Through the Lighthouse Writers Workshop's Book Project, I've completed the third and final draft of my book about the Ross Sisters titled The Contortionists. I'm now in the process of querying literary agents and working toward publication.
Three sisters from West Texas saved their family from the Great
Depression when a chance encounter with acrobatic neighbors sparked an
unexpected career as singing contortionists.
The Ross sisters
quickly traded in their childhoods for roadhouses and rodeo shows. Soon
they were on Broadway and in the movies. At the urging of their mother
Veda--who trained them relentlessly--the girls lied up their ages.
Just
after WWII ended, the Ross Sisters sailed on the Queen Mary to London
to perform in a hit stage show. Free of their mother for the first time,
they each met a fellow performer and married: Betsy Ross to a
schizophrenic and charismatic dancer from America, Vicki Ross to a
lovable French ventriloquist and baby Dixie to an English actor and
comedian.
Dixie would die on her 15th wedding anniversary, and
her sisters would be left to pick up the pieces.
The Ross Sisters fame was short-lived, but bubbled up in the '90s when their act was featured in the film That's Entertainment III, and again in a new century when their contortions made them Youtube sensations.
Writing has become a family affair for prolific East Texas author Joe R. Lansdale.
He's jointly penned fiction with his son Keith, his
daughter Kasey edited the new horror anthology “Impossible Monsters,”
which includes a Lansdale story, and the voice guiding the writer's
latest novel “The Thicket” is his father's.
“It's the way he told stories,” Lansdale said of his father, who was
born in 1909 and was 42 when his son was born. “He had a beautiful
voice. He couldn't read or write, but he was a masterful storyteller.”
“The Thicket” is a western set at the turn of the last century narrated by 16-year-old Jack Parker.
Lansdale said the story came to him with what is the book's first
paragraph: “I didn't suspect the day Grandfather came out and got me and
my sister, Lula, and hauled us off toward the ferry that I'd soon end
up with worse things happening than had already come upon us and that
I'd take up with a gun-shooting dwarf, the son of a slave, and a big
angry hog, let alone find true love and kill someone, but that's exactly
how it was.”
Lansdale doesn't plot his novels and doesn't stick to one genre. He's
known for writing horror, mystery, science fiction, even comic books.
“I always write like the devil's behind me with a whip,” he said.
“I'm going to write because I like it. Then I'm going to write another.”
“The Thicket” has the excitement of Lansdale's pulpier
works, but there's an underlying literary element here that marks the
author as perhaps Texas' finest contemporary writer.
The novel easily draws comparisons to Charles Portis' “True Grit,” given Parker's quest with the help of his mismatched comrades to rescue his sister from bad men.
ut, like a lot of Lansdale's work, Mark Twain lurks.
“Twain is my keystone,” he said. “He reminds me of my people because that's the way they told stories.”
For Lansdale that means a lot of humor, violence and no flinching at tough subjects — particularly racism.
“One of the things I really despise these days in fiction
is political correctness, especially if I'm writing about the past,” he
said. “That's a way of showing you what it was like. People get upset
about certain words used. I don't use those words in my life, but people
did. And for you to think, 'If I just take that word out it'll be OK,'
well, it makes it mean that it never happened, and it did happen. It
disturbed me so much that probably 95 percent of my fiction is affected
by it. I really hate racism because I saw people denied possibilities.”
Lansdale had more Southern gothic in mind a la Flannery O'Connor
than he did Western with “The Thicket.” It's full of crisp and funny
dialogue (“That's the way I talk,” he said) and over-the-top characters
very much in the mold of his father, who could crush an apple in his
hand, bust a belt with his chest and fought at carnivals during the
Great Depression. He also was, at least on the surface, a racist.
“His racist rhetoric was about the worst I'd heard, but
he still treated people the same,” Lansdale said. “My dad was raised in
that environment, so he had that generalization. But when he dealt with
people individually he didn't feel that way. I know a lot of people who
have the right words but not the right actions. He's still my hero in
spite of that flaw. His reality and the way he proceeded with his life
is pretty much how I proceed with mine.”
The outsider is well represented in “The Thicket” by
ex-slave grave digger Eustace, and Shorty, a bounty-hunting dwarf.
Neither is anyone's fool. But there is evil lurking in this finely drawn
work as well.
The San Antonio native's “Nothing to Lose” is a mystery novel set in Beaumont where Sanderson, chair of Lamar University's Department of English
and Modern Languages, has long taught writing. The story collection
“Trashy Behavior” is primarily set in Odessa, where he was a college
instructor for seven years before that.
