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Notes from Texas

On Writing in the Lone Star State

TCU Press

JUDY ALTER

Judy Alter is the author of nearly sixty books, fiction and nonfiction for both adults and young readers. Her latest books for children are John Barclay Armstrong: Texas Ranger, Martin DeLeon: Tejano Empresario, and Souvenirs from Space. Her latest adult title is the collection of short stories, Sue Ellen Learns to Dance. She is a recipient of the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Western Writers of America, Inc, and her books have won awards from The Texas Institute of Letters, WWA, and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. Judy holds a PhD. in English from Texas Christian University. She has been the director of TCU Press since 1987.

NOTES FROM AN OUTSIDER

I have long envied native Texans. Elmer Kelton, Joyce Roach, Bob Flynn, Fran Vick, and others speak a language I can only imitate. Joyce Roach once said something to me about the perspective I, as an outsider, bring to Texas fiction. I am astonished to think that after forty years in the state, I'm still a Johnny-come-lately, an interloper, even a damn yankee. But whether or not you were born in Texas is important to a lot of people. Most of us remember the group that set up booths in malls during the seventies to seek out those born in Texas. If you could qualify, you received a membership and a certificate—Born in Texas. I think I bought memberships for my four children and hungered for one for myself.

I was born in Chicago, where my father was a physician and college president. He was a very British man who grew roses in his free time. When we talk in western fiction about the relationship between a man and his land, I don't think roses are what we have in mind. If my father ever rode a horse, I don't know about it. And when Texans of my generation were riding horses, I was riding a bike. I rode a horse as a child once, in a stable in Chicago, and hated it. I've not been on a horse again to this day, though I've written a lot about young girls and grown women and their relationships to horses.

Growing up, I thought Texas was a foreign country. When my brother was stationed at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station, my parents came to Texas to see him. They came back with descriptions of what sounded almost like semitropical land—not at all what any of us expected of Texas. Then when I was in graduate school, the man I would marry went to West Texas—Turkey, to be specific—to a funeral and came back describing a vast, barren brown land. More my expectation of Texas!

On our first trip to Texas together—for him to investigate a surgical residency and me to find out about the English doctoral program at TCU—we drove across Oklahoma in April. The fields were lush and green, and I remember particularly the plum thickets were in full bloom. But Joel kept saying, "Just wait till we get to Texas, Judith, it will all change." I began to wonder if a great curtain would drop at the Red River and we would instantly cross from green to brown. Of course, we came to North Central Texas, which is usually beautiful in April, as it was that year. I was surprised though that it reached the eighties during the day! So hot, I thought. (Little did I know!)

Long before I moved to Texas, I knew I wanted to write. I remember summers when I rode my bike to the public library each morning, brought home two or three books, spent the day on the front porch reading them, and went back the next day for a new supply. It did not make me popular with the neighborhood kids, but I think those library summers shaped me as a storyteller and writer. I wrote my first short stories at about the age of ten. They were about a nineteenth-century spinster named Miss Shufflebaum and her cocker spaniel, Taffy (that's because I desperately wanted a cocker spaniel). In high school I sent a short story to Seventeen, then the bible of high school girls. It came back immediately of course, but I tried. When I went to college, I majored in English because I liked to read—I had no thought of a career because I was going to get married and some man would take care of me. (Oh, was I ever the typical child of the fifties!)

So I knew I wanted to write—but I didn't know what to write. I used to sit at my desk and think I'd write if I knew what to write. Once a calligrapher friend and I collaborated on a Texas ABC book—there are lots of them today but there weren't back in the early 1980s. It was twenty-six pages of brief introductions to important points in Texas history, one for each letter of the alphabet—A is for Alamo, B for bluebonnet, and so on. (I had to stretch for Y and came up with "Y'all come back" for Texas hospitality.) When someone suggested I do similar books for other states and start with my home state, I thought only briefly about Illinois and realized there wasn't a whole alphabet of history there. Illinois, I'll have you know, is not a lackluster state. We gave the country Lincoln, after all, and even if you still call it the War of Northern Aggression, you have to admit his greatness. And Chicago—that city has a great sprawling history, highlighted by Mrs. O'Leary and her cow. But somehow it pales in the face of Texas history.

Over the years I've tried to write about Chicago. Once I wrote a young-adult mystery based on an actual stalker who threatened the all-female household of a high school friend of mine to the point that my parents forbade me to stay overnight there. I tried to catch the ambience of being in high school on Chicago's South Side in the 1950s, but I couldn't find a home for the manuscript. And I labored long over a novel about the Chicago World Exposition of 1893 and Mrs. Potter Palmer, who was president of the Board of Lady Managers and was the first woman to combine the concepts of wealth and philanthropy. I loved writing it, loved the research—I grew up in the neighborhood of the exposition—but every agent that read it said it read like a young-adult to them. To this day I'm not sure if it really does or if I was just pigeon-holed in their minds. But we all have unpublished manuscripts, and that's one of mine.

