Outsiders seldom understand the curious amalgam of artists, galleries, misfits and hangers-on known as the Santa Fe Art Scene. Douglas Atwill, a painter living and working in its midst for many years, writes stories with an insider's eye, tales of facing the easel every day, as well as those of dealing with the commercial demands from collectors, galleries and their crabby owners. In this collection of stories, we witness a group of Santa Fe painters confronting their art and life in creative ways, solving the ages-old problems of painting the perfect canvas, making that obstinate muse smile....

Before returning home, Neil Bronson and his friends, Sam and Carrie, rent a cottage on the coast, playing out a languorous triangle of seaside sexual attraction. Neil's uncle interrupts the idyll, urgently seeking their help teaching at his art school in Santa Fe.

In this family epic, Donovan Merrill and his grandmother, Anna, reinvent themselves. Anna finds love again with a German expatriate, and Donovan pursues love and his art career in Santa Fe.

A summer on the California coast calls to Mattox Williams, a writer wanting quiet days to do the finishing work on his novel. He leases his Santa Fe house for three months and finds an ocean-facing room at Glitter Bay. While meeting the other people of the beach community, a love affair develops as well as the surrounding strife. He makes a deep emotional mark on the neighbors, particularly on Hayden Danning and his sister, Sylvan. A surprise offer from a film producer opens his horizons and requires trips south to Hollywood and Laguna Beach. At the end of summer, Mattox tries to find a way...

The title story tells of Marian Nakamura who pickles the fallen pears to remember a husband who took a fatal fall from an upper branch of a pear tree. The story won a place on the final ten list of a 2010 "The New Yorker" magazine competition. In another story a Minnesota woman learns to paint in Santa Fe and finds acclaim for her colorful canvases, only to walk away from them. A native American artist paints a cathedral scene, loosing the powers of old spirits. An even more notable force breaks into a fourth painter's life, the ancient Old Goddess wanting a place in the new world. Douglas...

Douglas Atwill is a painter who lives in Santa Fe, painting the New Mexico landscape and gardens, often his own studio garden. His paintings are in collections coast to coast and he continues to have solo exhibits. Atwill's observations accompany each illustration. His other books from Sunstone Press include: "Why I Won't Be Going to Lunch Anymore," "The Galisteo Escarpment," "Imperial Yellow," "Creep Around the Corner," "The Oyster Shell Driveway," "Dinner in the Labyrinth," and "Husband Memory Pickles."

Like shards from an Anasazi pot, fragments of writing can describe the whole piece. Eleven selections are included, chapters from three novels and pages from eight stories. There is a long tale about a boy who wins sixteen lotteries in a row, inflaming entrants and targeting him for kidnap. An artist buys an Italianate house in California and moves in her bohemian friends and family, to the dismay of neighbors. Remembrances of past times in the counterintelligence world come back to haunt in several stories. A successful portrait painter takes the family to Bora Bora for a troubled season of...

The title story concerns an old painter, whose Greek landscape canvases have lost their appeal with the buying public. That changes after a visitor to his garden. Another tale is told about a doubting monk who leads a horticultural rebellion in the far west country. Further skepticism in a third story is punished after a holy man's passing in the Himalayan foothills. There is a touch of the other world in these stories, with unknown hands operating in the modern world.