John Nichols and the KiMo Theatre come together in a celebration of New Mexico

John Nichols is still famously known as the author of the 1974 comic novel “The Milagro Beanfield War,” which was made into a film of the same name.

Nichols will be reunited with the movie Wednesday, Sept. 19, at the KiMo Theatre. He’ll introduce a screening of the film and will autograph copies of his new novel, “On Top of Spoon Mountain.”

The 72-year-old author stays busy at his Taos home writing, and writing some more.

“I’ve been working for decades on a long memoir about my mother and father. My mother was French. She died in 1942 when I was only 2. My father lived to be 81. I have an awful lot of information about my mother from letters and articles and journals she kept, and I have many photographs,” he said.

Part of Nichols’ research has involved talking to an archivist at the American Museum of Natural History where his paternal grandfather, a well-known naturalist and ichthyologist and Nichols’ namesake, worked.

“Doing all the research for this work has been a lot of fun, an adventure. I’ve got about 1,500 pages. … I’ll probably wind up with 2,000 pages, then figure how do I structure this. I’m not using my imagination very much,” he said.

“On Top of Spoon Mountain,” he said, took him 12 years “and God knows how many drafts to figure out how to tell the story sentence by sentence. And I had a project of three novellas I’ve worked on and off for another 10 years. I never seem to get it right.”

He’s never had a contract with a publisher until he’s finished a book. “Mostly I just write the books and if anyone is interested and if I’m lucky, I’ll sell them,” Nichols said.

He has 12 novels and eight works of nonfiction. His earlier novels, “The Sterile Cuckoo” and “The Wizard of Loneliness,” were also made into films.

Another book he wants to write is about the high country around the Taos area.

“From 2000 to 2010 I spent a lot of time in the high country — Wheeler Peak Wilderness, the Columbine-Hondo (Wilderness Study) Area, over to Spoon Mountain. I spent a lot of time in the tundra, carried spotting scopes, learned about bighorn sheep, alpine botany, migratory patterns of birds that came through there. I kept enormous field notes. It’s in an area where almost nobody goes,” Nichols said.

The evening before the KiMo event, at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 18, Nichols will give a reading at the Randall Davey Audubon Center, 1800 Upper Canyon Road, Santa Fe.

“I’m going to read an abridged version of a wacky novella I’ve written over the years, never published, first time reading it in public,” he said. “It’s about three guys, fishing companions, on the rio for 20 years.” The reading is to bring attention to Amigos Bravos, a Taos-based environmental organization that’s interested in protecting rivers, especially the Rio Grande, he said.