Monday, April 11, 3:00pm
Prominent regional author Uncle River will be reading one of his earliest works, The Cosmic Cycle, at the Silver City Public Library on Monday, April 11, 3:00pm. The Cosmic Cycle was the heart of River’s “Senior Study”, at Goddard College. More than 50 years later, he still finds it some of his best work. And the piece which set him on what turned out to be his life’s path. The work is a combination of poetry, vision, and a bird’s-eye view of the trajectory of a civilization.
Uncle River grew up among Boston intellectuals, including pupils of Sigmund Freud, who had come to America from Vienna, as refugees from Hitler. At Vermont’s Goddard College, the most experimental accredited college in the United States at the time, River studied Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God mythology series, with a nuclear physicist. Which led him, on a college year abroad, to the C. G. Jung Institute, in Zurich, where he began dream analysis… with another nuclear physicist. Math and myth. Two symbolic languages which can address a lot of the same questions.
At his entry colloquium in the then-new experimental Ph.D. program Union Graduate School (now Union Institute And University) River did a reading of The Cosmic Cycle. Fellow student David Hilligoss asked him for a copy. The following winter, on a cross-country journey, an approaching blizzard detoured River to David’s home, in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. David had been doing readings of The Cosmic Cycle, and River had a following there as a writer.
David and River established an experimental college center in Tahlequah, which became Flaming Rainbow University, with a student body about half Native American, and David as Director. (The name derived from the great vision in Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt.) River went back to Zurich, to continue his studies with the Jungians, through Union Graduate School. Several years later “I returned to Oklahoma only to discover that State educational authorities who hated David Hilligoss were blacklisting the parent institution of both Union Graduate School and Flaming Rainbow. Illegally, but in effect just that year,” River said. “As well, I got bitten by a copperhead, right on the spot I had thought to build a house.” Meanwhile, friends Kathleen Kesson and Earl Hatley began publishing River’s writings, in a little periodical called The Wellspring, over the byline Uncle River, derived from the opening and closing lines of The Cosmic Cycle.
“Thus, my identity shifted, from Dr. Stephen Kaufman, Jungian Analyst, to Uncle River, writer,” explained River.
Looking for the least populous place in the United States with a nice climate led River to Catron County, New Mexico, which he now has called home most of his adult life.
For some years, River’s work found favor as cultural Speculative Fiction, including stories in Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and a Year’s Best Fantasy volume.
River’s published work includes The Mogollon News, fictitious news set in Mogollon where River lived the second half of the 80s, which began as a column in the Silver City Enterprise. He also wrote Thunder Mountain, Prometheus – the Autobiography, King Freedom, and the story collection Counting Tadpoles.
Pie Town has been River’s home since 2006. The Silver City Public Library is located at 515 W. College Avenue.