​Yep, turns out that Quintana Ranch is a real place, home to five generations of Gordon Lucero’s family in the foothills of the Southern Colorado Rockies. It has also been the birthplace of so much creativity! From the early days of the ancestors finding innovative ways to make a living on this remote piece of land to the stories told about those days by all the decedents who have scattered far and wide since then, creativity has been a joy and, in reality, a survival tool.

 

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Gordon has his own brand of creativity, expressed in his mixed-media artwork, an intriguing intermingling of impressionism and abstract styles with not a small amount of street-art influence. No matter the piece he’s working on, though, big or small, it never fails to include the silhouette of his beloved peaks and his ancestors’ found objects as well as those ancestors’ habit of utilizing the materials to hand in order to accomplish any job (cardboard being his preferred working surface).

 

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This place has shaped Annette Meserve’s innate creativity too. She came to the land as a visual artist but through her raising of children here, of taking hikes at sunset, of making the funky and dear old buildings home, and listening to the ghosts tell their stories, she began painting with words instead.

 

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The deep sense of stewardship, with which each generation has walked these pastures, inspired her to begin Quintana Ranch Educational Project. It was through bringing an environmental and health focused science education program to the local elementary schools, that Annette hoped to inspire an awe and a responsibility to protect and maintain our natural spaces, in Southern Colorado and beyond. Even though the Project was not destined to survive, the three years it operated in Huerfano and Las Animas Counties demonstrated to Annette that children (and the adults they would become) have an innate connection to the earth and its processes and they will choose to protect it, and their future along with it wherever and however they can.

 

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Now, nearly four decades on the land has given opportunity and inspiration to speak the ancestors’ stories, to talk about connection, connection with the plants and animals and rocks and wind and sunshine, surely, but also connection between us as people, people who live in our valley as well as the humans that walk the earth… and that’s every human. It’s an inspiration to share what the ancestors taught (albeit through the rather strange lens that is Annette’s imagination) and what we’re still learning each night we choose to lay on the cold ground in the grandmother’s orchard at midnight looking up at the Milky Way and asking for the earth’s healing.    

 

 

 

Toward this end, Quintana Ranch Publishing is pushing into being. With this imprint, we will first be sharing our own writings. Gordon’s mother Anastacia (Anne) Quintana Lucero was a locally famous historian in her time, the keeper of history for all the families here abouts. In the 1970s, she printed a book, ‘Trujillo Creek Early Days” the reprint of which will be Quintana Ranch’s first historical project. We’ll be refreshing the photographs (and adding a few more that we’ve found in old boxes) as well as chiming in with cultural context and new research. 

 

…and rumor has it Gordon, as the last of the valley’s sons who grew up living the old ways, is working on a memoir of his own… stay tuned.

 

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So, for now, Quintana Ranch Publishing will be doing what so many scientists in superhero movies do, we will be experimenting on ourselves. Though the result of such laboratory practices never looks easy or comfortable, maybe we’ll end up on the other side with amazing powers. Whatever the process, as we learn to navigate the publishing and promotional spaces through our own writings, we will be developing strong and sturdy platforms from which we hope to launch authors who come from the rich landscape of Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico but also those from traditions far from here. When we’re certain of our abilities (super human or not) to expertly represent broader works, we’ll open our doors to other creators and artists.

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Annette’s writing has a bit of a different flavor. As a daughter from not-here, Annette has received the old stories through other filters. In an effort to honor but not co-opt a history that is not hers, she has taken the grandmother and grandfather tales and morphed them, combining them with the mythic-style of her family’s ancestors along with a heaping dose of her own weird. Annette writes primarily speculative and supernatural fiction but wanders, from time to time, into the odd (and we do mean odd) description of her experiences of rural life. Quintana Ranch’s first publication was her book of poetry, ‘Life at the Far End: poems considering the unusual’ which was a collection of pieces that did exactly that. 

 

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Since this first adventure in publication, Quintana Ranch Publishing has created a subsidiary imprint, YKnot Press, that will handle specifically speculative fiction including fantasy, sci-fi, horror, supernatural, and all the permutations thereof.  And, yep, YKnot will be part of the laboratory trials. We’re looking forward to representing all you fellow weirdos just as soon as we get our feet under us!

 

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For now, look for Annette’s upcoming book, ‘a peaceful transfer of power and other tales,’ a collection of short stories and poems exploring what it is to be human in a natural world, what it is to be nature in a human world, how we have separated ourselves from our wild brethren, from ourselves; and how we never truly can. Launching March 2026.

 

Close on the heals of a peaceful transfer, will come the simultaneous release of Annette’s twin novel set, The Appearance of Terrible Things, Vols. I & II,’ set to be released Summer of 2026.

 

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Wish us luck! And come along by subscribing to our Newsletter and keeping up with our daily thoughts on our Blog. As we grow, we’ll do our best to stay away from radioactive spiders and avoiding as much gamma radiation as we can.