Frederick Hammersley Fund New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts and Education and Endowment Fund and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs and by the National Endowment for the Arts and viewers like you.

In her book 'Letters from the Edge' Margaret Randall shares correspondence with irreverent writers and artists.

Fellow Outwriters who focus on important themes such as social change, identity, art and creative integrity.

>> Margaret: I think courage might be the word that comes to mind.

They were all courageous each and his or her own way.

Navigating the complexities of art and life, teacher and photographer, Tom Siegmund crafts whimsical worlds and guides his students to do the same.

It's all ahead on Colores!

OUTRIDER CONVERSATIONS >> Faith: Margaret, thank you for joining me today on Colores to talk about your new book, 'Letters from the Edge: Outrider Conversations' Can you tell me what is an Outrider?

>> Margaret: I think of an Outrider as someone who is at the edge of society, someone who maybe has had obstacles in their lives that have kept them from doing or tried to impede them doing what they really want to do, whether that's paint or write or act or sing.

And they've pushed through those obstacles and continued to do what they need to do, often at great personal cost.

>> Faith: And your work and your life as well, I would say, you're an Outrider.

So can you talk about how you're an Outrider?

>> Margaret: I take that as a compliment.

Yes, I come from a time -- I grew up in the 50s, kind of suffocating time for women in this country.

We were expected to go up and marry and have children and then really not do anything else with our lives.

And I always really wanted to have it all.

I wanted to be a mother.

I wanted to be a wife.

I wanted to write poetry.

I wanted to change the world.

And so I identify very much with people who have that same journey.

>> Faith: Takes one to know one.

>> Margaret: Yeah.

Right.

>> Faith: So what inspired you to write the book?

>> Margaret: My youngest daughter has a very close friend named Mae Jacobs.

And she wrote to my daughter a couple of years ago, I guess, maybe three years ago.

She said, "I've just been at the Beinecke Library at Yale and going through my grandfather's archives.

And I found 400 pages of letters between my grandfather and your mother," meaning me.

Mae Jacobs is the granddaughter of Walter Lowenfel, who was a great poet.

And while I was reading those letters and realizing this would make a great book, because it's a kind of new genre, It's a genre that is very immediate.

It's very spontaneous.

People don't often write letters thinking of them as a document for posterity.

They think of them as just communicating with the person that they're communicating with.

And I was working on those letters and I thought, I've known other people in my life with whom I've had long correspondences.

It would be an even more interesting book if I included some of the other people.

And so this particular book, 'Letters from the Edge: Outrider Conversations' is the first of two, the second will be out from the same publishing house in September.

And they include correspondence with writers, editors, poets, painters, a curator, a social activist who was a political prisoner for 22 years.

So, there are a variety of people.

And the thing that links them, of course, is this condition of outwriter, which we've talked about.

>> Faith: Yeah, and letters are a lot more personal, right?

You can learn a lot more about a person through that kind of thing.

>> Margaret: They are.

And in the era in which these letters were written, which were basically the 60s, the 70s, some of them into the 80s, there's a few that are contemporary.

But most of them were written at a time when correspondence was not this kind of immediate flying through cyber space, you know, the email and so forth that we have today.

And they were very carefully written.

They were -- many of them were written in long hand or on the typewriter.

But a lot of thought went into them.

So, there's a texture to them.

There's -- they have a personality that I think a lot of correspondence has lost today.

>> Faith: A lot of the book is based on letters that were written decades ago.

What was surprising to you to learn about yourself?

>> Margaret: You know, I think were several things that were surprising.

I'm not sure so many things about myself, but things about the era, the 60s, the 70s, both in Latin America and in the United States and in many other parts of the world, were times when we really felt like we could fight to make society better and that we were winning, in fact.

I mean, my generation stopped the war -- the US war in Vietnam by protesting against it, massively.

So, it was a period in which young people were concerned with what was going on around them.

They wanted to make a better society, a more egalitarian society.

And we thought we could do it.

When you contrast that with the way were living at the moment, I think that that brought a lot of revisiting those times for me in the letters with these different people.

Brought me a lot of hope.

It brought me the sense that we'll be able to do this again.

You know, we'll be able to make changes that make life better for people.

>> Faith: As long as we have outriders in the world.

>> Margaret: Right, yeah.

>> Faith: So, Walter Lownfel, I want to talk a little bit about him.

He faced a lot of persecution due to his writings, poetry, journalism during that time where it was McCarthyism and a lot of poets and artists were afraid to talk about their political ideologies.

But Walter wasn't.

So, can you talk a little bit about that?

>> Margaret: He was a very interesting person.

He was a member of the US Communist Party.

One might have thought because of that that he would be rigid and somewhat serious and so forth.

He was a hoot!

[Faith laughing] >> Margaret: He had a wonderful imagination.

He had an extraordinarily magical sense of time.

He was -- and the obstacle that he faced in his life, as you say, it had to do with McCarthyism.

He was subpoenaed and brought up before the committee and refused to give names.

