John Nichols signing books at UNM. (© 2008 Photo by Denise Tessier)

John Nichols signing books at UNM. (© 2008 Photo by Denise Tessier)

Lest anyone think John Nichols’ promise to cut back on his prolificacy as a writer was merely to buttress his argument for sustainability this past weekend, think again.

During a talk at the University of New Mexico, the famed Taos author promised “to promote a healthier environment by only writing books the size of my novel ‘An Elegy for September,’ which was barely a hundred pages.”

He then announced: “As a matter of fact I only have two more books to write before I die, thank goodness.”

One is a short memoir about my mother, who died in 1942. That’s why the memoir will be so short. I was only 2 at the time, so I don’t remember anything about her.

The other book will be an important little tract on the sex lives of bighorn sheep rams in the Wheeler Peak Wilderness Area near Taos where I have hiked a lot during the past eight years. I promise that that book will be almost as short and sweet as the expression: “Ram, bam, thank-you-ma’am.”

And after that book, I’m done.

Nichols confirmed after the talk that he was serious about having two books left to write, although he added that the memoir will be about both his parents.

Nichols, who has never purchased a computer, said he writes on a 1966 Compaq that was given to him by a well-meaning friend, and then he only uses it as a word processor. He stubbornly has resisted the technological age, has no e-mail and goes to the local library to use the Internet.

While he has published 19 books, he said that over a “lifetime of inexhaustible typing” he has actually written about 80 or 100 books, each of which went through “anywhere from 10 to 50 drafts.”

The result is a mass of archives that he called — somewhat facetiously — a poignant lesson of his own non-sustainable attitude.

You could liken my literary manuscript output and my prolific correspondence since kindergarten to early cotton barons in the American South, who planted 5,000 acres of cotton every year in the same place until the land was exhausted, and then they simply moved on to the next 5,000 acres and ran them into the ground and ruined them by overproduction and no crop rotation, believing that the earth was inexhaustible.

Myself, I have already apologized to God and Al Gore (though not to Paul Bunyan) for all the trees I have cut down since I first began writing short stories at the age of 11.

He joked that the University of New Mexico, which, through its Center for Southwest Research has purchased Nichols’ archives, will have to build a separate building to hold it all:

And I can see it now, the John T. Nichols wing of the Zimmerman Library, packed to the ceilings with my plethora of mostly sentimental and embarrassingly sexually-explicit adolescent maunderings created since that immortal day when I first began, in the early 1950s, to imitate — in my writing — Damon Runyon’s gangster slang epics set in New York City during the 1930s and 1940s.

Nichols, who has an honorary doctorate from UNM, added:

Future New Mexico grad students are going to learn that when it comes to the overproduction of useless products, people like John Nichols make Sam Walton seem like a pygmy.

Nichols’ works span five decades, from “The Sterile Cuckoo” of 1965, which was made into a movie by Alan J. Pakula in 1969, to last year’s novel, “The Empanada Brotherhood.”