Current Issue: Winter 2025 with Featured Author Ron Wetherington

Macrame: A few years ago, you retired from a lifelong career in anthropology with many accolades to your name, including being a founding member of SMU’s Department of Anthropology, and honors including the H.O.P.E. Teaching Award, and the Rotunda Outstanding Professor Award, to name a few. Undoubtedly, you have accumulated a rich collection of impressions and insights that provide a source of inspiration for you as a writer. Can you share with us what your journey as a writer has been like, and what role your profession has played in shaping your writing?

Ron Wetherington: I was drawn into anthropology by default. As a young teen I was deeply into literature and science. We had many books in our house, including a six-volume set of Poe—which I had consumed by age 15. At the same time, my scoutmaster introduced me to field entomology and I amassed a good collection at age 16. So as an undergraduate at Texas Tech my major in zoology was complemented by a minor in English and one course short of another minor in French. Then, on a lark I enrolled in an anthropology course, and that was that! My penchant for stories was fed by ethnographic studies and my love of science by participating in a summer of fieldwork in archaeology between my sophomore and junior years. I somehow got a scholarship to Michigan for graduate work in anthropology with minimal academic preparation for it—aided greatly by my mentor, Fred Wendorf.

Macrame: Among your publications are several full-length books. Some are primarily academic in nature, such as Battles and Massacres on the Southwestern Frontier, and Ceran St. Vrain, American Frontier Entrepreneur. Somewhere in the middle of the scholarly books is Kiva, a work of fiction and mystery grounded in your research. Can you share a little bit about these books, what makes each of them special, and what readers can expect to take away from reading them?

Ron Wetherington: St. Vrain’s history is fascinating and I just had to write it, but it is also a vehicle for my report on excavations of his flour mill, three miles downstream from Ft. Burgwin, outside Taos, N.M. Battles and Massacres is a collaborative volume. My co-editor and I wanted to explore the historical interpretation of 19^th Century engagements from the perspectives of archaeology, history, and Native American culture. We succeeded in finding authors for the first two, but not for the Native American side. We settled on Joe Watkins’s excellent Afterword. Joe is a member of the Choctaw Tribe and has a Ph.D. from my department at SMU. It is not our history we publish, he explains, it’s the White Man’s history. Why should we Native Americans want to participate in that! It’s one of the central take-aways from the book.

My novel, Kiva, was just a lark. I had thought about fictionalizing my excavations at Pot Creek Pueblo on the Ft. Burgwin property for years! After all, we archaeologists snatch accounts from the artifacts we recover and imagine their backstories in scientific language, so why not tell it straight from the imagination? It took me two weeks of evening typing, one chapter an evening, with a little cleanup a month later. Such fun! I later became the Director of the Research Center there, but did not find another novel lurking.

Macrame: As an anthropologist and a director of Ft. Burgwin Research Center in Taos, NM, you have dedicated much of your time to work in the field. Can you share some of your most memorable experiences or discoveries that had a particularly profound impact on you?

Ron Wetherington: Field archaeology is grueling yet never boring, as testing prior assumptions and discovering the unexpected are the driving expectations. Probably my most memorable experience occurred in a 1967 winter excavation in Egypt’s Western Desert. From Abu Simbel’s temples—this was on the original Nile, before Lake Nasser–our Land Rovers took the five of us two hours west where our support team had our tents erected and the pens for the ducks and two goats safely occupied. We had to pack in everything—food, drink, kerosene, fuel.

The desert sands, chilled at night and hot (even in winter) during the day, had long ago buried a lush lakeside where pre-Neolithic hunters harvested a wild millet. Sifting the sands and scraping along the ancient limestone escarpment revealed an amazing collection of tiny chert crescents, called “lunates”, scattered along the site. Handheld, these tiny sharpened flints aided in harvesting the brittle seedheads. Twelve to fourteen thousand years ago, this wild grass was on the very edge of domestication, and this was one place where it happened! Microscopic views reveal a sheen made by minuscule silica deposits from repeated cutting of the rachis, or stem, just below the seed bract. So these tiny treasures opened a magical storybook about ancestral hunters and gatherers taming the wild and becoming sedentary farmers.

This expedition ended on a somber note: For three weeks, we had eaten only lentils and rice with olive oil for lunch and roasted duck every evening. We had looked forward to having goat the final week.

On the morning of the slaughter, we awakened to find an empty goat pen! Carnivore tracks led off across the distant dunes. Jackals had quietly taken our goats during the night, somehow muffling their plaintive bleats. There were enough ducks left for the week, and I hated eating duck for a long time afterward.

I could not imagine that my experience in that Western Desert would so deeply inform my prose poem, “On Guillaumet’s Sahara” over fifty years later, in the March 2024 issue of The Ekphrastic Review.

Macrame: One of your interests has been advocacy for the defense of science literacy, and you are a recipient of the Friend of Darwin Award from the National Council for Science Education. As science literacy continues to be a relevant issue, what, in your opinion, are the dangers posed to young people by attempts to erode the scientific theory of evolution?

