Politics & Power Quote by Terri Windling

There’s a quiet pivot in Windling’s sentence: from personal career arc (“more recent years”) to a re-mapped sense of place. She’s not claiming expertise or ownership; she’s describing an appetite that’s been sharpened by proximity. The repetition of “folklore” reads almost like a self-check - a way of naming the gravitational pull of story systems without pretending they’re interchangeable. That matters because the Southwest is where myth is never just aesthetic; it’s braided into land rights, tourism economies, spiritual practice, and centuries of cultural extraction.

As an artist, Windling is signaling a shift in source material, but the subtext is about orientation: what happens when you stop treating folklore as a grab bag of motifs and start treating it as a local ecology. “This land” is doing heavy work. It implies that stories aren’t floating abstractions; they are site-specific, shaped by desert light, border histories, migration routes, and the layered sovereignties of Native nations and Hispanic communities. It’s also a phrase that can trigger alarms, because “this land” has been the opening line of appropriation for generations of outsiders.

Her careful, additive phrasing (“and also... and also... now that I live...”) suggests discovery rather than conquest. Still, the quote sits inside a contemporary ethical pressure cooker: fascination is not neutral. For artists, being moved by Indigenous and Hispanic folklore raises immediate questions about permission, collaboration, translation, and who benefits when sacred or communal narratives enter the marketplace. Windling’s line captures that tension - the genuine magnetism of regional storytelling, and the responsibility that arrives with it.