And so he was sentenced to two years in prison.

That's the kind of obstacle that isn't the obstacle.

It's a different obstacle in each life, but each one of my correspondence in this book faced that kind of a big obstacle that they somehow had to push through with a lot of courage and creativity.

>> Faith: What do you think you learned from Walter's resilience despite, you know, the fear of him being persecuted, he continued to write about his political ideologies?

>> Margaret: I learned a great deal from Walter, and I think probably the main thing was not to be afraid, not to allow oneself to be cowed, to be -- not to obey without thinking, but to really figure out what we believe in and stand up for that.

He was somebody who taught me that you could do that.

So yeah, I learned a lot from him.

I learned something from every one of these correspondence.

>> Faith: As he said, "To be heard", right?

>> Margaret: Right.

>>Faith: Yeah.

>> Margaret: Exactly.

>> Faith: So, moving on, I want to talk a little bit about Laurette Sejourne.

She was a mentor, a friend, your compass, as you could describe to her.

[Laughs] >> Margaret: Right.

>> Faith: You also talked about her being the quintessential outwriter, a fearlessly brilliant thinker.

And someone who was a rebel in every area that she engaged in.

Can you talk a little bit about how those traits manifested in her work and in her personal life?

>> Margaret: Yes.

Laurette Sejourne was born in Italy.

Her father was a Fascist and an admirer of Mussolini, and so, she left Italy as a young woman, moved to Paris, changed her name actually to get away from sort of the stigma of her family.

And became friendly with Breton and some of the people who were the artists and writers who were the exciting names in Paris at that point.

And then she married a man named Victor Serge, who was a Jew.

He was a Belgian Jew who had to escape Europe during the years of Nazi Fascism.

And with him she came to Mexico.

I met her in Mexico when I moved to Mexico at the end of 1961. and we became instant friends, and by that time Serge had died, and she had remarried a man named Arnaldo Orfila, whose letters are also in the same chapter.

Arnaldo Orfila -- so her and then, you know, Laurette reinvented herself in Mexico.

She studied anthropology, she became an anthropologist.

She was very much hated by the Mexican anthropological establishment of the time.

And she was much too wild for them.

And so, you know, that was her obstacle that she had to get over.

>> Faith: Her ideas were like contradictory to the main ideas that were going on at that time in the anthropological and archeological communities.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

>> Margaret: I think that her brilliance lay in the fact that she was able to really put herself in the place of the people she studied, of the culture that she was studying.

The Nawas and the Aztecs and the Mayans.

She had that facility to -- she wasn't really looking at them from afar, but she was able to imagine what it would have been like to think like them, to act like them, to be them.

And that gave her an inside line to who they were, really.

And I think that was something that the establishment, the anthropological establishment in Mexico couldn't do at that time.

And, of course, they resented her because she was a foreigner, she was a woman, she had ideas that they didn't understand.

But she was vindicated late in her life, fortunately before her death.

Her books became very important.

>> Faith: And you were inspired by the Toltec dish that she gave you to write a poem about it.

Could you talk a little bit about how her work inspired your work?

>> Margaret: Yes, when I moved to Mexico in 1961, I was a single mother, my son was 10 months old.

And I soon met Laurette and Arnaldo.

And at that time, Laurette was going out to a dig that she had a Teotihuacán, the pyramids just outside Mexico City.

She would go out there once a week and she had workmen digging up items.

And she would look at what they had dug up during the week and she would decide what to bring back to Mexico City to study.

And we would have a picnic out there.

So we began going with her every Wednesday.

And I knew nothing about these cultures.

And she began to educate me in the wonders of these ancient peoples.

And I learned a lot from her.

And, you know, when you're learning that kind of thing, it's not really just about the people or the history of that particular story.

You learn things that make connections in the rest of your life as well.

>> Faith: I want to talk a little bit about Arnaldo, So, he was fired from his publishing company, Fondo de Cultura Economica.

And yet he still was able to persist with the help of you and others.

So, can you tell me in what ways did his fearless commitment to publishing inspired your own work and publishing efforts?

>> Margaret: He was the director of one of the largest publishing houses in Latin America.

And this publishing house had something to do with the Mexican government.

They had some degree of investment in it.

So, when he published two books that were not-- didn't characterize Mexico in a way that the Mexican government wanted the country to be seen, they fired him.

And a great number of writers and artists, myself included, got together and we raised the money for him to have his own independent publishing house.

So, that was the obstacle that he had to get through.

I think one of the things I learned from Arnaldo, or at least, Arnaldo reinforced in me.

I may have already had sort of the seeds of this, was the conviction that once you decide what you think about the world and how you want to see it change, it's very important to speak that truth, to write that truth, to sing that truth, to whatever your genre happens to be.

And in my case, as a writer, his fearlessness taught me to be fearless.

And it's something that I go back to frequently.

And it's of course very useful today, we need to be speaking truth.

>> Faith: Especially today.