Sanderson evokes the names of other Texas writers — Tom Pilkington, J. Frank Dobie and Billy Lee Brammer — who saw the state as a borderland with a mindset focused on the “end of things.”
“Within 200 miles in much of any direction you're almost in a
different state,” he said. “The geography changes, the culture even
changes a little.
“Odessa has a Westerness to it, a Southwesterness. People
are laconic and slow-talking. They accept things. In East Texas there's
a sense of irony. Life is tough, and there's a tough, mean God out
there.”
Sanderson's Beaumont is the land of the three P's: pine, petroleum and
Pentecostals, where the claustrophobia of the swampland and the
oppressive heat conspire to push the “Baptists behind gated communities
to avoid sin, while the Pentecostals are not afraid to testify,” he
said.
“There's an old saying that things in West Texas can kill you, but in East Texas they just make you wish you were dead.”
Both books are gritty and real with stories steered by those who are on the margins of society.
In “Nothing to Lose,” Roger Jackson
is a small-time private eye who spends most of his free time at the
Nothing to Lose bar, which is a mangled version of East Texas native Janis Joplin's famous lyric (as written by Kris Kristofferson): “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”
It's a theme that flows through Sanderson's work: The people who are
on the edges of society. He writes in the novel that “we didn't duck
life, as our social and financial betters did, but we were very wary of
it. We knew, eventually, life would just beat us down.”
Sanderson's fictional worlds abound with potential.
“I'm writing about the losers, the ne'er-do-wells, the people who
almost, could of, maybe done it,” he said. “I'm always attracted to
those stories, those people. It's one reason I don't like superheroes. I
don't like people who are all-powerful.”
In “Trashy Behavior,” that includes a prostitute turned
bar owner with a gripping story behind the scar that snakes across her
face. That story and a few others from the book set in the Odessa oil
boom and bust years of the late '70s and early '80s are being reworked
into another novel on the horizon.
In the '60s San Antonio-set story “Bankers,” inspired by his
part-time bank jobs while in high school and later at what was then Southwest Texas State University, Sanderson writes of a teen who is “mostly waiting on my future to find me” but is instead thrust into danger.
“In most of my stories, a character has to confront
something,” he said. The collection's strongest story may well be the
gripping Western “Comancheria,” in which a boy Sanderson describes as
being potentially autistic gets caught among the languages of his
German immigrant family, the Comanches who brutally capture him and the
English-speaking soldiers who save him. Back home in school “not only
did he not trust the Deutsch and American words ... but he distrusted
what the words meant.”
Jim Sanderson
grew up in San Antonio dreaming of escape. Today he's on the short list
of accomplished authors who most effectively evoke the city's essence.
His latest literary mystery, “Dolph's Team,” opens with a
group of middle-aged men drinking beer and telling lies at a South Side
ice house. One of them is murdered in the restroom, and the crew set
out to right the wrong with nothing but a Taser, their reading glasses, a
few beers and a lot of reminiscing about a city constantly evolving.
“There are in fact three San Antonios to me,” said Sanderson, 58, a writing professor at Lamar University
in Beaumont. “The first is the town that I remember. It is a part of
me. It is vivid, even if my memory is faulty — thus, I can remember it
like I want to. The second is the historic San Antonio. I don't mean
just the big incidents of the city, but its growth into what it is
today. The third is the nearly million-population city of today.”
“Dolph's Team,” about a group of aging friends from both sides of the
law investigating the (seemingly) cut-and-dried murder of a friend, is
the fourth Sanderson mystery. He's also an accomplished short story
writer, and many of the characters in the new novel also appear both in
his other mysteries and his most recent story collection “Faded Love.” A
recurring theme is the almosts of life, or, as
writer-turned-bug-exterminator Walter tells the reader: “the importance
of what could have happened.”
“At writers' conferences,” says Sanderson, “we talk about
how the publishing world has changed — or has died. Self-pity and
gallows humor are served at these conferences as desert. So I'm always
reminded that I'm an aging/outsider/loser. But I think that this
disenchantment is a part of growing up. I think that we all feel that
way. I just like to write about characters who really are aging
outsiders who've missed their opportunities.”
His recurring characters give his collective work a view of how lives evolve.
