A working writer

TAOS, N.M. — John NICHOLS can't stop writing. He often produces 10, 20, 30 drafts of a book, some more than 1,000 pages long. Nichols saves them all and frequently returns to things he started decades ago. Threads of stories surround the writer like milkweed seeds with their gauzy fibers. His little adobe house in Taos is full of books and other projects. Overflow goes to one of several storage lockers.

Three years ago, a documentary filmmaker named Ariana Cardenas made a short movie about Nichols called "My Beautiful Storage Locker." In it, the author, with his gray ponytail, beatific smile and finely articulated hands, guides us through drawers and shelves filled with 40 years of manuscripts, notes, photographs and letters from everyone he has ever known. There are the directors he has worked with: Redford, Pakula, Costa-Gavras, Ridley Scott and many others. Editors, politicians, other writers, old girlfriends and ex-wives. It's been quite a life.

Now, as a high-desert wind comes through the kitchen door of his home and blows a pile of white pages across the floor, the writer -- normally placid and self-contained, who cares nothing for earthly possessions and spends most of his waking hours in the mountains around Taos or at his desk -- leaps to his feet, waves his arms and chases after them.

Nichols' 11th novel, "The Empanada Brotherhood," has survived many drafts and now weighs in at a tightly honed 208 pages that display the author's gift for language and his ear for dialogue. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about it is that Nichols, whose outspoken progressive politics have been at center stage in almost every one of his books -- "All writers are morally obligated to overthrow the capitalist system and to end racism and chauvinism and sexism on the globe," he told the Rocky Mountain News in 2006. "And stop preemptive wars and basically hold the feet of their country's leaders to the flame" -- has produced a completely apolitical work.

Of course, after struggling with his last novel, "The Voice of the Butterfly" -- a rollicking tale of environmental activism -- Nichols may have needed a break from politics. He rediscovered a draft of "The Empanada Brotherhood," which is set in Greenwich Village in the late 1960s (Nichols lived there during that era), in one of his lockers and worked on it for nearly a decade before sending it to his editor, Jay Schaeffer, at Chronicle Books.