Jacque Garcia is a writer, desert enthusiast, and founder of The Dust Magazine. After falling in love with the southwest originally in Moab, she relocated to Telluride with a mission to highlight the network of small town creatives in the Four Corners region.
What are you watching?
Honestly, I'm living for the weekly release of this season of Top Chef. I'm so used to binge watching TV series that it's sort of refreshing to have to live in anticipation for each new episode. Plus it provides a lot of home cooking inspiration.
What are you reading?
I'm bouncing around between a couple of novels, both by authors I really admire: House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende and Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami. I'm also slowly savoring my way through Virga & Bone by Craig Childs, whose book of essays is both invigorating and also somewhat torturous in a time when I feel so close to the desert and so unable to access it. Lastly, I'm reading a book of poems by Rainer Rilke, whose lndustrial Era German poetry is serving to remind me that other times and places do exist, and that there is a familiar course of human emotion that runs through all of them.
What are you listening to?
I'm listening to the KOTO daily updates, NPR, and the This American Life podcast. Musically, I'm finding comfort in the old familiar music of my childhood and adolescence, primarily Stevie Nicks, Death Cab for Cutie, and Joni Mitchell.
What are you currently working on?
One project I'm really excited about is collecting firsthand accounts from writers in the Four Corners region during this time of uncertainty and change, which is being published this week with The Dust (www.thedustmag.com).
Personally, I'm continuing to work on a collection of poems I've written over the past few years. It's called Red Wine & White Lies and is split into sections all named after different types of wine. It's been a perfect time to reflect on how I've grown and changed over the past few years, and focusing on this book has been a great lens through which to do so.
A brand new project I'm working on (thanks to the new guitar I picked up from the Telluride Music Company TODAY) is taking my poems and putting them to music, which I have vague aspirations of collecting into an album to be called Red Wine, White Lies, and the Blues.
What's changed for you?
I'm realizing (somewhat unexpectedly) that it feels like I am both where I want to and where I need to be right now. In the past year and a half, Telluride has come to feel like home in a way I haven't experienced in years of traveling and living seasonally. So, I suppose what's changed is that I'm no longer looking for my next move to the next place. So many things are uncertain right now but, amidst it all, I'm relaxing and becoming comfortable, for once, right where I'm at.