“I'm confirming what I first thought about fiction: It is
the best medium for dealing with time, showing the past and present
working simultaneously,” he said. “So in my stories, no matter how long
they are, I try to show that my characters have a future — in terms of
their hopes, ambitions, loves — and a past, but are stuck in the present
of the story.”
Sanderson cites as a major writing influence the late Three Rivers native James Crumley for his twisting of tried-and-true mystery conventions, and for his sense of place.
San Antonio is indeed a character in “Dolph's Team.” The character Rodney Lee,
a city councilman dreaming of being the city's first black mayor,
epitomizes the ambition of a poor boy from the East Side. Meanwhile,
Dolph, Walter and crew watched Southtown evolve into a trendy spot for
artists. Sanderson's San Antonio clearly evokes his South Side
upbringing.
“There was a mixture of ethnicities, races and income
levels,” he said. “But we were united in feeling that we were outshone
by the North Side. We weren't the cool kids. We didn't have the cool
stuff. We mocked our ethnicities and our backgrounds, but the mocking
was adolescent games. And I think that we came out of that time seeing
those problems as the source of games or humor. Thus we couldn't take
the prejudices that we grew up among seriously.”
Bret Anthony Johnston's
fiction shapes Corpus Christi into a literary character, but he has a
confession: He hates the beach. The sand itches; the salt water clings.
“I never felt the pull that everyone else had,” Johnston
said by phone from New York City, his latest stop on a whirlwind
national tour for “Remember Me Like This,” a deeply human novel that
follows a broken, battered family dealing with the return of a son four
years after his kidnapping in a fictional Corpus Christi suburb.
The beach may get short shrift, but the Sparkling City by the Sea glistens in Johnston's taut prose.
“The longer I'm away from South Texas in general and Corpus Christi
specifically, the more clearly I see potential for stories that can only
happen there,” said Johnston, who was born and raised in the city but
now directs the creative writing program at Harvard University.
Stand on Ocean Drive and look at the water and tourists,
he said. Pivot to the south and you've got soldiers and sailors. Pivot
again and see farmers. One last turn and you see a downtown trying
desperately to reinvent itself.
But most of all it's the weather. The distinct, overpowering heat that
pulls you down. The threat of a distant storm that ever looms.
“I wanted the weather to in some way mirror what the family was going
through,” Johnston said. “They can't escape everything that has
happened to the family in the same way people in Corpus Christi can't
escape the heat.”
The novel drills into the fractures the kidnapping has
created in the family and how they have learned to cope. The mother
volunteers at night to keep watch on an injured dolphin. The father
turns to a lover for distraction. The younger son masters the skateboard
that his brother left behind (and that Johnston in a previous
incarnation rode in a brief professional skateboarding career). When the
missing boy returns, they must cobble together a changed life in the
aftermath of their personal storm.
“You never know when one of these storms is going to hit you,”
Johnston said of the novel's greater metaphor. “When it does, you can
tell a lot about a person by how they handle the storm. Do they put up
plywood on the windows or do they hit the road?”
“That changed my life,” Johnston said. “I left knowing this is what I
want to do — I want to tell stories. That's what I'm still trying to
do.”
He grew up in a household where reading books was the
norm, but had no notion that he could write them. In May, Johnston
returned to Corpus Christi to read in that same author series.
After degrees from Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and Miami University,
Johnston found himself at the famed Iowa Writers Workshop where he
completed stories that would make it into his 2004 debut collection
“Corpus Christi.”
“Remember Me Like This” can trace its seeds to Johnston's
volunteer work decades ago in Corpus Christi with an injured dolphin,
which left him with a mystery. He was told the night shift with the
dolphin was the hardest to fill, yet the shift was always taken. Then
someone brought in a beach ball for the dolphin. Over the years he
pondered who would so strongly desire to work the night shift. Then it
came to him: A mother who had lost her child. The ball belonged to that
child.
“The beach ball was full of her son's breath,” Johnston
said. “She brought it in to save the dolphin since she hadn't saved her
son.”
Six years of writing, frustration, breaks to pen short stories, more writing and rewriting later he had a novel.
“Many people say the book is about being lost; I think it's about
being found,” Johnston said. “We all want to believe the lost will find
their way home.”
While Johnston revels in the creation process, he sees writing as a vocation.
“I find writing incredibly difficult. What makes me come
back is the pleasure of the sentence,” he said. “I don't romanticize
being a writer at all. I think of writing as labor. I don't believe in
muse or inspiration. I believe in going to work. It's the same as if I
worked at the Naval Air Station. I clock in and clock out when the work is done.”
