Caroline Starr Rose

picture book and middle-grade author

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Leaving Your Mark

10 Comments

Just a fifteen-minute drive from my house is the Petroglyph National Monument, a jumble of lava rocks with thousands of carvings left by the ancestors of the Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache people.
I love searching for certain pictures, trying to find ones I’ve seen before, hunting for new shapes, animals, faces.
Some are mysterious, like these fellows with the square hats (most likely depictions of Pueblo gods).
Some are everyday.
I’m always struck how these images, estimated to be between 300 and 700 years old, are still around, and I can’t help but make the connection to the writing life. 

We write to say something, to create a world bigger than ourselves, to tell stories that will be heard by people we’ll never know. Maybe some of those words will outlast us and speak to new generations, etching marks on lives like pictures in stone.

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Filed Under: home, the writing life

Comments

  1. Natalie Aguirre says

    May 9, 2011 at 11:33 am

    Wow! That must be inspiring to live so close to something so amazing and so old. Thanks for sharing it.

    Reply
  2. Nikki says

    May 9, 2011 at 11:47 am

    Hey, I went there last summer on the Family Road Trip!So cool,my boys loved it.
    I agree with why we write. When my stepdad died and we cleaned out his office, pretty much all we decided to keep were the books he’d authored.
    Well, those and the collection of gag gifts and joke books. 😉

    Reply
  3. Anna Staniszewski says

    May 9, 2011 at 1:05 pm

    Wow, those are amazing. I love being reminded of how it’s human nature to want to hear and tell and draw stories.

    Reply
  4. Katie Ganshert says

    May 9, 2011 at 4:20 pm

    Those pictures are so incredibly cool!

    Reply
  5. Faith E. Hough says

    May 9, 2011 at 6:00 pm

    That is so neat! I guess we humans never could avoid telling stories.

    Reply
  6. The Pen and Ink Blog says

    May 9, 2011 at 8:20 pm

    I visited the Cahokia Indian Mounds this weekend. http://cahokiamounds.org/
    That civilization was 700-800AD and there is so much information at the site and my recurring thought was “How do we know this? Who interpreted all the evidence of their lives and came up with such clear pictures of daily living?
    But to an extent, that is what w do as authors. We excavate our books.

    Reply
  7. A.L. Sonnichsen says

    May 9, 2011 at 8:31 pm

    Caroline, I went there when I was on a business trip to NM a loong time ago. It was so cool to see!

    Amy

    Reply
  8. Joanne Fritz says

    May 9, 2011 at 11:49 pm

    Someday I’m going to visit cool sites like this myself. In the meantime, thanks for the photos and the profound thoughts.

    Reply
  9. T.B. says

    May 10, 2011 at 4:50 am

    Thanks so much for stopping by my blog!

    Wow, those lava rocks are amazing! My family loves to go on trips and explore, so this would be a really fun and interesting place to visit. I can’t believe those markings have been around for hundreds of years!

    Reply
  10. Susan Kaye Quinn says

    May 10, 2011 at 1:09 pm

    Oh, wouldn’t that be nice? To have our words survive us? It is amazing how much (and how little) human beings have changed over the centuries.

    Reply

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