JOSHUA WHEELER HAD HEARD THE STORY—many times—about the cult in La Luz.
His family owned White Sands Ranch in nearby Alamogordo, and his aunt and uncle ran a church on the property that became a refuge for people seeking help.
“One of the cult members, a young woman, escaped and ended up living at my family’s ranch,” he recalls. When Wheeler wrote his 2018 book of memoiristic essays, Acid West, he planned to include the tale. But after his research turned up few public records or newspaper accounts, he decided to pivot and make the story the centerpiece for his first novel, The High Heaven (Graywolf Press), which debuts October 7.
The book focuses on Izzy, a young girl who becomes orphaned in 1967 when the cult she was born into in southern New Mexico clashes with police. A struggling rancher takes her in while he and his family navigate drastically changing political and economic times.
“The ranch was always a mythical place to me,” says Wheeler, who now teaches creative writing at Louisiana State University. He was just three years old when his family sold the ranch after losing much of their grazing rights to White Sands Missile Range. “It made having their cattle operation difficult,” he says.
A seventh-generation New Mexican, Wheeler grew up in Alamogordo and went on to study poetry at New Mexico State University. One of his professors, however, encouraged him to shift his writing pursuits to other genres. “Finally, I started having some success,” says Wheeler, who earned an MFA in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa.
See Joshua Wheeler discuss The High Heaven at Bookworks, in Albuquerque, on October 13, or Collected Works Bookstore, in Santa Fe, on October 14.
Whether in fiction or nonfiction, Wheeler returns to southern New Mexico as a source of inspiration. He’s fascinated by the region’s complex cultural history, unique landscape, and the remarkable contrast between groundbreaking scientific innovation and rural life. Acid West, which landed on several national “best of” lists, examines UFO mania, cowboy masculinity, living near atomic bomb testing, and the search for thousands of Atari video games in the local dump.
For The High Heaven, Wheeler uses the story of the cult as a jumping-off point to explore the intersection of faith and technology as Izzy grows up and tries to find a new spiritual identity and purpose. The book, he points out, is less about being in a cult than it is about the broader struggle to find some sort of belief system, a theme that runs parallel to the history of American space exploration and the desire to achieve something transcendent. “I don’t think people realize how integral southern New Mexico was to getting people on the moon,” he adds. “We couldn’t have gotten to the moon without going through White Sands.”
He ticks off a list of the state’s contributions, ranging from early rocketry testing at White Sands Missile Range to training astronauts to walk on the moon near Las Cruces. “New Mexico just has this history of being a place where really weird innovation—whether it’s technological innovation or spiritual innovation—has occurred,” he says.