It's not easy being a 21st-century male. The silent, hardworking
breadwinning dad of the past still lurks, but his sons have to find
their way in a new world of open communication and shared
responsibility.
Author Kevin Grauke
examines this change in the 13 stories that make up his tautly written,
thoughtful debut collection, “Shadows of Men,” which recently won the Texas Institute of Letters' Steven Turner Award for best first published book of fiction.
“The definition of masculinity has changed in the last several decades,”
said Grauke, who received a master's degree in creative writing from Texas State University and now teaches at La Salle University
in Philadelphia. “We have households with two incomes, households with
women earning more than men. There's a sharing of domestic duties, of
parenting duties, a flattening of gender roles. That's very good, but it
also creates stress.”
Grauke's men band together to drink beer and lament their low sperm
counts. They grapple for a sense of identity after losing their jobs.
They sometimes live with their mothers.
“It's hard to completely disengage from the myth of the
man and what that means,” Grauke said, “especially in Texas, where there
are those other layers of machismo — ranchers, cowboys. Whether you
have those in your personal family history, it's there in the culture.”
The stories are set in a Texas that reflects Grauke's childhood in
Garland. Arguably the collection's strongest piece is “The New Father,”
in which a stay-at-home dad roams his North Texas subdivision
fantasizing that behind each closed door a mother both admires and lusts
after him. He walks streets named for Texas heroes such as Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie,
but his world would prove alien to those icons. Then a real-life mom
recklessly speeds past his baby carriage and isn't pleased when he calls
her on it. He later plots a clumsy form of revenge, but the minor guilt
twists like a knife inside of him.
“He wants to do something that asserts the role he
relinquished when he wasn't paying attention,” Grauke said. “He has a
desire to be heroic, but there's an impotence that goes along with it.”
In “With the Snow,” a haunting story that channels Richard Ford,
a young man caught up in a world of drugs and desperation attempts to
save a girl who may or may not be in a drug coma, but he instead leaves
her behind.
“There's a continuing notion of wanting to fulfill that mythic
masculinity, that heroism,” Grauke said, “but the opportunities to do
that are limited. He almost does the heroic, but those rescuing moments
are rare. Yet we still desire them.”
Grauke leaned on an older story of masculinity in the suburbs — John Cheever's “The Housebreakers of Shady Hill” — for inspiration when he settled on the theme for his work.
“It seemed to bring the stories together to be something a little larger than they were on their own,” he said.
The author left his native Texas a decade ago, but it
clearly has not left him. He's at work on a collection of linked stories
set in small-town West Texas, the home of his parents.
“I don't think if I stayed in Texas I'd be writing about it,” Grauke
said. “There's certainly a truth to that cliché that you don't know what
you have until you no longer have it. I feel artistically connected to
Texas in a way I never did when I lived there.”
“I think of the difference between them and some coddled students,” said Leche, who now teaches at Austin Community College. “They were so appreciative to have teachers there.”
Leche spent a year teaching in Afghanistan for the University of Maryland,
which has offered college classes in the field for American soldiers
since the Vietnam War. Halfway through the experience she had a light
bulb moment when one student said, “I wish people knew what it's really
like to be a soldier.”
Thus was born “Outside the Wire: American Soldiers' Voices from
Afghanistan,” a book of essays by soldiers and their loved ones who aim
to walk us through the experience from recruitment to horror to honor.
“It struck me that I could help these students to be heard, give them
a chance to connect with the public in a visceral way about what goes
on: the good and bad, the funny and sad,” Leche said. “For a lot of
Americans, the military is an abstraction. Soldiers realize that.”
In other words, we may honor our soldiers, but do we truly understand them and their experiences?
Sgt. First Class Michael Bramlett writes of “The Great Voice,” the public address system that emits a monotone phrase: “The aerial gunnery range is now hot.”
“Do any of us really know what the hell this means?” Bramlett says in
an essay titled “B-Hut Blues.” He knows loud booms will follow while he
looks up with reverence at the 3-by-5-foot American flag on the wall
near photos of his wife and children. Yet his national pride is mixed
with sorrow. He soon learns a mortar hit a couple of B-huts away. He
tries to sleep, but cannot.
“It's beautiful and terrible to wear that uniform,” said
Leche, who when her husband's job took them to Germany in the 1990s
first volunteered to teach in war-torn Bosnia and knew she had found her
calling. “They gain a life — the military is a life — but they risk
losing their lives.”
