee with me on long early-morning walks that wind past WPA-era buildings, hand-painted murals, and a Honda adorned with stick-on letters crookedly spelling “F U C K T R U M P.” My phone’s camera roll fills with pictures of weird signs, colorful doors, and prickly pear cacti bursting into bloom. Every now and then, something unexpected stops me in my tracks: the call of an unfamiliar bird; the way the light shimmers on the river; a striped cat studying me skeptically beneath a Land of Enchantment license plate.
The secret to enjoying T or C is slowing down.
Between writing sessions, I poke my head into local establishments. In a town of just over 6,000 people, many businesses are doing double duty, and you never know what you might find. The cashier at the craft store-slash-meat shop might offer you a pomegranate from the tree in the parking lot as she’s ringing up your purchase. The doors of the St. Charles Inn might open to reveal a boutique selling vintage kimonos and microwavable pouches of vegan lentils, and the front desk clerk might invite you to a kundalini yoga class, then casually mention that there’s a soaking tub on the roof where you can float in healing hot springs water while looking at the stars. Your eye might be drawn to Martha’s Ever Changing Gift Store, with its implied promise of different wares than the day before. Or you might spot a gleaming hunk of the mineral colloquially known as “fool’s gold,” only to see that in T or C it goes by the respectable name “pyrite” and boasts the power to stimulate creativity and block negative energies.
I buy the pyrite, because why not?
*
On Saturday evening, I text my boyfriend: Going to an art hop (and maybe a dance party?)
Oooo. Special nights in small towns can be awesome! he replies.
And honestly? It sort of is.
If you’re looking for the kind of gallery hop experience that might be found in New York or LA or even Columbus, Ohio, you will, of course, be disappointed. But if you remember that this isn’t there, it’s here, you can and will be charmed.
At nightfall, we writers make our way to the art hop and find the sleepy streets of T or C transformed with activity. Belly dancers undulate rhythmically to the beats that a man in a Death Row Records hat taps out on a handheld drum. Barefoot children dart beneath a hanging installation of blue linen-and-cotton disks patterned with sacred geometry, giggling with delight. In an empty room swirling with disco lights, a man holding a guitar announces “All right, I’ve got one more for you guys” before launching into a song that distorts through the fuzzed-out amp, reverberating across the walls.
Throughout it all, in a ritual that’s been happening on small-town Saturday nights since the invention of wheeled vehicles, locals loop up and down the main drag in their cars and trucks, seeing and being seen. It makes me think of my own hometown two thousand miles away, in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where folks are undoubtedly doing the same.
*
The leaves are changing back home in Ohio, sticky summer days quietly slipping into cool mornings and longer nights. Here in New Mexico, sweat gathers at the nape of my neck as I wander bare-legged under a cloud-free sky, desert dust clinging to my boots. If it weren’t for the Halloween decorations adorning shop windows and Harris-Walz signs popping up in yards, I’d swear it was July instead of mid-October.
My time here is coming to an end, but I’m still trying to grasp the vibe of this place, where smoke shops outnumber grocery stores and the entire town seems to roll up its collective rug by 6 PM. At night, I quicken my pace past shadows that elongate in doorways, acutely aware of the distance between camp and my accommodations. By the time the sun rises over the Rio Grande, I’m charmed again.
My stomach growls while I’m browsing the stacks at Black Cat Books and Coffee, so I make another trip to the Giddy Up Cafe. My new writer friends wave from the patio, but even though it’s an hour before the restaurant’s closing time, the gates are padlocked. Turns out they ran out of food.
I try to remember to enjoy the magic, but I’m too hungry.
Still: This isn’t there, it’s here. So I settle for a peanut butter sandwich at the Airbnb, then make my way back to The Loft, where the door is always open, waiting for us to step through.
*
Two days after returning to Ohio, I’m still trying to put my trip to Truth or Consequences into words. In this Midwestern landscape dotted with yellowing oak trees and brick ranch houses, where I search for jobs and jump through unemployment hoops, my time in the desert already feels like a dream. All my attempts to craft a linear narrative fall flat.
As I sit at my laptop, deadline looming, Ariel’s words drift back to me: Let your writing meander like a river.
And so I do.
Jen Bryant is an editor at MUTHA Magazine and a creative nonfiction reader for Mud Season Review. Her work has appeared in Ms., BUST, Hip Mama, The Sun Magazine, 614 Magazine, and elsewhere. She has participated in readings and storytelling events at the Columbus Arts Fest, Wild Goose Creative, and Two Dollar Radio. Originally from the South, she currently resides in the Midwest.
