Alum Kyle Paoletta '16 Publishes Debut Book, 'American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest'
In his first book, American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest (Pantheon), alum Kyle Paoletta ’16, reaches back to the 17th century desert—Albuquerque (where Paoletta grew up), Phoenix, Tucson, El Paso, and Las Vegas. The fact that the desert is an “extreme environment [that] forced people into community and a kind of civilization,” Paoletta said, and is where “the history of civilization begins—ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia,” for example, informs how the desert in the U.S. speaks to the history of American civilization and its pathway forward to tackle water scarcity, multiculturalism, and the land itself. Moving through successive indigenous empires in the region (O’odham, Diné, Tewa, Apache, and Comanche), to the settlement of colonial empires (Spanish, Mexican, and American) Paoletta tracks the history to project the future in this era of climate crisis and mass migration.
Because Paoletta went into journalism and nonfiction from the Fiction concentration, including working as a fact checker for GQ while enrolled as a student, he credits his Columbia education for giving him “the building blocks of character, storytelling, scene setting, imagery, conflict, narrative arc…all that was necessary to make a book that has a lot of history [and] research.” Rather than writing a narrative taking place in the 17th century “that [would] just be a lot of dates and facts,” Paoletta says his Columbia experience helped him develop those different modes of writing. “I need the same skill set to tell a good story regardless of if it happened or is made up.”
Two pieces of advice Paoletta has to give to current and recent MFA students comes from the advice he received while in the program himself: focus on the writing rather than getting an agent; if the writing is mastered, the agent will come, and nothing will come from writing for a writer who doesn’t stay at it. From having to get a day job to freelancing, Paoletta says it took him a long time to get a publishing contract, but he couldn’t have gotten there if he quit.
About the debut book, Associate Professor Rivka Galchen, said that “curiosity and learning run deep as the Vishnu schist, while empathy and understanding extend out to the far horizon. Paoletta’s deep thinking about the American West—across red mesas, scant waters and improbable cities—is as essential as it is companionable.”
Texas politician Beto O’Rourke remarked that “with booming development, stressed natural resources, and a quickly changing climate, Paoletta’s deep research and irrepressible personal passion describes a way forward in tune with what has come before.”
Kyle Paoletta’s reporting and criticism has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, New York Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, n+1, The Believer, The Columbia Journalism Review, The Baffler, High Country News, and Boston. He previously worked at GQ and New York Magazine. He grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.