They also face the losses involved with not being there, like in Sgt. Christopher Williams' piece “My Great Sadness,” which tells of discovering over the phone that his wife had died in her sleep so many miles away.
Perhaps most powerful is Specialist Andrew Stock
of Austin's piece, “The Hate,” a poetic meditation on the moment when a
soldier must pull the trigger. “The tragedy of war is the realization
that it would be all too easy to exterminate everything,” Stock writes.
An anonymous soldier illustrates this in “They Were Just Kids” with
the moment waving children refuse to get out of the way of the Humvee
she is in. The driver doesn't dare stop for fear it's a Taliban trap. “We roll through,” the soldier writes. “Not even a glance back.”
Leche terms it the “humble ambiguity of being human
yourself but having to forget that the enemy is human in order to kill
them. Some soldiers say they want to kill all those (enemies), but what
they really mean is I don't want to be killed by (them).”
That’s what Stephen Harrigan did while writing his latest novel “A Friend of Mr. Lincoln.”
“He had little schooling, he was a great joke teller, and he was
politically ambitious,” Harrigan said of Lincoln. “I think that in his
mind, he emulated Davy Crockett. Both were these backwoods guys who went
into politics. Maybe in his mind he thought he could be that guy.”
Harrigan’s novel follows a young Lincoln finding his
political and social way in 1830s Springfield, Illinois. The future
president is sometimes gawky, inept in the ways of love, but ever
charming and driven.
It’s a time period Harrigan already mined in “The Gates of the Alamo,”
which made the project a little easier to research — he knew the big
issues of the time, the clothes, the speech.
One of those big issues was Texas. Early in the novel, the Alamo falls,
and people in Springfield are alarmed by newspaper reports of the
battle.
Later in the book, Texas’ role in the expansion of slavery comes into
play, as people debate the Texas republic’s admission to the U.S. union and the consequences of that decision — which led to the war with Mexico. Several men in the book fought in that war.
“As a novelist, a lot of my work, including ‘The Gates of
the Alamo’ and ‘Remembering Ben Clayton,’ is centered on San Antonio,”
said Harrigan, who is one of the headline authors at the San Antonio
Book Festival on April 2. “In this novel, given the time frame and the
issues of the day, I wanted to come back to San Antonio, a city that has
had such an magnetic pull on my life.”
While “A Friend of Mr. Lincoln” is fiction, and Crockett isn’t a bona
fide character in the book, his presence is based solidly in fact,
something that could be disconcerting to the longtime Texas Monthly writer, who grew up in Abilene and Corpus Christi, but has called Austin home for many years.
“There’s a sense of a thousand Lincoln scholars looking
over your shoulder,” he said of the three-year writing process for the
book. “My mind was divided between winning their respect and
entertaining the reader. I had to be authentic to history, yet have a
credible story.”
Clay Smith, the Austin-based editor-in-chief of Kirkus
Reviews and literary director of the S.A. book festival, praised
Harrigan’s “bravery” at “taking on another Lincoln book.”
“As a person who receives a lot of books and galleys, the number of
books published about Lincoln is just bizarre,” Smith said. “The beauty
of a novel about young Lincoln is you have this man who is extremely
ambitious, but also very awkward, who doesn’t know what to do with
himself at times. Stephen has captured that young man very accurately.”
Harrigan began thinking about the youthful Lincoln during a cross-country car trip a few years ago with his wife of 40 years, Sue Ellen.
Harrigan was reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” and was struck by a letter Lincoln had written to Mary Owens, a Kentucky girl he courted, if it can be called that, before meeting future wife Mary Todd,
also from Kentucky. (A sample quote from Lincoln: “Nothing would make
me more miserable than to believe you miserable — nothing more happy,
than to know you were so.”)
“In the letter, he just seemed so confused and so
equivocal that I thought there’s something about this guy that we don’t
really know about,” Harrigan related. “I wanted to look beneath the
facade.”
He succeeds by creating the fictional character Cage Weatherby, the book’s title friend, a poet whom Lincoln both respects and confides in. Like Lincoln, Weatherby is also fired by ambition.
“You can’t be president if you’re not ambitious,” Harrigan said.
“It’s the thing that defined Lincoln, that kept him on his path.”
While Weatherby is a fictional character, as is Springfield doctor Ash Merritt, Harrigan weaves real characters into the story such as Lincoln pals Joshua Speed, Ned Baker, John Stuart, John Hardin and Billy Herndon,
as well as real events like the Black Hawk War of 1832. Viewed through
all these characters’ eyes, Harrigan’s Lincoln is both likeable and
perplexing.
