- Emily Jones will be at Macdonald Book Shop (152 E. Elkhorn Ave., Estes Park) Tuesday, Sept. 2, from 4 to 6 p.m.
- She will be signing copies of her debut novel, “Nahia.”
Emily Jones has combined her considerable academic expertise (she is a professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico), her love of reading and writing, her love of animals and the outdoors, and her love of history and prehistory to create a novel that will delight a wide range of readers.
It’s billed as a “young adult” book, but offers something for all ages. Yes, it has some strong messages for young women — be independent, find your own path, embrace responsibility, thrill to the natural world, and believe in yourself. Good messages for everyone, right?
You could say Jones has lived by these guidelines, too.
“I grew up on the East Coast,” she wrote in an email. “I lived in Philadelphia as a kid and later in southern New England. I was a voracious reader as a child, especially of fiction set in the past … and especially anything set in time periods for which there isn’t much of a historical record.”
Books by Scott O’Dell (“Island of the Blue Dolphins”), Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy, and “The Clan of the Cave Bear” by Jean Auel were all big favorites.
Jones says she still loves books in this genre, though she also reads a lot of speculative fiction of other kinds including fantasy, science fiction, and alternate history.
“In retrospect, I can see this as an early interest in archaeology, but I wasn’t someone who grew up wanting to be an archaeologist. I didn’t make the connection between my interest in the deep past and archaeology until I was an undergraduate at Vassar College, intending to be an English and Drama major, and stumbled into an archaeology class by purest chance. I was lucky enough to find a wonderful mentor, Dr. Anne Pike-Tay, who got me started on my interest in European prehistory. My career as an archaeologist developed from there.”
Jones earned her doctoral degree from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2004 and taught at Diné College (a tribal college on the Navajo Nation) and Utah State University before moving to UNM in 2011.
“Nahia” is about a teenager who lives with a group of semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers on the seacoast. Their lives are endangered by the arrival of an aggressive tribe of agriculturalists who tame the land and build villages. When Nahia warns her people of the threat facing their way of life, she is exiled. She is forced to become the apprentice to the local shaman. Slowly, Nahia discovers her own power.
Jones says moving from academic writing to young adult fiction has been an interesting journey, but in some ways, it was a return to her roots.
“Most people who knew me in my pre-archaeology days, if asked what I was likely to wind up doing as an adult, would have said ‘writer.’ I was not only always reading, but I was also always writing, mostly fiction, at that age.”
Her return to fiction writing was challenging.
“Writing a novel is very different from writing scientific articles, but I have come to see how much it is an integration of many strands of what I do. Writing ‘Nahia’ allowed me to bring together the fiction I love and my work in European prehistory. I also have to say … writing fiction about the past this way was just incredibly fun. I don’t get to let my imagination run quite so wild in my scientific work.
“It was freeing to approach the past from this very different direction,” she added.
But Jones also includes “A Few Notes on Nahia’s World” at the end of the book, which readers will likely find fascinating and helpful. In her nonfiction notes, Jones describes some of the archaeological data used to underpin her fictional story.
“The transition from foraging societies to agricultural ones was undeniably one of the most significant events in human history,” she wrote. “Real people lived through this change, and saw their worlds altered beyond recognition as a result.”
Jones brilliantly captures this change and its human effects in “Nahia.”
Elisabeth Sherwin is a journalist who teaches memoir writing at the Estes Valley Community Center. She holds a master’s in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, worked as a copy editor at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and the San Francisco Examiner, and was a reporter, editor, book reviewer, and copy editor at the Davis (Calif.) Enterprise. She also taught journalism at UC Davis Extension. She lives in Allenspark. Her book reviews and other writings can be found on her website, Printed Matter.