No, it was Texas that gave me the stories I wanted to write about. When we first moved here, Joel was in that residency, and I was in graduate school on a fellowship; we were dirt poor. We did what was free, and we frequently went to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, which then had its original name of The Amon Carter Museum of Western Art. We were both captivated by the paintings and sculpture of Charles M. Russell and Frederic Remington—I don't suppose I knew about either one before. But today I trace my interest in things western to that exposure to art. I did much of the research for my dissertation, "The Western Myth in American Literature and Painting in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries," at the Amon Carter.

In the years since, I have studied hard and tried to write like a native Texan. Even so, after all these years, I have strong handicaps as an author and a nonnative. I hope that I write about horses and western women with authenticity. But if I do, it's because I have friends who are real westerners, and I am shameless about picking their brains. When I wanted to write a novel based on the life of Wild West roper Lucille Mulhall, I called Joyce Roach for information about roping. She was so thorough and I worked so much of the material into the novel that she finally said, "Quit with the roping and get on with the novel, Judith."

In the mid-1970s, an older friend gave me her mother's memoir about being a child in a small East Texas town around the turn of the century. It contained wonderful details of daily life and an exciting story. The child's father, a deputy sheriff, arrested a man for drunkenness on Christmas Eve. When the man got out of jail, he shot the deputy for disgracing him. Because I was fairly new to Texas and didn't yet know its stories, I didn't realize what a violent history East Texas has. My reaction was "That's really unusual, because after all, this wasn't the Wild West with shootouts in the streets." But later I learned that it was. Still at the time I didn't know what to do with this jewel. After all I didn't write fiction. As a PhD. candidate, I was trained to support, defend, criticize, do anything but give in to my imagination. So I put the manuscript on that huge stock of "I-don't-know-what-to-do-with-these things" every writer had. Then, almost coincidentally, I read two or three novels with young girls as the protagonist, and I suddenly realized I could do that. I could make that little girl fourteen instead of four and write a novel about her and the effect of her father's death on her and her family. The result was After Pa Was Shot, though I titled it A Year with No Summer and still like that better than the publisher's title.

Although later for several years I spent as many free weekends as I could on a friend's guest ranch near Tyler, I'd never been to East Texas at that time except to drive from Fort Worth to visit my family, who by then lived in North Carolina. So as I wrote, I called two friends and asked them such questions as, "If you were a child in East Texas in 1904, what would you do to kill idle time?" One of the answers was, "Chunk rocks in the stock tank," so Ellsbeth, the central figure, spends a lot of time chunking rocks. Another question was, "If you were going to a funeral, what food would you take?" The answer was dried fruit pies.

When I wrote After Pa Was Shot, I didn't know I was writing a young-adult novel. I simply told the story, in the first person, as it came to me and using the details in the memoir. By happenstance I met a New York agent who read the manuscript, liked it, and marketed it as a young-adult, probably based both on content and length. When it was published, I was categorized as a young-adult novelist and still am today, even though I've written almost as much adult fiction (and way more young-adult nonfiction than anything else).

In Texas, I've found the stories that have given me the body of my writing. Unlike most of my native Texan friends, I am less apt to find inspiration in or to write about the land, perhaps because I don't know it instinctively in the way Elmer Kelton, for instance, does. Instead, I find inspiration in the stories, the people, and the history.

On a trip to that ranch in Van Zandt County, I read a small county history and one paragraph about the Van Zandt County War leapt out at me. It seems when General Phil Sheridan was in charge of reconstruction in Texas, Van Zandt County posted announcements that it was withdrawing from Texas and the Union. Sheridan, who once said if he owned Texas and Hell, he'd rent out Texas and live in Hell, would not tolerate rebellion. He marched his troops to Van Zandt County, but the farmers hid in the trees and took potshots at the soldiers who marched up the road in formation. It was the sort of tactic the Americans used during the Revolutionary War. The army retreated, and the farmers went into town to celebrate with a huge bonfire and the little brown jug. Of course after nightfall, the army came, surrounded and arrested the celebrating "victors." The men were kept all winter in a stockade on the edge of town. When the spring rains came, they discovered they could push the posts far enough apart to walk out. One by one the men of Van Zandt County walked off into the night. Some never returned. Now who could resist turning that into fiction? Luke and the Van Zandt County War, my second young-adult novel, is complete with the Ku Klux Klan, a lynching, and Civil War feuding.

