A love letter: Stavo Mustang Craft takes readers on a journey with 'Auto Antenna'

Stavo Mustang Craft is all about organization.

The Santa Fe-based artist and writer put everything in place for six months so he could write “Auto Antenna: An Enchanted Guide to Santa Fe & Vague Blueprint to the Cosmos.”

“I worked on it for two years,” Craft says. “It took one year to write it. Organization for six months and another six months to edit.”

Craft will have a book event at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 21, at Iconik Red, 1366 Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe.

Craft says the book received a publishing offer within 15 days of the very first proposal sent, hooking a press with a 50-year track record in Santa Fe.

This prompted an independent grassroots publishing campaign not born of a lack of prospects, but an act of entrepreneurial prerogative.

“Auto Antenna” is a pulp fiction memoir about art, personhood and an insider’s guide to Santa Fe, all as an enchanting backdrop for an unusually alluring and free-spirited adventurer on the verge of her sixth decade; a mysterious transplant to Santa Fe, who it turns out may not be from this world at all.

She drives a turquoise 1959 Ford Galaxie, exploring the unique mixture of “art, magic, and spirituality as a lifestyle” that has allowed a small town in the desert to become the third-largest art market in the country.

The atmospheric highs of the City Different delivers fertile terrain for anyone interested in exploring artistic revelry, spiritual seeking and the process of becoming a person.

A therapist for artists, Cybilline provides keen psychological insight and hilarity into issues of self-construction and perceived success, while identifying the uses of imagination; not just for the purpose of art making, but how those same elements play a role in determining personal identity, and even destiny.

Craft says the book offers a toolkit for creating a life of sustaining pleasures, purpose and invention.

And at all times remaining a love letter to Santa Fe.

“It really was a whole lifetime to write it,” Craft says. “It’s an actual memoir and spiritual experiences.”

Craft says it is a book particularly of interest and relevance to local readership, because Santa Fe – with its restaurants, its legends, its sights and sensibilities — isn’t just the backdrop, but is itself a main character.

“Not to mention that, for 100 years, the city has constructed and marketed an idea of the ‘Santa Fe artistic persona’ with a vision of the eccentric artist living in the American Southwest with an independent spirit and knack for weaving their dreams into reality,” Craft says. “ ‘Auto Antenna’ is a companion piece to that living mythology, as being far more than a marketing scheme to support what’s long been the central economic engine of this town: well-spent tourist dollars. But an abiding, precious and present reality for a large portion of its inhabitants.”