Into Another Time

Margaret Randall describes her long love affair with the Grand Canyon as dating to the summer of 1947 when, lying about her age, her father took her down its trails by mule. Since then, she has returned more than a hundred times to explore its rims, hiking trails, river and side canyons. The poems that make up Into Another Time: Grand Canyon Reflections draw on these experiences as well as on additional research and countless conversations with other canyon lovers. The book's main section emerged from a river trip in 1997. The cover painting and interior line drawings, by Albuquerque painter and public school teacher Barbara Byers, were made on site on the same trip. Margaret and Barbara have been partners for seventeen years.

Born in New York in 1936, Randall grew up in New Mexico before living for twenty-three years in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua. In Mexico she co-founded and edited El corno emplumado/The Plumed Horn, a vanguard bilingual literary journal of the 1960s. In Cuba and Nicaragua she worked with other artists to contribute to social change. Randall returned to the U.S. in 1984, only to face attacks on her writing that led to an effort to deport her under the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act. After a five-year battle, joined by many of the nation's outstanding artists, writers, unionists, religious leaders, and others, she won her case in 1989.