Q&A with Garrett Peck

  

Photo by Casey Addason

 

 

 

Garrett Peck is the author of the new book The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop. His other books include A Decade of Disruption. He lives in Santa Fe. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Bright Edges of the World?

 

A: Hello everyone, readers and Willa Cather fans and Cather fans who are readers. And thank you to Deborah Kalb for hosting me once again. My name is Garrett Peck, and I’m an author, independent historian, and tour guide in Santa Fe. My latest book is The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop (University of New Mexico Press). 

 

I first encountered Willa Cather in 1998. My mom used to attend a continuing education conference in Santa Fe called Creativity & Madness, and she suggested that we have a trip to the city together. She knew how much I love history, and Southwestern history is especially complicated and rich. She assigned me to read Cather’s Death Comes For the Archbishop before the trip. I was 30 and that was my first encounter with Cather - we didn’t read her in California schools. 

 

I fell in love with Cather’s writing, which so beautifully and sparsely evokes the Southwest, as well as with Santa Fe. I came back to Santa Fe so many times (I lived in the D.C. area for 27 years) that I finally decided I should just live here. So I moved to the City Different in 2021.

 

As I’m a tour guide, I set up a Willa Cather’s Santa Fe walking tour, and now have a book published about how Cather wrote her “best book” (her words), Death Comes for the Archbishop. I focused on Cather’s travels to the Southwest: she came here six times between 1912 and 1926, and that inspired three novels, the last of which was Archbishop. I wrote the book conversationally and it has 80 images. You’re going to want to visit New Mexico after reading this book! 

 

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: I began working on The Bright Edges of the World long before I moved to Santa Fe. Crucial to the story are Cather’s letters, which are snapshots of her travels. She usually wrote on hotel stationery when she traveled, so we can follow her trail. I’ve quoted from hundreds of her letters.

 

And of course I visited all the places she wrote about, including Acoma Pueblo, Albuquerque, Canyon de Chelly, Chimayó, Hopi, Laguna Pueblo, Mesa Verde, Santa Fe, Taos, Taos Pueblo, Winslow, and much more. She really got to know the Southwest quite well, and her evocative descriptions were her own experiences that she transposed onto her fictional archbishop, Jean Marie Latour. 

 

The biggest surprise for me was how well Cather got to know Pueblo culture. New Mexico has 19 Pueblo Indian tribes, and Cather visited most of them, as well as numerous Ancestral Pueblo sites such as Homolovi, Mesa Verde, and Pecos Pueblo. She subtly wrote about Pueblo faith and wove that into the narrative.

 

I didn’t realize how extensive her knowledge was until I started composing the chapter called “Native Faith,” and that had me examine how Cather incorporated Pueblo culture, history, and spirituality. 

 

Here in Santa Fe, you’ll meet Indigenous people every day, as they are our neighbors, and we are theirs. New Mexico’s population is 12 percent Indigenous. I think it’s so important that people see Native peoples as they are - not looking down on them, nor placing them up on a pedestal, but meeting them where they are as human beings. I’m blessed to know so many Native people. 

 

Q: What do you think still fascinates readers about Willa Cather (1873-1947) and her work?

 

A: Like the Greek playwrights, Shakespeare, and Chekhov, Cather remains deeply relevant, even though her most significant body of writing is from a century ago.

 

She examined contemporary issues through the lens of the past, although many people misjudged her as a nostalgist (she insisted that she was not). And she examined questions of human nature: family, friendships, love, midlife crises, mortality, and more. Those are always relevant.

 

In My Ántonia, she wrote about and celebrated immigrants on the Nebraska prairie in 1918. We’re still having this debate about immigration, between those who want to let new people become Americans, and those who want to shut the gates. 

 

A common theme in Cather’s work is to pick up a person or persons and plop them down on the frontier and to see how they adapt. She had to do this as a pioneer child, and that theme resonated with her during her entire writing career.

 

Death Comes for the Archbishop is an unusual Western novel - there are no gunfights, stagecoach robberies, or cattle rustling - but she chose an unusual topic: the friendship between two French Catholic priests working on the frontier of the American Southwest.

 

Friendship of course is an eternal theme. And her prose is just stunning. This is the peak of Cather’s career, and like I said she called it her “best book.” 

 

Q: How was your book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: The title comes from page 273 of Cather’s novel, and it is one of the most beautiful passages of prose that Cather ever wrote. It is set in the final chapter of the book, “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” which is also the name of the novel.

 

This brilliant chapter has us going into the mind of the dying Archbishop Latour. Latour has decided to remain in New Mexico after his retirement, rather than return to his native France, as he has fallen in love with the desert.

 

Cather wrote: 

 

Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up to him for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert. (Archbishop, 273) 

 

Death Comes for the Archbishop is a novel set on the frontier. The frontier is disappearing, and Latour is hanging on to see the last of it. As a child, Cather’s family were pioneers in Nebraska, and she saw the prairie grass plowed under so farmers could grow alfalfa, corn, and other crops. Many of the archbishop’s experiences in the novel were her own. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I have a long list of books to write (the Cather book is my ninth). The most immediate is a history of Prohibition in New Mexico, which no one has ever addressed in book form (there are a few scholarly and legal articles out there, but no one has given this epoch the full treatment). The working title is Prohibition in New Mexico: Mayhem and Moonshine in the Land of Enchantment. 

 

I want to go to Scotland in a couple years and explore the backstory of the first beer brewer in the Washington, D.C., area. His name was Andrew Wales and he came from Edinburgh to Virginia in 1765 at the age of 28.

 

I led a walking tour about him in Old Town Alexandria and wrote a 10,000 word biography of the man in 2015, which may surprise you since he’s an obscure 18th century figure. He had a three-decade commercial relationship with George Washington, selling him ale and barley, and was a Tory (a loyalist) during the War of Independence and helped lead a prison break of British sailors, soldiers, and loyalists.

 

I want to explore the world he came from and where he apprenticed in Edinburgh before he came to Virginia. His life coincided with the Scottish Enlightenment, and I’m thinking of calling the book Enlightened Ale: A Transatlantic Brewing History. 

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I’m taking my Cather book, The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop, on the road in spring 2026. Besides Santa Fe, I’ll be traveling the country to Albuquerque, Colorado Springs, Crested Butte, Dallas, Denver, Lincoln, Omaha, Provincetown, Red Cloud, Washington, D.C., and more.

 

I hope to see you at one of these author talks and book signings. I’ve got them listed on my website at https://www.garrettpeck.com/new-page. And if you are part of a book group and want to discuss Cather, you can always invite me to join remotely. There’s a Contact me page on my website. I’m happy to meet fellow Cather readers and fans. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Garrett Peck.