Much more recently, I was at a luncheon where Steve Harrigan was one of the main speakers. He had just published The Gates of the Alamo, his blockbuster novel. After lunch a woman came up to him and said she wanted to tell him abouther friend whose great-great-(I forget how many greats) grandmother had as a young girl ridden across South Texas, urging settlers in Austin's Colony to join Sam Houston's army after the fall of the Alamo. Steve was polite. I was fascinated. I carried that story around in my head for a long time, even talked to the descendant—she had a clipping about it but didn't know where it was, which absolutely appalled me. How do you lose something that important? Anyway, the young-adult novel, Sam Houston Is My Hero, grew out of that brief lunchtime encounter. And I loved writing it, because I learned so much about the Runaway Scrape and the Battle of San Jacinto, things I had only vaguely understood before.

But even as I became comfortable with Texas materials, I still made mistakes and needed my friends to rescue me. In So Far From Paradise, an early novel commissioned by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram as a Sesquicentennial project, I wanted to have the central figure take a shotgun from a desperate and dangerous man. The setting was Decatur in North Central Texas, and the time was late in the Civil War, when there were hangings of so-called northern sympathizers by frustrated southerners. I called the late Don Worcester to ask how you would break a rifle if you wanted to disarm an enemy. I had planned to have the central figure slam the shotgun against a wooden stockade-like wall, but Don explained that the shotgun probably would have fired, and I would have lost my central figure right there. He suggested another solution—breaking it over the knee, I think, which sounded painful to me, but I took his word.

If true stories and historical accuracy make regional literature authentic, so too does voice. Over the years, both as author and editor, I've become more and more interested in the importance of voice in fiction, and I frequently cite Elmer Kelton as a novelist with a strong, clear, and believable voice. If someone handed me one page of one of Elmer's novel, with no heading, no identification, I'd recognize his voice. Reading his fiction is like listening to him talk. He is a West Texan, the product of ranch country, and he sounds like it. I suspect you can make the same case for Jane Austen or William Faulkner or any number of novelists—and it might make an interesting paper. But before I moved to Texas, my voice was a Midwestern twang. After I'd lived here about a year, local people were still teasing me about my northern accent, but family and friends back home laughed aloud at my southern drawl. And even today my kids say that my voice changes—and my pronunciation—when I talk about things western.

But speaking voice and fictional voice are different, and if I have a fictional voice—and it seems presumptuous to suppose that—it's as a woman in the American West of the past. Beyond my early fascination with the Amon Carter Museum, I can't exactly tell you why my voice is western. The fiction of my contemporaries—Carolyn Osborn or Shelby Hearon or Beverly Lowry—about slick, bright, slightly disengaged contemporary women doesn't have a particularly western voice, though Shelby especially is adept at capturing the feel and details of place in Texas. Just read Hug Dancing and you'll be transported to Waco, for better or worse. But I write almost exclusively about women of the past. And I don't think my writing voice is a feminist statement, though I can't support that either. I just know that I'm at my best as a writer when I put myself inside the head of a Texas woman of the past and tell her story in the first person.

The first person voice is important to me. The conventional wisdom is that if an author writes a first book in the first person, he or she then graduates to the third-person voice. But I've never graduated. The few times I've tried to write in thirdperson have been clearly unsuccessful, as though the voice were off key. Once, worried about that, I asked Larry Swindell, then book editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, what would happen if I never graduated. He assured me it wouldn't be bad if I always wrote in the first person in a feminine voice.

In the 1990s I was asked to write the second chapter of the collaborative novel Legend. Elmer started the central figure out in a homestead on the Texas plains, where his family is massacred by Indians. I believe Elmer left him a bounty hunter (I would never have thought of that.) But then I wrote the only chapter in the entire novel told from a female point of view, that of a young eastern woman, come to Fort Worth to stay with her pregnant (and difficult) sister. The young woman, Melanie Beaufort, falls in love with Lyle Speaks, the bounty hunter. I wrote in Melanie's voice because I had no idea how to write about a bounty hunter. More recently I wrote the second chapter of a collaborative novel called Noah's Ride, again following Elmer. The novel was about a runaway slave in Mississippi who makes it to Texas and the Union Army. I worried long and hard about whether or not I could see the world from the viewpoint of a male slave, but I did write the chapter in third person from Noah's point of view. I found it hard.

My own experience and my work with other authors have led me to believe that an author grows into both voice and subject. Once you find the combination where your creativity seems to flow best, you'd best stick with it. But it's not something you always have control over. I'm reminded of Dorothy Johnson, best known for short stories that gave birth to the movies A Man Called Horse and The Hanging Tree. Late in her life, Dorothy worked on a novel she called The Unbombed, about New York City during World War II when the city was constantly at full alert for a bombing attack that never came. One day she wrote to me that she'd had a horrible shock: she'd just found out that the man she thought was going to come back and marry the heroine was going to be killed in the war. Since Dorothy once told me she could not write if her muse was not talking to her, I presume her muse gave her that shocking bit of news. That muse often has more control over fiction than the author. Maybe it's just another name for instinct.

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Excerpted from Notes from Texas by W.C. Jameson, Barbara Mathews Whitehead. Copyright © 2008 TCU Press. Excerpted by permission of TCU Press.
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