Gail Wanman Holstein has indulged her love for the Southwest for years, traveling extensively, exploring ancient sites, visiting museums and collections, and admiring the artifacts left behind by prehistoric peoples. She and her husband were curators of a three-museum exhibit entitled Enduring Visions: 1000 Years of Southwestern Indian Art. She did the photography for the show's catalog, which has become a classic reference book.

       Her first sight of the huge Mogollon Rim was from the cockpit of a small plane carrying her, her husband, and a load of gear to Phoenix to take pictures of prehistoric pottery. The updraft coming off the quarter-mile-high Rim slapped the plane with enough force to throw everything up against the ceiling—making for a strong and lasting impression. On a camping trip years later, as she watched her husband gather sage for a cleansing ceremony, the opening scene came to her.

"People in Arizona aren't like other Americans," she says. "Whether they know it or not, they absorb energy from the prehistoric peoples. Some Arizona people, especially those in the Mogollon area, are quite eccentric, like the character of Howlin' Jim. Given that I've met plenty of these folks in real life, I believe some of them could be adventurous enough to try Jim's outrageous experiment. It would be the ultimate in alternative lifestyles."

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Gail welcomes your comments after you've read the book. Email her at info@ThundercloudBooks.com.

If you wish, she'll email you an announcement of her next novel when it comes out. It's set in the slickrock country of Utah and draws on her experience as an advocate for victims of domestic violence. "Redemption on a mountain bike" is all she'll say about it now.