“It’s an odd thing to do, to put words into Lincoln’s
mouth,” Harrigan said. “I can’t help myself. I want to get in the time
machine and go back there.”
It’s been said that more books have been published about
Lincoln than anyone except Jesus. So adding another title to that long
list can be a daunting proposition.
“I’ve learned not to be afraid,” Harrigan said. “I keep trying to
break out of my comfort zone. Lincoln’s is a story that’s both familiar
and dangerous. He’s a person everyone in the world has an opinion about.
It could easily go wrong.”
Indeed, while the young Lincoln presented in the novel is
full of charisma, he also shows cruelty to his political enemies,
penning scathing anonymous opinion pieces in local newspapers. He makes
some questionable calls with his friends, too.
One aspect of Lincoln that may surprise many readers is
his attitude about slavery. While the fictional Weatherby leans toward
abolition, Lincoln is stuck in the middle ground of his times.
“He had a strong moral compass,” Harrigan said. “He had
deep-set admirable qualities, but he was not an abolitionist. Slavery
was not the burning issue it would become. It tracks the people of his
time.”
Historian Karl Jacoby was driving near the Texas-Mexico border when he was stopped by the U.S. Border Patrol, the agency charged with keeping Mexicans out of the United States.
He explained, to their dismay, that he was writing a book about a Texan who had tried desperately to cross into Mexico.
In the completed book, “The Strange Career of William
Ellis,” Jacoby has pieced together of the life a former slave who
transformed himself into a wealthy Mexican.
Ellis was born to a mixed-race mother on a cotton
plantation in Victoria one year before slavery ended, but found
transformation in San Antonio, then the hub of commerce between the
United States and Mexico.
“He was born ‘in between’ in multiple ways,” Jacoby said. “There was
this fault line between slavery and freedom and what that might mean.
There was also a fault line between the United States and Mexico.”
Both nations were courting immigrants as business boomed in the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century.
“Victoria was the outer fringe,where the Mexican ranching frontier
and United States cotton culture met,” Jacoby said. “San Antonio was the
hub of transport across the border to Monterrey. Then the trains came
and opened it up, and everything exploded.”
Ellis had a knack for language and soon served as an interpreter while working in the leather and wool trade.
“It’s remarkable — the boldness of what he did,” Jacoby said. “It’s
easy to locate in historical records — he took out a full page ad in the
city directory. He flipped the script. Instead of being a worker in
someone’s store, all of a sudden he was running a large concern and
doing it quite publicly.”
The newly renamed Guillermo Eliseo set up shop in the center of downtown commerce — Military Plaza.
“He wasn’t hiding on the outskirts,” Jacoby said. “He was out in the open.”
That was important to Ellis/Eliseo’s success, said the author, who teaches at Columbia University.
Slaves from Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico had been escaping in large numbers across the border to Mexico.
After being granted their freedom, African-Americans were quickly mired in Jim Crow laws that largely nullified it.
“Ellis was code-shifting,” Jacoby said. “While ‘passing’
is to completely surrender yourself to a new identity, he was
strategically moving back and forth. He would rupture the stereotype of
the African-American and play on the stereotype of the Mexican, so he
could make his way in this world.”
Ellis’ brother-in-law was the only African-American
physician in San Antonio at the time and lived just a few blocks from
Ellis, but in the city directory a C next to the doctor’s name signified
him as “colored.” In a San Antonio that was then a third Tejano, no
such C appeared initially by Ellis/Eliseo’s name.
Ellis kept one foot in his African-American past through heavy involvement in the largely black Republican Party, but it proved his undoing, Jacoby said.
When the dots were finally connected between the freed
slave and the Mexican businessman, Ellis vanished, only to reappear in
New York City as an even more flamboyant Mexican businessman, this time
on Wall Street.
The book plays on the trickster of African-American fiction, Jacoby said.
“The trickster is a character who simultaneously creates
order and disorder,” Jacoby said. “In doing so, the trickster shows you
where the boundaries are. Ellis was able to transgress every boundary
U.S. culture tried to place on him.”
His dual life also reflected the differing views on race in the
United States, where a single drop of African-American blood classified a
person as black, and Mexico, where the mixed race Mestizo was revered,
Jacoby said. Despite its own history of slavery, Mexico disavowed the
concept long before the United States.
