Courtesy Unglebah Dávila-Shivers
Ramona Emerson, apparently, never sits down. The Albuquerque author and filmmaker currently is working on at least four film projects with her husband and filmmaking partner Kelly Byars (Reel Indian Pictures) whilst riding a wave of success following her first two novels, Shutter and Exposure, towards a date with the main stage of the Santa Fe International Literary Festival this weekend.
The 1997 University of New Mexico graduate aimed for a career in Hollywood after earning her Media Arts degree. When the job search proved challenging, Emerson took a job with an Albuquerque videography firm that documented crime scenes for the Albuquerque Police Department. For the next 16 years, she engaged in de facto mico-documentary work that proved ideal for logging reps crafting narratives—helping solve crimes and settle insurance claims along the way.
In between crime scenes, Emerson made award-winning films and documentaries, earning an Emmy nomination, a Sundance Native Lab Fellowship, a Time-Warner Storyteller Fellowship, a Tribeca All-Access Grant, and a WGBH Producer Fellowship. Her career as an author took off after earning an Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing (Fiction) in 2015 from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She counts as mentors Eden Robinson, Sherman Alexie, Marie Helene Bertino, Manuel Gonzalez, Deborah Magpie Erling and Linda Hogan. She’s been an instructor at IAIA and UNM. Emerson and her husband also conduct filmmaking camps for Native youth at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe.
When Emerson started working on her MFA at the IAIA, she had in mind a memoir about growing up with her grandmother on the Navajo Nation. Mentors recognized something Emerson hadn’t, steering her toward fiction. The result was Shutter (Soho Crime, 2022), a thriller that follows crime scene investigator Rita Todacheene on a case set in Albuquerque.
Courtesy Penguin Random House
That first novel was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award. Last October, Exposure, the second in a planned trilogy hit bookshelves real and virtual under the Penguin Random House banner. The main character, crime scene investigator Rita Todacheene, now stands to be the star of a series.
Now, Emerson, who never dreamt of being an author, finds herself parachuting into modern literature’s royalty as a featured author in the Santa Fe International Literary Festival. Tickets still remain available for her conversation with Jamie Figueroa on the main stage of the Santa Fe Community Center on Saturday afternoon at 2:30.
A tight schedule is nothing new to the Dine’ writer, who was born and raised in Tohatchi. She fit in a phone interview with SFR riding with her husband, who is also a sculptor, to Abiquiu to make repairs on a sculpture installation. The interview has been edited for concision.
First things first: Is there anybody that you're looking forward to meeting?
I saw that Percival Everett is gonna be there. Wow, it would be cool to meet him.
Film is your first love, what initially drew you to it over writing?
What I remember most about being a young girl watching film was seeing the cultural inaccuracies. I see The Searchers and see an obvious white guy playing a Navajo sitting in front of Monument Valley, and I already knew that there was something wrong with it. I was also very aware that nobody that looked like me was on the screen. I wanted to see my own people on screen. I wanted to be able to relate and to interact with somebody on the screen that looked like me and that had the same experiences as me. That just didn't exist. There were maybe one or two native filmmakers when I was at film school that I could reference as a goal, but now there's a ton of Native filmmakers and TV writers—there's so much more of a broad spectrum of storytellers.
That wasn’t the case when I was starting out. Back then, I knew if I was going to see myself or my stories with my people on screen, I was probably going to have to do it myself. I'm telling you all that because I think fiction, right now, is in the very same state—the term ‘Navajo fiction writer” doesn’t really exist. That’s the result of a lot of past cultural ramifications dictated by a lot of antiquated or skewed cultural beliefs. So only now are we seeing Navajo fiction writers starting to come into their own, writing short story collections and embracing fiction as a narrative path. We've. always had a very strong tradition of poets and memoirs in Navajo culture, and so it's nice to see these young writers coming up, writing really groundbreaking material—talking about things that we're not supposed to talk about and dealing with issues that have been swept under the rug because of superstitions or because of our systems. I think we're only now being allowed to explore and to expand on those themes.
Tell me about getting your MFA and how that affected your career.
I have to say that I would have never believed that I would be talking to you right now as a novelist. I never wanted to be a writer. It was one of my very first mentors, Joan Teweksbury, who really helped me. Before I enrolled in the MFA program, I was in a writing workshop for about six months at Los Luceros. Joan is the one who wrote my recommendation letter for the MFA. I always like to say I was tricked into it. I was going to study screenwriting for my MFA, but she told me, ‘No, you need to study fiction because you just don't realize that you are already writing it.’ So I followed her advice and got in on fiction, and I started writing this book.
In those two years at my MFA program, all of my mentors had to teach me how to write fiction. I mean, I didn't get my bachelor's in English or creative writing. So they had to teach me how to write a narrative from the ground up. I knew how to write little short pieces or flash fiction, but I never knew about narrative structures. How does a mystery work? How does a horror story work? I had to figure out how to build tension, how to introduce characters—it was a lot of hard work.
Eden Robinson, a writer from British Columbia, was my mentor for two semesters when I first started, and I really felt like she had the biggest impact on me as a writer. She basically handheld me through the process of writing the early stages of the book. The very first feedback I got from her was just full of red. I was so terrified when I saw my manuscript there just covered in red. And she was like, ‘Well, Ramona, it’s really great. The bones are there, you just need to figure out some stuff, and you'll figure it out—just keep writing. She kept telling me, ‘Just keep writing,’ and I did.
I learned so much from them in the process of writing the first book. After I left the MFA program and graduated, I stayed on and worked and Pat Houston, who also had a huge, huge impact on me, brought me into Writing by Writers, which is one of her programs that she runs nationally and internationally. She brought me in for two weeks to work on my draft, which really helped me. When I was there at Writing by Writers, one of the authors in my writing workshop sent my class manuscript to her publisher, which happened to be Soho Press. And she told them, ‘You should really look at this girl's writing. Within maybe two weeks, I was talking to somebody from Soho about the book.
