Author, photographer, journalist, screenwriter, activist, and beloved Taos beacon
BY KAY MATTHEWS
Who wasn’t John Nichols’s friend? His Hispano neighbors who shared the acequias that served the Lower Ranchitos area where he first lived in Taos, New Mexico, taught him the ins and outs of getting water from the ditches to his fields, how to fix his roof or plaster the house, and argued with him about whose responsibility it was to keep the horses or sheep or dogs out of his garden and chicken coop. When the bureaucrats came to town to persuade Taoseños that a conservancy district to impound irrigation water was a good idea, Nichols teamed up with his compadres to let the state engineer know that the people of Taos thought it was a bad idea, and in the battle over the Indian Camp Dam he made lifelong friends of the farmers and acequia parciantes who valued his courage and writing skills.
Those writing skills had already produced two novels, The Sterile Cuckoo and The Wizard of Loneliness, published in New York, where he grew up. John Treadwell Nichols, the curator of fishes at the Museum of Natural History, instilled in his grandson a lifelong appreciation of the natural world. When the young author and his small family moved to Taos in 1969, that
appreciation only deepened as he roamed the Sangre de Cristos on foot or snowshoes, fished the rocky rapids of the Rio Grande, and explored the Taos West Mesa—its small ephemeral ponds and sage landscape full of animal life—often with his children, Luke and Tanya. The mesa inspired several of the 10 nonfiction books he wrote and photographed, including On the Mesa and A Fragile Beauty.
But his love was fiction. He wrote 13 novels over the course of his life. His first novel published after moving to Taos, The Milagro Beanfield War, never made the bestseller list, but its story of a Northern New Mexico village opposing a golf resort and housing development became a local favorite and made Nichols a New Mexico celebrity. Two more “Chamisaville”—aka Taos— books came fast and furious to form a trilogy with a more radical tract—The Magic Journey—and a satirical look at the future, The Nirvana Blues. Later books also reflected his desire to write “political fiction,” especially American Blood, an indictment of the violence underlying American history, which takes place during Vietnam. But Nichols could also write comic novels, like Conjugal Bliss, this writer’s personal favorite. The Chicago Tribune called it “a hilarious, raucous, painfully graphic portrait of The Marriage from Hell.” Nichols was married three times, had many girlfriends, and lots of platonic women friends.
His fans also became his friends. He faithfully answered mail from people he’d never met, often maintaining correspondence
with them for decades. He knew everyone at the post office where he stopped daily to get the dozens of letters that always arrived via snail mail (he never had an internet account although late in life he got a digital tablet so he could go online and do research). His best friend, Rick Smith, owner of Brodsky Bookshop, explains, “He loved being woven into the fabric of everyday life in Taos. For him, the people were what made it so special. The pandemic was hard on John because it isolated him from his community.”
His celebrity only increased when he was recruited by Robert Redford to adapt Milagro Beanfield War to film. It went into multiple rewrites and he was not credited for the screenplay, but it launched a career spanning several years as a screenwriter. He repeatedly told people that Milagro “is an albatross around my neck.” Everyone thought he’d made a ton of money; he hadn’t—though the film did secure a much-needed pension later in life from the Writers Guild. Other screenwriting included work on Greek film director Costa-Gavras’s great film, Missing, a story based on the disappearance of a young American during the military coup in Chile in 1973, which was backed by the CIA and American corporations.
There’s a video called “My Beautiful Storage Locker” now residing within the University of New Mexico’s Center for Southwest Research, where Nichols’s archive was established, that provides a discerning look into his personality and talents. It begins with him playing his guitar and singing a song he’d written for the occasion. (He was an accomplished guitar and piano player, and was part of the popular local band, Ricky and the Re-Rites). He then takes you inside his storage locker, which is filled floor to ceiling with drafts of every one of his published books and every unpublished book—of which there were many.
In his memoir I Got Mine, published a year before he died in late 2023 at age 83, Nichols admits that he thrived on staying up all night writing the 50th iteration of whatever book he was working on. Rick Smith notes, “John always said that doing the work was what he trusted, not genius or inspiration. He truly was grateful to be a writer and be able to make a living being one. It wasn’t something he took for granted and he showed that with his work ethic.”
From the Summer 2025 issue
