Happy Colorado Sunday, friends!
Second summer lasted so long that I was a little shocked to see 31 degrees on the thermometer Friday morning. I can’t be the only one.
I also can’t be the only one who folded up office-worthy sweaters during the extended-play pandemic winter and reached back into the cupboard a couple years later and found them in, um, poor condition. I’m loath to throw out expensive clothing, so I quickly made Instagram friends with a community of like-minded folks who have actual skills, and learned about visible mending. The idea is to embellish the holes in your sweater or jeans in a kind of tribute to where the garment has been and where it might go next. My fine wool sweaters, once needed for meetings with politicians and fancy business folk, now are decorated in bold colors and weird shapes. I wear them while walking the dog or planting garlic.
I am not good at this. My stitches are as uneven and chaotic as my handwriting. But the work is mine.
This is perhaps why I’m so attracted to Josie Lobato and her colcha, a form of needlework handed down through the generations in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, which tells the stories of people and places in her own hand. Parker Yamasaki caught up with 88-year-old Lobato as she prepared for a solo exhibition of four decades of her work.
Editor
The Cover Story
Josie Lobato knows how to spin a yarn
When I met Josie Lobato for the first time, she told me that when she was younger, she wanted to write a book. I already knew that, though. She has told lots of reporters that she wanted to write a book. It’s her shorthand way of saying that she is a storyteller, and it’s a crucial event in the narrative she’s woven about her life in colcha embroidery.
Lobato was always interested in the history and folklore of the San Luis Valley where she grew up, but it wasn’t until she started working for the Fort Garland Museum in the 1980s that her dedication to these stories took shape. It was there she learned how to be a historian of place — how to dig through records for interesting anecdotes and colorful characters. Those were the same years she first encountered colcha, the embroidery craft for which she’s now recognized as a National Heritage Fellow.
Rather than write a book, Lobato learned how to enshrine the stories of her youth — some of them true — in cloth and wool yarn. Now her eyesight is going and her hands work more slowly, but, as she told me from the comfort of a wide reclining chair, surrounded by desk lamps and tangles of yarn: “I can thread a needle with my eyes closed.”
I feel really lucky to have met Lobato, to not only view the stories that she’s worked into her fabulous colchas, but to hear her vividly recount each one. Her attention to historic detail means she can recite the exact names and dates of a scene; but her wild imagination and penchant for folklore makes it hard to tell when she’s recollecting an event, and when she’s just spinning a yarn.
For the sake of her art, the distinction doesn’t matter. What matters to her now is that the stories and crafts of the San Luis Valley aren’t lost to history. When I was leaving her home, I told her I was happy that she discovered colcha when she did. “It made me a storyteller,” she said. “Or maybe I always was.”
READ THIS WEEK’S COLORADO SUNDAY FEATURE
Parker Yamasaki | Reporter
The Colorado Lens
Wherever our photojournalists head out and about our beautiful state, there’s always lovely landscape to capture. But it’s the people who make us Colorado. Here’s a sample of the people we saw at the places we went.
Eric Lubbers | CTO & Newsletter Wrangler
Flavor of the Week
When less terrifying is more scary
My MO for Halloween has always been the scarier the better, even if it triggers my anxiety and makes me want to vomit candy corn pumpkins. But last weekend, I realized less is more, especially compared to Terror in the Corn, 13th Floor or Asylum.
Don’t get me wrong. I love those places for what they are: high-octane scare factories that elicit intestine-rattling screams. But there’s something about a lower-key haunt in the middle of nowhere that brings the scary home in a way those bigger venues don’t.
Such is the Haunted Stage Stop in Rollinsville, created by fiddle-playing artist Andy Reiner. He stumbled into haunted house creation during the pandemic (natch), fell in love and hasn’t stopped creating them since. First came the haunted cabins he toured people through in Ferncliff. Then the Spookygrass Haunted House (complete with bluegrass!) at the Gold Hill Inn.
Then Reiner discovered the Stage Stop, which sits at the corner of Colorado 119 and Main Street in Rollinsville, was built in 1868, and, he says, is actually haunted. There’s a ghost that drinks the whiskey shots he leaves out on a regular basis and something that moves heavy furniture around when Reiner is working on scare rooms. And there are the ghosts in all of the stories told by all of the people connected to the Stage Stop who instruct him on how to appease the spirits that have haunted the place for untold decades (see: whiskey).