You worked in forensics for a long time, which became the foundation of your novels, right?
Right out of film school, I couldn't find a job on a film set, but I called around town looking for video production work, and the first guy that hired me ran a forensic video photography firm. I ended up working for him for 16 years. With forensics, everybody thinks about crime scenes, but it's not always crime scenes. A lot of things happen: you collect evidence, you do a lot of scientific studies and recreations—you're building cases for people. It's dealing with people in very difficult situations and you sometimes build an emotional attachment when you work for these people.
I would do day-in-the-life documentaries with people who were injured or who had lost a family member, so I would spend a significant amount of time with people to see the impact an injury or a loss had on them and their family, or we needed to see maybe how a person lived a certain way but their circumstance had been changed. It was my job to make sure that a lot of these people would get settlements before they had to go to court, because they knew if they got my documentary in front of a jury, that they would be awarded a lot of money. So it was my job to help them get a settlement, which included things like sitting in depositions for hours on end, or studying traffic patterns, standing on the side of the road assessing skid marks, looking at photographs, scrapes on seat belts after an accident, taking pictures of the aftermath— all those kinds of things.
Some of it was horrible, but I never worked for the police department. They would come to us, and I would enhance video or we'd go out to the scenes when they needed us to. It was very interesting. I think what it did is it trained me very well for noticing details, combing a scene to make sure I covered everything. I feel like when you look at it that way, and then you write about it in that very same way, it's very easy to describe what you would be putting in a report. It's a strange place to learn (how to craft narrative), because I didn't really learn that in film school.
Courtesy Penguin Random House
Who is Rita Todacheene? Obviously, you two have a lot in common, but who else inspired her into existence?
I'm happy that I found a lot of connection with Rita, and a lot of people can relate to her. They like her. It's good to have a good female, native character that's running the show, you know? And that was always my dream, right? As a little girl watching bad Westerns on TV, I'm like, ‘One day there's gonna be a kick-ass lady on this TV, and she's gonna be Dine’, and she's gonna be from my community, and she's gonna be awesome.
There's a lot of my work stuff and experiences in the book. My husband and I went to CSI school and APD and a lot of the stuff that we learned there is in the book. Rita's first day at work was my first day at work, getting a photograph I wasn't supposed to be doing. Of course, we both grew up in Tohatchie with a grandma who was a huge influence on our lives, and I think Tohatchie is very well represented—I describe it exactly how it is. There are characters in there that are based on real people that I did grow up with. There really was a lady named Miss Busy who lived across the street, and she really had a dog named George Bush. And then there’s stuff that’s completely made up—that's the fun part about fiction, you can blend real experiences with fictionalized ones like talking to the dead.
There's some paranormal stuff going on in these books. Have you had paranormal experiences?
Strangely, not until after the book, and it was for real! I am not joking. I had never really had a personal experience, but about a year and a half after I had written the book—it hadn't even been published yet—I was doing a summer workshop at IAIA. We were in one of the computer labs getting them set up. There were two other teachers in there, and I heard a rustling behind me. We turned around and watched my coffee mug slide all the way down this really long conference table on its own. I remember hitting one of the other teachers in the arm, and they’re like,’I'm watching it. ‘I'm watching it.’ It freaked me out. It really did. I've never seen anything like it.
What can you tell us about No. 3?
I am writing the third book now, it’s called Dark Room and it should be out next year. A lot of people are trying to convince me to do a fourth, and we'll see about that. Rita is a really good character, and I almost killed her at the end of the first, but all my mentors talked me out of it. She’s still got some mysteries to solve.
Have you got the screenplays written?
Yeah, one of these days. Shutter was optioned for a bit, and they did write a pilot for it, and then they decided not to pick it up. But that's how the film industry is, especially right now, everything is just really not in a good space.
Have you and your husband got anything you're working you want to talk about?
Absolutely. We ‘re always working on something. So my husband right now is directing a documentary called Three Generations, and it's about a family in Taos Pueblo he’s been filming for about five years. We're hoping to get the post production done on that this year and get it into the Santa Fe International Film Festival this fall.
We're also working on a documentary called Crossing The Lines. It's about border town violence in communities surrounding the Navajo Nation. I have been making that documentary for almost 10 years now, and I need to finish it this year.
We're also working on a documentary called Through Her Lens, about a Chicana photographer and civil rights advocate from the 1960s named Maria Varela. And, of course, we've got a couple more in pre-production. My husband's working on a doc about Somers Randolph, who's a master sculptor there in Santa Fe.
Santa Fe International Literary Festival
May 16–18, 2025
Santa Fe Community Convention Center, 201 W. Marcy Street, Santa Fe, NM
The Santa Fe International Literary Festival 2025 takes place at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center, where three days of author appearances, panels, and public programs are planned. The venue’s central location near the Santa Fe Plaza gives attendees easy access to local bookstores, shops, galleries, and open-air gathering spaces throughout downtown.
Featured Authors and Speakers
The Santa Fe International Literary Festival presents voices across fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, highlighting acclaimed writers alongside emerging authors in dialogue.
Tickets are still available for insights from remarkable voices:
Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographical author (Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, and Lou Gehrig).
National Book Award finalist and acclaimed Whiskey Tender author, Deborah Jackson Taffa, converses with Hampton Sides.
Hispanic experience writer, Maria Arana, award-winning author of LatinoLand,
Pulitzer Prize-winner Cristina Rivera Garza, and The Iliac Crest and The Taiga Syndrome, plus the memoir Liliana’s Invincible Summer, in conversation with award-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa
Novelist and Screenwriter, Gabrielle Zevin author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