“It all underscores how basically fictional race is,” Jacoby said.
The book presents Ellis as a dreamer/schemer whose big plans proved as much fantasy as fact.
Jacoby’s initial interest in Ellis was sparked as a
graduate student when he read of a plan Ellis organized to bring freed
U.S. slaves to Mexico as sharecroppers. The plan eventually failed.
Ellis did have some success with controlling water companies in New
York, but his far-flung adventures also included business failures, near
misses and intrigue. His early trade negotiations with Ethiopia even
brought him under suspicion of a murder that Jacoby gives little
credence.
“You could never have made this story up,” Jacoby said of
Ellis’s life. “What I love about history is its capacity to surprise
me. When you can grasp the unexpected, it makes you reconsider your
conceptions of the past.”
Joe O'Connell, For the Express-News March 21, 2014
Rolondo Hinojosa-Smith. Photo by Joe O'Connell
AUSTIN — Rolando Hinojosa-Smith chose to set his fictionalized Texas-Mexico border world in Klail City because there is no k in the Spanish language.
“It shows the Anglo side — the people who have taken over the land,” he said.
The first volume of the “Klail City Death Trip” series
appeared in the '70s. Hinojosa-Smith is now at work on the 16th and what
he expects to be the final series book. The novels and their world
recently garnered him the National Book Critics Circle's Ivan Sandrof
Lifetime Achievement Award.
“I was speechless,” he said of the call informing him of the award.
In late April, Houston's Arte Público Press
will republish — in a never-available bilingual edition — his classic
early '70s novel “The Valley/Estampas del valle,” the first in the Klail
City cycle, which won a national Chicano literature award, Premio
Quinto Sol, in 1972. Four years later, he won the highest award for the
novel in Latin America, the Premio Casas de las Americas.
Hinojosa-Smith's work has been compared to William Faulkner's
and the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. He humbly
dismisses that, yet he often quotes Faulkner to his creative writing
students at the University of Texas at Austin:
“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and
see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice
and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's
good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
Born in 1929, Hinojosa-Smith wrote his first story — in
Spanish — at 16 while spending a World War II summer with family in the
small Mexican town Arteaga. The tale was about farm workers who come
home and are pressed into military service. He lost the manuscript, then
his mother found it and he lost it again, but it set a tone for what
would come.
He is anonymous on the bus he rides to the University of
Texas with book in hand and his mind often on the next story. By 7 a.m.
each weekday he arrives at the same small office in UT's Parlin Hall
he has occupied for more than 30 years. Colorful paper flowers decorate
the wall — his daughter put them up two decades ago when she was an
undergrad at the school.
Parlin Hall's bluish tile walls evoke its 1954 opening, which came after Hinojosa-Smith's own UT days as a member of the elite Tejas Club.
He attended on the G.I. Bill after Army service spent largely in Puerto
Rico as a military newspaper reporter and an Armed Forces Radio
announcer called Rocky the Disc Jockey.
The UT campus was a big leap for a boy from Mercedes in the Rio
Grande Valley, the model for Klail City, which resides in Belken County —
meant as a stand-in for four border counties combined.
But his childhood home was filled with books. His Anglo
mother was a teacher like her mother before her. His father had fought
in the Mexican Revolution and loved to tell stories. The house was
filled with a constant flow of Spanish and English. Four of the five
children — Rolando was the baby — became teachers. His first creative
works saw print in a high school publication called Creative Bits.
That mixed heritage imbues richness to the “Klail City
Death Trap” series, which has Mexican-American and Anglo kids in
conflict, and Mexican and Anglo politicians melding into one breed.
“There are fools on both sides of the fence,” he said.
Hinojosa-Smith figures he's got a few more years in the classroom,
but he has no plans to stop writing. He used to write in longhand, with
only his first novel composed in Spanish. These days he uses a computer,
typing in English and later translating his own work to Spanish.
He travels home frequently and recently gave the convocation at his alma mater, Mercedes High School.
He told students of how their town contributed to World War II, with 16
boys lost in the war and another 16 gone later from wounds they
suffered.
It's the story of the Rio Grande Valley that has sustained him, fascinated him as a writer for decades.
“Sure, I'll keep writing,” he said. “I'd like to write something else than the series.”
His writing advice? “Don't fall in love with your writing. If it's good, you'll know.”
