With the start of Labor Day weekend today, it was a good day to mix things up a bit. This morning, I visited the monthly meeting of an organization, and this afternoon, I went and saw a movie. Later this afternoon, the Cubs survived a slugfest with the Atlanta Braves to win 14-12, and to win their 6th straight. That was something. But I was going to talk about the other stuff here really.

While I probably could have used a meeting with a recovery group, this morning I attended the monthly first Saturday meeting of the Southwest Writers organization. I had been invited to visit a meeting a few times in the last year by several members I met in continuing education classes at UNM. This weekend seemed as good a time as any, and it was interesting.

The meeting was held, as I guess it has been for a long time, at New Life Presbyterian Church on Eubank, north of Spain. That church has been at that location since I was a kid and as a midschooler, we used to walk and bike by it circumnavigating the Spain-Eubank-Juan Tabo triangle, but I had never been in it before today. The group met in the facility’s fellowship haul, and when I arrived at the church near meeting time, the church lot was full, and cars were stacking up in the spillover dirt lot off of the main asphalt lot. That means there were a lot of people at the meeting. And there were.

And the two hour meeting, running from 10 AM to 12 AM, began with club officers making announcements up front, and then a member talking about the benefits of membership, and then a time when any member could go up front and share “successes” in their writing and publishing journeys- contracts secured, book signings upcoming, cover art selected, rejection notices received. The first hour was made up of those activities.

The second hour was supposed to feature a speaker on a subject I never learned about, but it turns out she was sick today, so four members of the group created an impromptu panel to talk about their writing journeys and how they got published, and to offer tips on getting published. When i had first entered the hall where we met, there were round tables set up covering the front three quarters of the space for attendees to sit at. Behind them was a section of 4 rows of chairs for other folks to sit at, and it was in this area I took a seat. As a Q&A to the panel was wrapping up, I opted to leave the meeting before the rest of the people left when the meeting was ended.

It was an interesting experience. The bulk of the attendees in the room were Anglo and also in their mid-fifties or older. I am sure there is a lot of experience in that group, and that the organization probably has some amazing classes and workshops, but I did not feel the need to break out my debit card and join it right away. I think I am still learning a good amount from taking classes at the university, and what counts the most in becoming a writer is what Stephen King suggested: read a lot, and write a lot.

After the writer’s group, I took advantage of an early Saturday afternoon to enjoy one of my favorite pastimes, and I went to a local theater to catch a showing of the film “Wind River”.

The film itself has been marketed with nominal fanfare. I don’t know that it will win any major awards, or be nominated for any, for that matter. It cost $11 million to make. But I find I am drawn to the work of the guy who wrote it, and in this case, also directed it.

When Taylor Sheridan found himself ekeing out a living trying to be an actor in LA and he couldn’t land a substantial role that would give him grounding as a potential key player in major pictures, something in him turned off to acting, and chasing an idea he had had in his head for a while, he began to write a script. When he finished the script and floated it, it got picked up, and then greenlit for production. His script became Sicario- a film about counter-cartel activities between clandestine US agents and Mexican drug lords near El Paso, Texas. The film was largely shot in New Mexico. Sheridan’s vision in that film was, like that shared in his others, a recasting of an old outlaw West in modern garb, where justice is meted out by the good and the bad alike in action and vengeance by the wronged and the wounded. Individuals embody the law, and these individuals are forced to act where the machinery of American justice may be absent or not available to deal with circumstances. His characters live in bleak, broad, and unforgiving places, where nature is a huge figure in his stories, but as such, it is unforgiving and indifferent, and as a result, Sheridan’s characters are hard but hearty.

Following Sicario, Sheridan penned the Script to Hell or High Water, the story of two brothers who decided to rob banks in the vacuous Texas panhandle to collect enough money to pay a bank that was trying to take a family farm from them through shifty practices discovered based on conditions that had been built into the farm’s debt papers. The banks were robbing from them, they reasoned, so they would rob the banks to make sure they could keep what was theirs.

In today’s film, Wind River, two girls from a Wyoming Indian reservation end up being found dead three years apart, each discovered deceased on snowy hills, victims of assault. The father of one of the girls is enlisted to help find answers about the death of the other.

Sheridan’s films work for me. They are decently paced and well shaped, definitely colored by the austerity and violence of the locales they are filmed, giving the audience glimpses of both the beauty and the harshness of the spaces these people live in, and carve lives out of.

Sheridan did it again, and I remain a big fan of his storytelling, and will look excitedly for his fourth film.

To end the day, I came across a video on Friday that explained a mystery that had perplexed Tim and I for a little while. On the back side of the new Imperial building that sits south of our office downtown, there are retail spaces on the ground level that have been filled by a few restaurants and a hair stylist shop. There have been a few spaces that remianed empty as well. In one of these spaces, several weeks ago Tim and I saw a logo for something called “Donovan Discovers”, which was the those words under the face of a kid. When we first walked by the logo taking an afternoon walk, we commented about wondering what Donovan had discovered. About a week ago, out on another walk to stretch our legs, we again passed by that space with the logo on its glass front, and with brown paper covering the glass inside, hiding the contents of the space from public view. We decided Donovan was curious, and that he must still be discovering as we chatted walking past the location.

The video I found on Friday had been shared by a friend on Facebook, and it told us who Donovan was, and what he had discovered- and I was surprised. Everything that happened in the video I watched had happened at some time in the building right behind where I worked. And the video shared a tremendous story. I am glad Donovan discovered, and was also discovered.

View the film on Donovan here, at the bottom of this page.