Ron Wetherington: I got drawn into the science teaching challenge in 2008 when I was invited to testify on behalf of evolutionary science at the Texas State Board of Education. A majority of the conservative Board had long wanted to insert a creationist “alternative” into the curriculum and we were aghast but unsurprised. After the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision made such a move illegal their strategy focused on raising “scientific” challenges. A marathon public debate involving three appointed creationist “experts” and three scientists—including me—took place in 2009 and received national coverage. The resulting award-winning documentary, The Revisionaries, was seen on PBS and won acclaim at numerous national film festivals.

The evolution battle is mostly over now (we won!), but I’m still called upon to join textbook review committees. Eroding science teaching is always a threat—whether the subject is as specific as climate change or a false belief about scientific theories in general. To paraphrase Derek Bok, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” It’s a Sisyphean struggle, and I refuse to stop being part of it!

Macrame: Almost three years ago you were diagnosed with lymphoma and have documented each step of your journey since the diagnosis in your personal blog, which can be found here: https://onlifeanddeath.blog/. You have also shifted your focus away from full-length projects to short stories, placed with independent publishers. Can you share some thoughts on this chapter in your life, and on the relationship between your battle with the disease and your writing?

Ron Wetherington: I suppose it’s natural to relate my lymphoma episode to a shift from long-term to short-term writing projects. But, after all, at a particular age, everything becomes short-term, doesn’t it! In fact, upon my retirement from my profession, there was a natural shift away from the longer commitments to research and publishing that characterize academia. And, too, 53 years of long-term projects is enough, you think?

In fact, just moving to a retirement village in which the average age is north of 80, plus the lymphoma diagnosis, made me reverse my telescope. Starting my “Lymphoma Blog,” which I’ve now linked to my webpage, was my way of beginning introspection through snapshots. While the blog has ended, the snapshot approach has not, and I find writing short fiction and nonfiction, in about equal measures, a perfect fit to my routine. That routine includes daily immunotherapy medication, monthly blood draws, and a PET-scan each trimester. I live a metered life. My biggest advantage is the loving support of my three daughters and two sons. One daughter now lives in Prague, but we visit on video weekly and we take a cruise together every year.

My form of the disease involves an almost certain return after two to five years (a greater than 50% chance, which is probably about the same as the likelihood of my shuffling off during that time in any case!) Living life in focused episodes like this is good for me, I think.

Macrame: You have written numerous stories that have found a home in a swath of publications. Where do you draw your inspiration for stories, especially considering that they cover a wide range of topics and genres?

Ron Wetherington: As I think most authors will admit, inspiration comes unexpectedly and intermittently, but never from an effort to be inspired. The harder you try, the more out-of-reach a story idea becomes. A good many of mine come in moments of undefined reverie or sleepiness. My story, “A Stitch in Time,” about lucid dreamers came, not surprisingly, in a lucid dream that I recorded as soon as I awakened.

Most of my non-fiction (Fog, River, Wilderness, etc.) comes from personal experiences that had a substantial impact on my life and values, like “Sahara”. There are still more of these to come.

Macrame: What advice can you share with our readers regarding life, work, or writing?

Ron Wetherington: The mantra of writing something every day is good advice for writers in the same way that walking five miles every day is good advice for the health-conscious. If your self-esteem can get you by with less of each, you shouldn’t sweat it (figuratively or literally). This advice is as much about self-discipline as about productivity. If your primary focus is on publishing, then you ought to write or do something related to writing every day.

But too many writers I’m in contact with obsess about it—and about measuring success by acceptances or rejections—and they suffer from it. Writing should be a pleasure in itself, to please in its own way on its own schedule. Publishing, at least for me, is decoration on the cake. But, of course, it’s also affirmation, and that’s important, too.

Macrame: Who are you as a reader? Who are the authors that inspired you throughout your life?

Ron Wetherington: I thrill to the prose and poetry of many authors: Dickenson, Poe, Hemingway, Thomas Wolf, Loren Eisley. I return to their works frequently to remind myself what elegant and evocative writing is like. I remember how taken I was in 1951 as a sixteen-year-old reading The Old Man and the Sea in Life Magazine! Absolutely absorbing language that put me directly in that little boat as a silent companion to the old guy! Could I ever write like that?

There are a few writers like that today, but I have to wade through a lot to find them. When I do, they become gems in my collection. I published my first short fiction in 2022, at age 86, and don’t make comparisons. It’s not healthy.

The summer that Pappa Hemingway published “The Old Man”, in July 1961, he took his own life. He was 61.

Macrame: What are you working on now and what can we look forward to reading next?

Ron Wetherington: I write a short piece for our monthly newsletter—350 words or less—and I’m a member of two writing groups here in my Village, one that I initiated, so I have to produce something to read along with the other members every couple of weeks. Some of this finds its way into print, and I’m thrilled when it does. But I can’t predict what’s coming next, because it’s always a surprise. I suppose I write, in part, to discover what characters and which topics are waiting to be revealed.