>> Margaret: Yeah >> Faith So, what do you feel -- is the most important lesson that you've learned from each of these individuals in your book?

>> Margaret: I think courage might be the word that comes to mind.

They were all courageous each in his or her own way.

They didn't let the sort of conventions of society drag them down, limit them, stop them.

They knew what they wanted.

It didn't, very often, it didn't mean economic success or professional success.

The way our society thinks of those things.

But they just followed their hearts and minds and I think this is true in every single case, every one of these people.

BUILDING WORDS AND RELATIONSHIPS.

>> Tom: I'm taking my cues from this real intimate place that I call home, and I'm applying it to the space beyond this space.

>> Tom: We kept moving further and further out, trying to get more space.

>> Tom: And when I am here, I'm pretty content.

>> Tom: I never really did a lot of Still Life's 'till my first home I bought and I started actively changing that home and renovating it, where a lot of things came together.

I became real aware of objects.

I'd find things, strange things.

I like having a bunch of stuff in the studio like -- this little pile growing and that little pile is growing and I sort of get to feel it out.

And then eventually I realize I think I could do something with this now.

I like the ideation phase.

I like this incubation period.

I like the studying and thinking about the work, the individual pieces and how it's all coming together.

As I began to figure things out, I think I've become more sensitive over the years.

I think it all comes back to home, a home, a nest, roots.

>> Tom: I might stay enough just for a test shot.

I want to think to look like what I want to look like.

And I want the shadows to be set and I want the lighting to be set and I want the composition to be what I want it to be.

The cropping and the framing, I want that all to be the way that I imagine it to be.

So as I kind of make stuff and I work, I'm doing test shots along the way just to see photographically if it's going to look like what's in my head.

I'm constantly running back to the house to check it on the big screen and see what it looks like.

For the most part, the thing is built the way I want it to.

So I'm just getting some light on it and seeing how that looks.

And then you can see here I've made some notes based on my observation on the printed set up, some things I need to lighten up or darken or so forth.

So I think that that's really cool.

Once I get it off the table and I get it on the computer and I think it looks good, then the detail where it can be kind of exciting.

That straight horizon line really bugged me.

So that was one of my earlier kind of changes.

It's almost like the curvature of the earth and then everything else is sort of a piece you're puttng together.

>> Tom: The older you get, you become a better teacher.

And it's probably because at some point in time that you realize that probably it's the relationships that're most important thing.

I characterize myself as a teaching artist.

So, I'm working and I'm teaching.

So, I get to tell that to students, it's like, hey, I'm working hard too, you know, I have the same schedule you have, I have the same deadlines and that welcomes deadlines, you know, because I understand what you're going through.

So, I just think that to be fair, I should be working hard if I'm expecting them to work hard.

And I think that's worked well for me.

I think they've seen that.

They can see that around town and they can certainly look at my website and see that.

And so I think they feel better about it.

You know, the first day of school, I said, you know, hey, you should look at my website.

You know, I really like doing this.

I really do.

And, you know, if someone were going to be bossing me around for the semester, I'd want to know what they did.

And so I think you should take a look.

And so I think it helps out.

I really try to take my cues from the world that I live in.

What I'm supposed to make, what I'm supposed to do, some of the work that I've done is speaking to current events and this political place that we're in, this awful political place, kind of working through that.

Some of this work has probably helped me do that.

You see that in some of the titles, "Land of Promise," "No Hope Road" is probably that.

Frustration and anxiety, you know, building these houses on these cliff structures, I think that it's coming from that.

I feel genuinely, you know, sad about the fact that we can't treat each other nicely.

You know, that's probably one of the things with animals.

I can do something.

I can make a dog's life terrific.

I can affect that, you know?

Dogs, I think, they want to be in the same spaces you are generally.

So, I think they're pretty trusting for the most part.

I think the first dog that Missy and I got together was Casper, this Wine Reiner.

And when we just started to photograph him just in the normal kind of snapshot way that you photograph your animals, we realized that he's really photogenic.

We realized that, not only that, but they'll do whatever you want them to do.

You know, I mean, I literally like tell him, "Look at the camera."

And he would just, you know, stare into the camera to tell him to do something else.

>> Tom: Come on!

>> Tom: We now have some horses here, and horses are totally different.

You know, they're skeptical of everything.

The first time I ever thought, "Cool.

I've got horses.

I'm starting to take a pictures.

I'm going to start waving my camera around."

You know, they just get really weird.

I've been photographing them a little bit, but they're quite different.

It's amazing how you do what I would characterize as a nice piece of work that kind of stays relevant.

That nice piece of work stays relevant.

I guess that's the work that I reflect on the most.

The idea is to kind of make the work that will speak that way.

And it doesn't always work, it's not always, I don't know what the word is, temporal or timeless, but some of the work is, and that's really rewarding.

The award-winning arts and culture series, Colores, is now available on the PBS app, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and at NMPBS.org.

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Funding for Colores was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts and Education Endowment Fund.

and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation.

New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

and viewers like you.