Postmarked Calexico explores the enigma and disappearance south of the border of one, or maybe more than one, renegade writer who doesn’t want to be found. One man’s dogged search for an old friend through the mountains of Colorado and the beaches of Baja ultimately entangles him in the labyrinthine lives of two men and a woman who will change him forever. This search, and Davidson’s spare and provocative narrative style, peel away layer after layer of silence hiding a complex story of passion and protest, of pair of committed writers (or perhaps over-committed writers) whose quixotic destiny is both to challenge and to flee the destructive matrix of contemporary America. Echoes of Edward Abbey and B. Traven haunt these pages, along with the almost impossible dream of disappearing into a dangerous emptiness called Mexico. Davidson deftly weaves the stubborn heroism of their lives-as-protest—along with their need to live in the shadows—into the bone-dry mythology of the American West.
Author Jim Davidson is a a refugee of small-town newspaper wars (the endless survival struggles of small, independent Western papers that he lived through as a publisher, editor, and writer in Colorado and Kansas). His first novel, Mine Work, won the prestigious Western Writers of America Spur Award. A life-long resident of the Colorado mountains, Davidson now splits his time between northwestern Kansas, Baja California Sur, and a house he built single-handedly in the southern Rockies.
