The Big Idea: Betsy James

Every journey begins with a first step, but where that journey goes from there can take many forms. Betsy James took many journeys leading up to Practicing to be Lightning, but to play fair by the characters in her story, there were more journeys for her to take. BETSY JAMES: It started out simple. I wanted to exploit my hiking journal for a fantasy setting: thirty years’ walking the New Mexico desert wilderness, about six hundred hikes. Wonderful stuff: the deer skull shrine, the bear fall, the sliding rock, the grave of locked stones; the red stone altar-bowl full of blood, which was even weirder in real life because whoever (I assume) belonged to the blood had used one finger to paint a spiral on a nearby rock. So many of those places are gone now, changed, no longer accessible. I wanted to share them, and I wanted to walk through them again myself. So I thought: If there are two young people, a sciency white ecologist—Ben—and a mixed-heritage artist—Trace—both of them violently…