The Geology of Secrets
THE GEOLOGY OF SECRETS is a family drama set in the American Southwest which follows a lonely man’s journey from abandonment to a heart-opening awakening in a land haunted by its own complexities and mystery. Don Corely, a stoic, solitary man, devotes himself to his family’s meadowland near northern New Mexico’s wild mountain foothills seeking solace from the troubling questions surrounding his mother’s mysterious death when he was a kid. So caught in the past, he is blind to the land’s well-being as a warming climate threatens until a stranger who claims ancestral ties to the land, appears unleashing family secrets and forcing him to confront a drying, fading meadow. As they toil there one summer, he tangles with matters of the heart and the trials of how to keep the meadowland’s past alive while ensuring its future.
On Sale Jan 13, 2027
Author photo by Anne Staveley
About Debra
Debra Hughes is the author of the debut novel The Geology of Secrets, a 2025 finalist for the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence and is the first book of fiction in the University of Georgia Press/Columbus State University Press’s Nature Series, and the nonfiction book Albuquerque in Our Time: 30 Voices, 300 Years (Museum of New Mexico Press). Her short fiction has been anthologized in Tierra: Short Fiction of New Mexico and Walking the Twilight: Women Writers of the Southwest and has appeared in Image Journal, New Letters, Blue Mesa Review, and others. A native of New Mexico, her writing touches on the region’s land and its people, for which she received the International Regional Magazine Silver Award. Her essays and articles have been published in Narrative Magazine, Huffington Post, The Writer’s Harbrace Handbook, New Mexico Magazine, USA Today, and elsewhere. Hughes holds an M.A. in American Literature and Creative Writing from Ohio State University. She is a member of the Author’s Guild, New Mexico Writers, and serves on the advisory board of the Leopold Writing Program. She lives in Santa Fe, NM.
“Debra Hughes writes with elegant restraint and compelling narrative tension, and her knowledge of the Western landscape adds stunning precision and urgency to her storyteller’s art.”
-Melissa Pritchard, author of The Carnation Milk Palace & Flight of the Wild Swan
Books & Publications