Forget “Slacker” and “El Mariachi.” Underground Austin filmmaking street cred begins and ends with the original “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” the quirky shoestring-budget cinematic blast of cannibalism that set the gold standard for creepiness while keeping gore to a minimum. The 1974 film also begat a cottage industry of remakes, knockoffs and reverberations. Just last year, co-writer Kim Henkel’s “Boneboys” script was being filmed near Austin by Duane Graves and Justin Meeks with its own flesh-eating fiends.
Now it’s “Chainsaw” director and co-writer Tobe Hooper’s turn to take a nibble with the very cinematic novel “Midnight Movie,” co-written with Alan Goldsher. It stars a guy named Tobe Hooper who comes to Austin during the South by Southwest Film Festival to screen the rediscovered sole print of an obscure movie he shot as a teen — well before “Chainsaw” — to a small crowd of film geeks. The catch is a car crash years ago has left Hooper with little memory of the film except he’s “pretty sure there’s some zombie sex involved.”
The film, titled “Destiny Express,” is a squishy, bloody mess, but it just possibly infects the hipster audience with a virus dubbed the Game that transforms some into sex-crazed harlots and others into violent, flesh-munching zombies. Soon Austin is ablaze with what are presumed to be exploding drug labs, and the violence and madness quickly spreads nationwide.
How to stop the spreading gloom? Hooper, part-time Austin Chronicle film reviewer and wannabe rocker Erick Laughlin, University of Texas student and waitress Janine Daltrey and the overly glib über-film geek Dude McGee (whom Hooper tells us — wink, wink — is surely not inspired by Austin’s Internet film guru Harry Knowles) decide the only hope is to quickly track down the original cast of “Destiny Express” — minus its main star, who has gone full-tilt zombie — and remake the film in order to kill off its bad juju.
It’s a fun ride, made all the more so by its links to reality. Hooper did indeed come to SXSW in 2009 to show his earlier, little-seen 1969 film “Eggshells,” which he also co-wrote with Henkel. But he made that film in his 20s, and it’s more groovy psychedelia than bloody horror.
For the myriad “Chainsaw” fanatics, Hooper the semi-fictional character (we can assume speaking for the real-life Hooper) unapologetically addresses his reputation as a cold dictator. “Always have been on the set. I have a vision, and I want to bring it to life.”
Hooper also makes it clear that he takes “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and its mythic legacy quite seriously. “See, ‘Chainsaw’ was a story. It wasn’t ‘The Iliad’ or anything, but it had an arc, a beginning, middle, and end. Yes, it was about shocking the audience, but they wouldn’t have been shocked if it was a random series of attacks and murders, because they wouldn’t have been absorbed into the picture. There would’ve been distance. If there wasn’t anything for the audience to grab on to, they wouldn’t have given a good (expletive) what happened to good ol’ Sally Hardesty.”
Does the novel “Midnight Movie” have something for the reader to latch onto? For the most part, yes, and that something is the engaging voice of Hooper that sings. Told through the viewpoint of a lot of characters mixed with blog posts, Tweets and news articles, the story is most engaging when its main force is on stage. Hooper, the character, comes across as a crusty but kindly curmudgeon who is serious about the art of creation but is also a dedicated loner. He’s funny, wise and in on the zombified joke.
But Hooper vanishes into hibernation during the novel’s midsection when the stylized details of the spread of the infection become a little repetitious. Fortunately he and his posse return for the final showdown. It’s a satisfying blur of zombies, film fandom and the messy business of low-budget filmmaking. Our heroes must recreate the original film’s fake alligator stuffed with roadkill, in a touch quite true to the legend of the late “Chainsaw” art director Bob Burns driving around the countryside collecting decomposing animals to strew about the set.
Oh, and for the record, Hooper does claim to have lost part of his memory after being in a car crash as a teen. “The whole incident was a big blank, and the concept of blankness is flat-out frightening,” Hooper writes in a brief interview included at the end of the novel.
That theme and a sense of jovial nihilism lurk just below the surface of the novel’s blood splatters, zombie sex and film-cool swagger. “The only thing that makes sense is the taste of blood, the taste of suffering, the taste of death. I do not know why I didn’t realize it sooner,” we are told as an aside by an analyst from the Department of Homeland Security who has gone zombie.
Hooper, the filmmaker, author and character, would surely laugh and tell his audience to sit back and enjoy the bloody ride.
I'm a writer, documentary filmmaker and photographer. My novel Evacuation Plan is about life/death in a residential hospice and is inspired by time spent observing an actual hospice. This is my older blog. See more about me at joeoconnell.com
