Corpus Christi plays role in novel

Joe O'Connell, For the Express-News

June 27, 2014

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?”

Johnston was attending Del Mar College 20 years ago when English teacher Mike Anzaldua dropped on his student's desk a ticket to see author Robert Stone read in the Corpus Christi Literary Reading Series.

“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.”

Joe O'Connell is an Austin writer.

The myth of Texas men

 

Joe O'Connell, For the Express-News

May 16, 2013

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.”

Joe O'Connell is an Austin writer.

Soldiers' stories help civilians connect

 Joe O'Connell, For the Express-News

Aug. 29, 2013

Christine Dumaine Leche's college students often showed up to English class dirty, with the dazed faces of zombies. They were soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, and they did something many of her Texas-based students were loath to commit to — they showed up to class.

“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).”

Joe O'Connell is an Austin writer.

Harrigan paints picture of awkward young Abe

Young Lincoln revealed in Harrigan’s latest novel

Joe O’Connell, For the Express-News

Feb. 20, 2016

Photo by Joe O'Connell

Imagine Davy Crockett and Abraham Lincoln as soulmates.

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.”

Joe O’Connell is a Texas writer

‘Mayhem’ chronicles scandal in a small town

 

Joe O’Connell, For the Express-News

Oct. 17, 2015

Photo by Joe O'Connell

The mystery stuck with Elizabeth Harris.

As a child growing up in Fort Worth, she would travel with her family to elderly relatives’ homes. Off to the side was a woman, always white, who served as caretaker/nursemaid/confidante. She worked for room and board and a tiny salary.

“The thinking was white women were qualified by race to care for elderly white women,” Harris said in a recent interview. “There was always some story about them that nobody would tell me. It was often scandalous, or ultimately, just that the brother lost the farm.”

Harris’ Gival Press Novel Award-winning “Mayhem” examines just such a fictional scandal and goes deep into how societies and families get dysfunctional in rural 1936 Texas. It’s a world of prim, hardworking German-immigrant farmers.

“I had to imagine a back story — how a woman came down in the world,” Harris said.

She drew from a real-life account of a ’50s fight in the small Central Texas town Goldthwaite between two drunken locals and a couple of soldiers that led to the partial castration of one GI.

In “Mayhem,” the stakes are raised with a presumed marital infidelity/potential rape as the catalyst. But Harris’ narrator makes clear what the author also wants you to know: This is not a rape story.

“I mean, it’s not just a rape story,” said Harris, a retired University of Texas at Austin professor.

Indeed, it’s a larger story of family, vigilante justice and the moral expectations piled on women, in this case recent bride Evelyn Gant, in a society that is quick to assume their guilt and cast them out.

“It’s a double experience: What has happened to her and what has been done within her hearing by her husband and his brother,” Harris said. “She doesn’t remember the events deeply for the next 18 years.”

This German-immigrant place is key to “Mayhem.” It’s far from the center of civilization, and the sexual freedom of the Roaring ’20s proved not a ripple in their world.

“Culture doesn’t change easily,” Harris said. “I’m interested in the daily life of rural people — the work they do and the rhythms that brings to life.”

Harris employs an interesting form of narration to bring her story to life. Essentially a girl is telling the story she imagines for a live-in caretaker much like the one Harris encountered when she was a girl.

The narrator “writes” the story and is truthful about her twisting of facts and fiction to suit her story. So the story, in a sense, references itself.

It’s a trick, but one that works for this story because Harris is after something larger — that sociological layer of choices we make to coexist.

Consider that main character Evelyn, who a few years down the road could easily vamoose to San Antonio and work in the WWII industry for higher pay and anonymity, chooses instead to stay put where she is known as a pariah.

“There’s a certain conservatism where it’s important to know the people you have always known,” Harris said. “She is her family, her ancestors and all of her connections.”

It’s a first published novel for Harris, whose story collection “The Ant Generator” won the prestigious John Simmons Prize and was published by the University of Iowa Press in 1991.

But she’s been a regular writer since seeing a film years ago about time management. The message: “Decide what is really important in your life and do that first every day.”

“Mayhem” is set her parents’ era — they were married in 1936, the year of the book’s scandalous incident.

