Note: For the past several months, I’ve been working on a new project called Almost — a modern Western fiction short story set in the deserts and mountains of West Texas and Southern New Mexico.

Recently, Elena Marquez of the High Desert Review traveled to my Cloudcroft cabin, La Casa de Luz, to discuss the Almost project, the modern Southwest, solitude, and why contemporary Western fiction probably has more RVs and motel parking lots than barns and horses now.

I’ll be releasing the interview in two parts over the coming weeks.

The interview is set to be released 10 June 2026.

HIGH DESERT REVIEW

Western Letters • Border Fiction • Southwestern Noir

Spring 2026

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“Smoke on the Jornada”

Western Author Capers Barr talks about his next project, Almost, the Modern West, and Men Who Stay ‘Switched On’ Too Long

Interview by Elena Marquez

The two-hour drive from Las Cruces into the Sacramento Mountains felt almost cinematic if not dramatic in its transition, the desert basin giving way to thick pine forests, dry heat slowly surrendering to cool mountain air as the Highway 82 climbed toward Cloudcroft through layers of stone, canyons, a tunnel, and the iconic Mexican Canyon Trestle overlook.

The temperature had dropped almost twenty degrees since leaving Las Cruces. Pine trees moved softly in the wind somewhere below the overlook while the enormous Tularosa Basin opened up westward beyond the mountains in faded layers of desert light and distance. Far below, to the left, the White Sands glowed faintly.

For the first time during the drive, the scale of the landscape finally registered. I stood there a little longer than I meant to, letting the thin cold air clear out the noise I’d carried up from the city — deadlines, emails, the constant pressure.

Whatever R. Capers Barr was writing about in these mountains, it clearly wasn’t going to be small. And neither, I reminded myself, was this interview.

A few minutes later I got back into the car and continued climbing toward the Village of Cloudcroft where Barr’s assistant, Maria, had instructed me to meet her at the Black Bear Coffee Shop. By then I had already realized that part of my curiosity about Barr had very little to do with literary reputation alone.

People willing to discuss him described Barr as talented, creative, reclusive, occasionally combative, and completely uninterested in self-promotion.

Barr, who rarely gave interviews and appeared vaguely uncomfortable with the entire idea from the beginning, finally agreed to meet with me after nearly three months, several unanswered text messages, and two postponed Zoom calls he blamed on “weather and golfing noise.”

He proposed what he described simply as “a working lunch” at his cabin outside Cloudcroft and asked that I coordinate the details through his assistant, Maria.

I met Maria around 11 AM at the Black Bear Coffee Shop. The thin mountain air carried a damp chill that seemed to settle directly into my hands and feet.

I looked down at my bare ankles and open leather flats and laughed.

“I should’ve brought socks.”

Maria glanced down briefly before smiling into her coffee cup.

“Actually,” she said, “that will probably work in your favor.”

I remember looking at her, confused.

“Capers notices things like that. Bare feet. Pedicures.” She shrugged casually. “He tends to relax more.”

I assumed she was joking.

She wasn’t.

Maria lifted the cuff of her jeans slightly as we stood in line, revealing bare feet despite the cold. Her toes were neatly pedicured with a thin silver toe ring.

“I stopped bothering with them when I go over to his cabin,” she said. “At some point he’ll just ask you to take them off anyway.”

“Why?”

She smiled again.

“Because it’s La Casa de Luz,” she said. “Yes, he named his cabin, and he likes people to be comfortable.”

Her long dark hair was pulled back casually, and she carried herself with the quiet confidence of somebody accustomed to handling difficult personalities and complicated situations without raising her voice. Barr was reputed to be a bit of a bear socially.

Medium height, athletic, and quietly self-assured, Maria mentioned during the drive that she had once played volleyball at New Mexico State. She arrived precisely on time in a dusty hunter-green Land Rover Defender and spent most of the drive navigating mountain roads with one manicured hand while drinking coffee with the other.

Barr’s cabin sits about 9800 feet high in the Sacramento Mountains outside Cloudcroft, hidden among a mix of tall pines and Douglas Firs, connected by a winding gravel road.

Barr looked less like the reclusive literary figure I had expected and more like somebody who had accidentally wandered out of an REI tactical catalog and into a border noir novel.

Despite his reputation for avoiding publicity and generally keeping people at arm’s length, Barr was waiting on the porch steps of the cabin when we arrived, coffee cup in hand beneath the heavy timber overhang.

Lean and athletic, with shoulder-length blond hair, a light beard, and the kind of weathered tan that only comes from years spent outdoors, he carried himself with the relaxed confidence of somebody long accustomed to operational environments and absolutely uninterested in impressing anybody anymore.

He wore faded charcoal hiking shorts, worn hiking boots, Vermont Darn Tough socks, and an earth-tone Organ Mountain Outfitter t-shirt with an American Flag on the right sleeve accentuating his lean frame.

Barr stepped aside and held the front door open as we entered the cabin.

Before I made it more than a few steps inside, he glanced down toward my shoes almost apologetically.

“You can leave those there if you want,” he said. “Nobody really wears shoes in the house.”

Maria looked over at me from the kitchen with the expression of somebody enjoying being proven right.

Her eyes seemed to say, “Told you.”

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