Waters, Barbara

views updated

WATERS, Barbara

PERSONAL: Married Frank Waters (a writer; died June 2, 1995). Education: Earned an M.A.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—c/o Frank Waters Foundation, P.O. Box 1127, Taos, NM 87571. Agent—c/o Swallow Press, Ohio University Press, Scott Quadrangle, 1 Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701-2979. E-mail— [email protected].

CAREER: Science teacher, 1959; Frank Waters Foundation, Taos, NM, president of board of directors.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Celebrating the Coyote: A Memoir, Divina (Denver, CO), 1999.

(Editor) Pure Waters: Frank Waters and the Quest for the Cosmic, Swallow Press (Athens, OH), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS: Barbara Waters reflects on the life of her late husband, Frank Waters, in Celebrating the Coyote: A Memoir. Waters, a well-known author and five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize, wrote fiction and nonfiction set in the American Southwest. He and his wife lived near Taos, New Mexico, an area with a natural beauty the author "rhapsodizes" about in Celebrating the Coyote, according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer.

Waters' book honestly exposes her husband's many weaknesses, while it also celebrates his accomplishments. She refers to Frank as "Dr. No" because of his generally negative attitude toward her activities and interests, and her narrative shows him to be "an insensitive womanizer" who generally put his own needs above those of others, according to the Publishers Weekly reviewer. Still, his passion for the Southwest, and for a greater knowledge of healing and unifying forces, dwarfed his failings. Celebrating the Coyote is also Waters's description of her journey through the grief that came after her husband's death, and as such, it is "eloquent and moving," stated Grace Fill in a Booklist review. Frank Waters's intense feeling for the land and the spirituality of the Southwest are spotlighted in Pure Waters: Frank Waters and the Quest for the Cosmic, a collection of his speeches, essays, and editorials, which his wife edited in 2002.