Go Ahead, Open the Drawer: Meow Wolf and the Quest for Wonder
An immersive art experience awakens my inner snoop, leaving surprise delights for one another, and Edwidge Danticat appears when you least expect her.
Six years ago my family and I visited Santa Fe for spring break. As we parked near the plaza, I saw Edwidge Danticat walking down the sidewalk. Danticat is one of my favorite writers. I might have squealed. My kids asked me who she was, what I was so excited about, and I tried to explain what her writing meant to me. My son, who was nine, still didn’t understand why I was making a fuss, so my daughter explained, “Mom’s like a fan girl for her.”
The kids told me I should say hello, but she was with her family. I pictured myself bursting out of the car and chasing her down the sidewalk to breathlessly express my admiration in front of her kids, who’d surely be skeeved out. No, I decided, not that.
The next day we visited Meow Wolf. Since 2016 when Meow Wolf first opened its permanent exhibition in Santa Fe, the House of Eternal Return, I’d been reading about it. While all the articles all conveyed enthusiasm, I still didn't understand exactly what it was. A modern art museum?
Three years after its opening, it remained so thronged that we waited in line for two and a half hours. Various characters entertained us—a bewigged tuba player, a man in short pants with sock garters and a curled-up mustache who asked nonsense questions nobody could begin to answer.
We finally entered Meow Wolf into an expansive space that looked like twilight on a street dominated by a large house. You could play a game by finding clues, so we entered the house through the front porch and we began to snoop. Looking for clues, we took books off shelves, opened drawers, and explored. We soon learned the clues were surreal and the deeper you delved into the mystery, the more confusing it became. But snooping was delightful.
In the sitting room, there was a fireplace. "Can we go though?" I wondered aloud. A man who'd been there for a while said, "Yes, you can, and you should." We ducked down to crawl through the fireplace and were soon in another land. One passageway led to a forest full of glowing trees with a neon lady posing inside. In a room filled with theatrical fog, laser beams illuminated the particles. The multicolored lasers produced what looked like harp strings that played notes when you plucked them.
Meow Wolf evokes the wonder of stories I loved in childhood. It puts you in the position of the kids in The Chronicles of Narnia who learn if you enter the wardrobe, and push past the hanging coats, you will arrive in a different world. Playing in Meow Wolf made me feel like Mary Lennox, the orphan heroine of The Secret Garden who wanders all the rooms of the mansion until she finds a mysterious, sickly boy, and then together they discover a hidden garden.
At Meow Wolf, you're meant to be nosy, climb inside things, open drawers. Sometimes you'll find nothing—a drawer in one room was filled with socks and undergarments. Other times you'll find unexpected things—the sorts of mysteries you were hoping to discover when you snooped as a child. In the bathroom, if you open the medicine cabinet, you'll see a black portal to another dimension. Look in the toilet. If you're brave, poke your finger into it to discover the water is actually clear resin. Then look deeply in, and find a projection of a tiny man. The black-and-white tiled floor looks unremarkable until you notice there's a bunched ripple in it, a section where the ground below isn't flat.
My favorite moment was opening the refrigerator and crawling through it, into the white light, and emerging in another world. In one room, there's a creature shaped like the tall, hairy, orange monster, Gossamer, in the Bugs Bunny cartoon "Hair-Raising Hare." This one is gray, but like Gossamer, he's shaped like an oversized carrot—wide on top and tapered toward the bottom. He rises out of a plastic structure that looks like it might be a teleportation device, and looms at least twelve feet tall.
When I was about ten, my grandparents lost their farm in Nebraska during the farm crisis of the '80s. They'd lived on two different farms while I was growing up, and my memories of the two farmhouses have mingled and merged. For years I had dreams that I was exploring them—they seemed so large to me when I was a kid. There was an attic room my cousins and I played in once, finding old clothes for dress-up. We reenacted characters from Dickens' A Christmas Tale, dressing my cousin RJ up as Tiny Tim, complete with a crutch. For years after, in dreams I'd wander those corridors, opening doors, finding rooms I'd never seen before, stuffed with fantastic and mysterious objects. This is what Meow Wolf felt like to me.
I love the way Meow Wolf presents art—as a surprise. In a regular museum, you enter a room—quite often a square room, with walls painted white or a neutral, solid color. You expect to encounter mounted paintings and sculptures on little platforms, all of it with explanations and names of the artists on placards near the art. You feel a remove from the art, just in the way it's presented. But in Meow Wolf, you're plunged into the dream of this art. Your defenses are down. You don't experience it as art exactly, but as a marvel—an unexpected discovery. Sometimes if you touch the art, it makes a sound. Sometimes, a monster or alien might wink at you.
You've crawled through a cramped clothes drier, its sides bearing lost socks and other articles regularly eaten by driers affixed in epoxy, and you've arrived at this next place. The floor is spongy and soft with plush sculpture. Sometimes you have to climb, and sometimes you have to crawl. You're always being placed at a different vantage to this art than you would if you were walking upright through a well-lit gallery. You're put in the position of discoverer, but also in a sense you're provided with an artist's mindset. What if I looked at this from a different angle?