“I’m trying to see through the eyes of the past,” she said. “I’m drawn to write historically about subjects that seem alive to me in the present. Like gender, or trying to tell truths — slippery as they are — about the family past.”

Joe O’Connell is a Texas writer.

Huntsville novel takes readers behind bars

Novelist Trow calls on her Huntsville experience for fiction debut

Joe O’Connell, For the Express-News

Jan. 9, 2016

Lisa Trow was teaching creative writing to Huntsville prison inmates when she noticed the obsession lurking behind some of their work.

The men would pen love poems to female attorneys or medical professionals whom they’d barely met.

“They’d fixate on these women as symbols of hope for the future,” she recalled in a recent interview. “It was all unrequited. It was just a distraction they would indulge in.”

That obsession is at the heart of Trow’s debut novel “Sign of Redemption,” in which accountant Richie Harrison is wrongly accused of armed robbery and finds himself behind bars.

His sign-language skills enable him to interpret a conversation between a deaf inmate and attorney Elizabeth McKenna.

Harrison’s growing obsession with her sparks his prison escape and escalates into violence as he tracks McKenna down in Austin and eventually kidnaps her.

As a reporter covering death row for the Huntsville Item (she also had two stints as the paper’s managing editor), Trow came to the story with first-hand experience.

“A capitol murderer fixated on me,” she said. “I had to ask the warden to ask him to stop writing me. It wasn’t flattering at all. It was gross and creepy.”

Harrison’s obsession is more nuanced and decidedly more human, mainly because Trow decides to have him narrate the tale as a man drifting near the point of no return.

Trow writes in Harrison’s voice: “When I first got sent down, I thought about escaping every day, and every day I thought of the bullet that would pierce my back and exit through my breastbone in a bloody spray. I thought of myself tumbling out of a dead run, my legs buckling, my face hitting the pavement. Maybe I’m just a coward if all it takes to make a coward is a vivid imagination. But I wasn’t here long before I found out what it sounded like when the blood left the body in gurgling rushes.

Behind bars, Harrison realizes that “there was some mysterious force that took over in these tragedies and became both writer and director to a cast of helpless actors.”

“If your narrator is a prisoner, he’s going to be unreliable,” Trow explained. “You could go into prison rational, but the experience of prison would corrupt you. It’s a bizarro world. Everyone assumes you’re worthless and up to no good. You are surrounded by people you have to be afraid of. To survive you have to learn to lie and you must act to protect yourself.”

“Sign of Redemption” was 20 years in the writing, morphing at one point into a Quentin Tarantino-esque screenplay.

It took so long, in part, because most of that time, Trow was a single parent working full time.

But she rejected efforts to buy her story idea and instead tried to teach herself to write a novel. She got stuck, and the partially completed book languished for years.

“Those urges to create don’t go away,” she said. “I felt I was letting the story beat me. Because it was now or never, I started to work again.”

he result is a nuanced, well-crafted tale that brings together both Trow’s journalistic skills of observation and her creative skills honed while earning a master’s degree in writing poetry.

“You have many, many more crayons writing fiction than journalism,” she said. “But there are things to borrow from journalism, like the use of dialogue. Somebody said that if you cross poetry and journalism you create novelists.”

Prison was a natural subject matter for Trow, whose first days as a Sam Houston State University student were marred by the 1974 Carrasco prison siege in which inmates took prison workers hostage. She heard the gunfire from her dorm room.

Meeting poet Grady Hillman and assisting him with his 1983 documentary film “Lions, Parakeets and Other Prisoners” led Trow to teaching writing in prison, where she once experienced a lockdown.

“The prison SWAT team came through,” she said. “You could hear the thunder of boots from the team, then hear them recede.”

And Trow had the personal heartache of marrying a seemingly reformed ex-con who later went back to his old ways.

Richie is not based on her ex-husband, she said, but through the relationship, she did get access to unfiltered information about real prison life.

In the end, the novel aims a spotlight at a corner of humanity we often ignore.

“I had this romantic idea of making the ordinary beautiful while also trying to make ugly things lyrical,” Trow said. “Those two notions are what drive me to tell stories the way I tell them.”

Joe O’Connell is a Texas writer.

Former slave passes as Mexican millionaire

Joe O’Connell, For the Express-News

June 11, 2016

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 is a Texas writer.