The connection to and intimacy with the Stage Stop is what makes Reiner’s haunted house so spooky. And that goes back to the idea that authenticity can’t be manufactured. That’s not to say those other haunts in the city are too Disneyfied. But the floors in Reiner’s horror house are truly slanted. And the volunteers who do the scare work have a visceral understanding of what makes the Stage Stop so creepy (including the little girls from Nederland who populate the Doll Room, one of the scariest in the place).
So if you’re sick of sharing urban haunted houses with the multitudes, point the hearse toward Rollinsville and let the Stage Stop, its ghosts and Reiner’s vision scare you silly.
MORE ABOUT HAUNTED STAGE STOP 1868
Tracy Ross | Reporter
SunLit: Sneak Peek
In “To Die Beautiful,” an incremental evil dusts WWII Amsterdam
EXCERPT: In her novel that might be more of a cautionary tale than we’d like to admit, Buzzy Jackson pulls from the real-life story of Hannie Schaft, one of the rare women who took up arms in the Dutch resistance to the Nazis in World War II. In this excerpt from the Colorado Book Award winner for Historical Fiction, narrator Schaft describes in chilling detail how the persecution of Jews was carried out in small steps.
THE SUNLIT INTERVIEW: Though a trained historian, Jackson realized early on that World War II was one of her blind spots. So she set about soaking up all of the era’s history that she could to ground her novel in realism. Here’s a portion of her Q&A:
SunLit: Tell us about creating this book. What influences and/or experiences informed the project before you sat down to write?
Jackson: I began work on this book (starting with the research), in early 2017, with the intention of writing a nonfiction biography of Hannie Schaft — not a historical novel. But over time I realized that going the fiction route would allow for a better experience for the reader, and it was important to me that this be a book people would actually enjoy reading, as opposed to a bunch of history homework.
READ THE INTERVIEW WITH BUZZY JACKSON
Kevin Simpson | Writer
Sunday Reading List
A curated list of what you may have missed from The Colorado Sun this week.
🌞 There’s been a ton of analysis about the impacts of this year’s general election. A key piece by Brian Eason and Jesse Paul contemplates races for the statehouse, where the balance of power could tip even further to the left. Meanwhile, at least a dozen ballots were stolen, filled out illegally and returned in Mesa County, turning up the vigilance among election officials across the state.
🌞 An outbreak of E. coli linked to Quarter Pounder sandwiches at McDonald’s restaurants in the West killed one person in Mesa County and sickened many others, Olivia Prentzel reports. Sliced onions may be to blame and that led to a recall of the ingredient, which is used in many restaurants, including Illegal Pete’s, which had to toss a lot of food.
🌞 Colorado’s attempt to scuttle the grocery megamerger between Kroger and Albertsons on antitrust grounds wrapped Thursday in Denver. Tamara Chuang listened in to it all and pulled some crucial numbers that help explain the impact of the deal.
🌞 The Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute tribes have the rights to a lot of water in the Colorado River Basin but have never had the means to use it. And they’re willing to forgo accessing it in the future in exchange for compensation under a federally funded conservation program. But as Shannon Mullane reports, the tribes’ plan doesn’t seem eligible.
🌞 In one of the highest profile examples of water-wise landscaping, Denver will rip up the lawn in front of the City and County Building and replace it with a garden of prairie plants, Mike Booth explains. Don’t worry about the historic Civic Center lawns. The “ColoradoScaping” ends at Bannock Street.
🌞Oh hey, The Colorado Sun got a big grant from the American Journalism Project to help with the business side of our operations. And that means we’re hiring a development director and a general manager. Know anyone who loves journalism and has the business chops?
Dana Coffield | Editor
See you here next week, when the clocks have fallen back, giving you a whole extra hour to spend using our Election 2024 Voter Guide to confirm your ballot choices. And it is worth repeating, if you’ve not already mailed your ballot back, you’re cutting it close. Tuesday is the last day you can safely mail in your ballot. After then, you’ll need to return it to a ballot box or voter center in your county. Happy picking!
— Dana & the whole staff of The Sun
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