Michele Potter is a writer & photographer living in Taos, New Mexico. In addition to her creative work, she teaches skiing at Taos Ski Valley and writing & American studies at the UNM Taos campus. Her doctorate explores the interrelationship between nature and culture and inspires her to always find the story in everything. You can find her work published by Enchantment Magazine, High Country & Snow Country Magazines, the Taos News, Trend Magazine, among others.
Has it been half a century since I first laid eyes on a mountain, and everything changed? The beautiful flat prairies and luminous skies of the Dakotas formed my family’s stoic outlook, but our migration to Oregon birthed my true self as a writer, a photographer, and a member of a global mountain community. Migrations matter, perhaps now more than ever. My Potter grandmother passed on the stories her horse, Dan, from the Dakota prairies. My Norwegian grandma was “just an outdoor girl.” My father’s passion for BMW motorcycles was legendary. He won my mother’s hand by writing her 900 letters during World War II. My mother saved the stories and passed them on, something we are called upon to do as we become elders. I hope to pass it on, too, to the next generation. My little granddaughter meets me to play and tell stories in our family treehouse.
My current project, a historical memoir, has encouraged me to explore the ways that history , place, and people shape our lives. As an accidental historian and traveler, I have been writing, ever since, at age 11, I was the Katherine Graham of our neighborhood, founder and editor of the Lloyd Street News.
Eventually, I became a Public Affairs Officer in Germany, a production editor at CitySports in San Francisco, a university writing and American studies professor both in New Jersey and New Mexico. My work has appeared in literary anthologies, magazines and newspapers. I publish monthly on Substack (@oneLmichele) about the way our lives are woven into This World of Ours Today (as my students like to call it). I look for beauty and meaning in the midst of crazy times. Oh, and fun, too.
I got stuck in Taos in 1996. I don’t think I’ll ever get out. And yes, I still teach skiing, because it’s in my DNA and because it’s too fun not to. Play is a tool for finding meaning in life, and that at its core fights the fear narrative that each generation finds itself in. Still, fear is the soul’s work; we can all do with a little alchemy.
There is a practical stoicism that helps us through until grace finds us again.
