The Barbara Waters Memorial

Taos, New Mexico

Barbara Waters, the fourth and final wife of Frank Waters, the godfather of Southwestern literature, passed away January 11^th of this year. She was a fine writer and scholar in her own right, and as head of the Frank Waters Foundation, a vital force in the preservation of her husband’s literary and cultural legacy.

The memorial for Barbara Waters was held at the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos and at the Frank Waters’ home in Arroyo Seco on June 27th. What follows is a short biography of Barbara Waters abridged from the Frank Waters Foundation website. (To read the entire biography, go to www.frankwaters.org/new_page_3.htm). After the bio, I have added the tribute to Barbara Waters I presented at the memorial – one of many made by her numerous friends.

Barbara Waters: Biography

Barbara Waters was born on September 26, 1929, in Oak Park, Illinois, and grew up in La Grange and Oswego, suburbs of Chicago. While raising her two sons –Terence and William Hayes – she attended Northwestern University and earned a bachelor’s degree in secondary education with an English major.

In 1968 she divorced her first husband and came to Taos, New Mexico, where she met Frank Waters in 1970.That same year she began dividing her time between Taos and Tucson, where she taught English at Canyon del Oro High School until 1985.

Barbara and Frank were married in 1979, the same year that she earned a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Arizona. In 1988 she earned another master’s degree in Counseling and Guidance and began therapy practices in Tucson and Taos. She organized the Frank Waters Foundation in 1993, two years before her husband’s death in 1995.

Barbara discontinued her psychotherapy practices in 1995 to write her memoir Celebrating the Coyote. Her work has appeared in Western American Literature, Chicago Tribune, Arizona Daily Star, and the Salt Journal. She also has essays in Frank Waters: Man and Mystic and in The Spirit That Wants Me and wrote a foreword for The Woman at Otowi Crossing, Frank Waters’ novel about the making of the atomic bomb. In addition to her writings, Barbara Waters was the president of the Frank Waters Foundation, a consultant for the Southern Arizona Friends of C.G. Jung, and a member of the Society of the Muse of the Southwest. 
 

She died January 11, 2015. 
 

Mountains near Arroyo Seco

Barbara Waters Tribute

It is an incredible honor to be asked to speak here at the memorial for Barbara Waters.

When I interviewed Frank Waters for Southwest Profile in June of 1989, there was a festival taking place in Taos, and the traffic crawled through town. I was coming up from Santa Fe, and as the minutes ticked by and the cars inched forward, it became clear that I was going to be quite late. So, a few blocks past the plaza, I pulled over and called Waters from a phone booth. (This was in the Dark Ages before cell phones.) When he answered the phone, he sounded very disappointed, which prompted me to apologize profusely for my lateness. He explained that my lateness wasn’t a problem; instead, he was concerned because Barbara was late returning from Tucson, and the phone rang, he had thought she was calling.

I finally arrived in Arroyo Seco almost an hour late, and we started the interview, which took a couple more hours. At the end, Waters was still clearly very concerned about Barbara, who still hadn’t arrived, and the last thing he said to me, after complaining about the lack of a bypass around Taos, was, “She should be here soon. I think I’ll throw together a little supper for her. I bet she’ll be hungry.”

At the time, I was impressed by Waters’ love and concern for his wife, and I thought she must be a very special person.

Twelve years later, when I met Barbara at the Robinson Jeffers conference at the Mabel Dodge Luhan house, I discovered that Barbara was indeed a great soul. Over the next decade, I visited her repeatedly while researching Frank Waters’ life, including an extended stay at their Arroyo Seco home, and I always found Barbara to be warm, compassionate, intelligent, most helpful, brave in adversity, and sharply honest.

The last time I saw her, my wife Brenda and I visited her in Arroyo Seco, and she was gracious as always, sitting in her armchair, a stack of books and journals on the coffee table in front of her; surrounded by the artwork of Fechin, Lady Brett, and Hopi artisans; the cool aspen-filtered light coming in through the east-facing windows.

I will miss those visits, as we will all deeply miss her presence in this world.

I would like to finish with a passage from the novel The Man Who Killed the Deer. Here, Frank Waters describes the Day of the Dead at Taos Pueblo:

The women kneeled down, lighted more candles, and from under their shawls took out wafer bread, loaves of long-bread, cornmeal baked in cornhusks, pans of panocha, even a cheap store sponge-cake to place on the sunken graves.

It was el Dia de los Muertos, and they had come with offerings for the dead. 

They who lie here were as alive as we are who have not forgotten. We too will lie here and will not be forgotten. Are we all alive, or all dead, in this unceasing file from one mystery to another, through this watery blue veil of November sky? Let no man say. Let him say only: I am the seed of the husk that lies here, my Corn Mother; and I am the seed of those husks which will follow after me; and this meal I now place here is the bond between us all; and may our Earth Mother, our Corn Mother, attest I have not forgotten.