And, in the middle of it all, that day in Santa Fe, I practically ran into Edwidge Danticat. This time I did express my admiration for her work. I learned she was in town to receive an award, and my husband chatted with her husband in French. Since then, I have a favorite, perfectly musical sentence I like to recite: “Once in Santa Fe, I encountered Edwidge Danticat at Meow Wolf.”
Meow Wolf has expanded, building new exhibits in Houston and Grape Vine, Texas, Las Vegas, Nevada, and in 2021, it opened a 90,000 square-foot exhibition in Denver called Convergence Station.
When we visited the Denver Meow Wolf a few weeks ago, I had a better understanding of what we would encounter, but when we entered, I was still briefly disoriented. It takes a moment to shake off expectations and schema burned into your brain from years of attending standard museums. There is a help desk, but all the staff can tell you is where to start and how to play the story game. There isn’t a map. So we wandered in and traipsed through the wonders. This time I knew to open doors, press buttons, and crawl through holes.
And this is the spirit I want to carry with me into the new year. Let’s sprinkle a trail of mysterious surprises behind us for other people to find. Let’s snoop, friends. Let’s leave our mind-control devices behind for a while and go seek wonders in the tangible world, which, for all its flaws, is full of them.
The Assorted Whimsy Portion of The Tumbleweed
After I declared 2025 to be the year of the snoop, I began poking around and last week I was already rewarded. I was teaching in the winter residency for the Mile High MFA at Regis University. The undergraduates hadn’t started spring semester yet so campus was mostly empty. I was walking past the empty cafe and I noticed a scattering of unusual objects on a table in the distance.
I decided to investigate, and I discovered this tiny toy assemblage: Happy Dumpster Fire, With Ducks?
Thank you to the architect of this whimsy, whoever you are.
The Book Recommendation Portion of The Tumbleweed
Gentle reader, you didn’t think I was going to tell you that long Edwidge Danticat story without recommending some of her fantastic writing, did you? Pick up any of her books for a treat, including these two I reviewed.
I wrote for the Minneapolis Star Tribune about her 2019 story collection Everything Inside:
“Edwidge Danticat has been laying waste to readers' hearts with her gorgeous prose for 25 years. She published her first novel, "Breath, Eyes, Memory," when she was 25, and Oprah selected it for her book club. Danticat managed the spotlight with grace and has only deepened her art, as evidenced by "Everything Inside," her collection of eight soulful stories about Haitian immigrants in America and their descendants…We're all terminal cases, Danticat's lush stories suggest, but that doesn't mean that any of us are unworthy of love.”
I wrote for the Rocky Mountain News about her 2004 novel The Dew Breaker:
“This book, like her others, never wavers in placing its attention on individual lives, and as she moves from one character to another you feel she is holding their faces up to you, each of them locking the reader with a gaze too intense to shirk.”
The Happenings & Links Portion of The Tumbleweed
My next four-week Lighthouse class is for nonfiction aficionados: Personal Essays: From the Particular to the Universal. It runs on Mondays from February 3 to February 24 on Zoom, from 6:30-8:30 p.m. If you have ideas for personal essays you want to write, but don’t know how to structure them, get started, or craft them so your personal story will grip readers, this is the class for you!
But that’s not all, friends. I’ll be teaching two more 4-week classes for Lighthouse this spring, both hybrid, so you can join on Zoom or in person at Lighthouse HQ. First it’s Get A Little Closer: Psychological and Emotional Writing for Fiction and Nonfiction, on Mondays, March 31-April 21 (6:30-8:30 p.m.). Next, it’s Seeing the Big Picture: Techniques for Revising Fiction and Nonfiction Books, on Tuesdays, April 29-May 20 (6:30-8:30 p.m.).
On February 22 I get to do one of my favorite things in the world: celebrate the book launch of one of the best writers around, Erika Krouse! Fresh off her Edgar Award win for the amazing Tell Me Everything, Erika will discuss her new collection of kickass short stories, Save Me Stranger, with yours truly. The whole shebang starts at 3:30 p.m. with a happy hour mingler, a reading and talk at 4:15, and a book signing at 5:15. Plus, it’s free for Lighthouse members, so save your pennies for the book that you are going to want to purchase and devour. (Trust me.) Save Me Stranger hits bookstores on January 21.
I’ll be on a panel at the upcoming AWP conference in Los Angeles on Friday, March 28 called “Making the Cut: What Judging Story Collection Contests Taught Us.” Led by Flannery O’Connor Prize editor Lori Ostlund, I’ll be talking about what made story collections stand out to me, alongside my fellow screener judges Toni Ann Johnson, Michael Wang and Hasanthika Sirisena.
Find me on Blue Sky at @jennyshank.bsky.social!
As always, The Tumbleweed welcomes your questions and comments about writing, reading, taco eating, the Denver Nuggets, rabbit wrangling, Deion Sanders, Ralphie the Bison, and baby seals.
Love this! I'll have to visit Meow Wolf in Grapevine, Texas as it's the closest one to me and one of my kids, an art student at UNT, lives in Dallas. Thanks for the lovely newsletter!