Bill Leftwich - Interview

Ed Blackburn, in his Texana Review, interviews the ancient Bill Leftwich, cowboy, artist and writer.
Give a listen to the podcast at
http://texanareview.typepad.com/posts/books/index.html

Getting Mother's Body - Susan-Lori Parks

Susan-Lori Parks acknowledges West Texas

in
VG: Voices from the Gaps: Women Artists and Writers of Color, An International Website
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/parks_suzanlori.html

“In 2003, [Susan-Lori] Parks returned to fiction writing, publishing her first novel, Getting Mother's Body. A twist on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, the novel follows the quest of a pregnant teenager who sets off with a small group of accomplices for Arizona, where she plans to exhume her mother's body in order to retrieve the jewels supposedly hidden in the coffin. She is pursued by her mother's former lover, who vows to keep her promise that the jewels remain with the body.
Parks says that the novel and its characters are grounded in the landscape of West Texas, where she had lived during her father's army days: "I love the big sky and arid landscape of that place. The characters came out of that landscape and the story came out of those characters. Then there was Faulkner's novel, which I had read eight years before" (Marshall).”

Ambush at Mustang Canyon - Mike Kearby

Ambush at Mustang Canyon. By Mike Kearby.

Austin: Trail’s End Books, 2007. pbk 196 pages. ISBN 0-9788422-0-0 / 978-0-9788422-0-8.
http://www.mikekearby.com/
Kearby, former English teacher concludes this third and last installment of the Free Anderson / Parks Scott story as he continues the friendship of the former Civil War soldiers, Free Parks, the ex-slave, and Parks Scott, his white friend, on the West Texas and Panhandle plains.

It’s 1874 and Free continues his vocation as a mustanger with his family, but here Free and Parks get entangled in the Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne Indians’ struggle to keep their lands and their buffalo, with the admixture of Billy Dixon, Mexican hunters and the U.S. Army. The fast-paced novel continues the harsh reality of the times, while splicing in loyalty, family ties, and sensitivity of folks of different origins.

The plot focuses around the famous Battle of Adobe Walls, virtually the last major violent settler-Native American encounter in Texas. While many readers will not think of it, the trilogy is also an excellent selection for teenage or YA readers.

Kearby’s earlier works have attracted attention and have been picked up by Dorchester / Leisure Books for 2008! The trilogy would be good in school libraries. (Did you read the lead article in this issue?)

Ride the Desperate Trail - Mike Kearby

Ride the Desperate Trail.

By Mike Kearby.

Austin: Trail’s End Books, 2007. pbk 192 pages, map ISBN 978-0-09788422-7-7 http://www.mikekearby.com/

Freeman Anderson and Parks Scott are back after their introduction in The Road to a Hanging, and Lou Halsell Rodenberger describes this second of a Western trilogy as “believable…. With deft characterization and historical accuracy.” This time the despicable Tig Hardy captures Clara, now Free’s wife, and the rescue is off and running. Clean writing and sharp characterization move the reader along. Clara emerges as a full partner, inventive and persistent, as Free and Scott battle the elements and fight their way through desperados, the desert, the mountains, back through El Paso, and finally make peace in the Big Bend winter retreat of the Apaches. It’s rather pleasant that Free is relieved of venting his anger in violence when Tig meets his demise by other hands as “No man escapes his own times.”

Mariposa - Candice Coffee

Book notes and author interview on the novel Mariposa, set in West Texas.

http://rebecca2007.wordpress.com/2008/06/06/mariposa-author-interview-candice-coffe/

Washed in the Blood - Shelton Williams

Washed in the Blood, 2nd ed.

By Shelton L. Williams. Denton: Zone Press, 2007. Illus with photos and facsimiles. 188 pages. Paperback $15.95 ISBN 0-9777558-6-X http://www.zonepress.com/

Shelton Williams’ account of the 1961 “Kiss and Kill” murder case outside Odessa is presented with a cold eeriness invoking Hitchcockian surrealism. In the first 2-page chapter, teenager Betty, whose desire, invitation, planning, and assistance is clear, is shot in the back of the head at a quiet, sparse oil field by her friend Mack who somehow finds it okay to be her instrument of death.

Betty’s cousin, Shelton, narrates the real-life drama in this “intersection” of their lives. We are introduced to teenage life in West Texas, football competitiveness near the height of Odessa Permian’s dominance, school cliques, the usual religious hypocrisy and adolescent sexual frenzy, and Betty’s angst of being stuck there. The town and the principal characters are detailed with the informative, yet simple, style common at kitchen tables, front porches, and automobile backseats. Shelton takes you there – through the relationships, the murder, the town’s reaction, the trial, and in this 2nd edition, two extra chapters. Part of Shelton’s success is his unvarnished portrayal of the innocent, the boredom, the anger, and anxiety of Betty and the ultimate cast throughout the city.

Why read the book, maybe because the story could arise from any place, like yours, and the good writing makes you turn the pages.

Jane Gilmore Rushing - Lou Halsell Rodenberger

Jane Gilmore Rushing: A West Texas Writer and Her Work

By Lou Halsell Rodenberger. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2006. xiii, 175 pages, classified bibliography, index. 7 b/w photos ISBN 0896725936. Hardback, wheat colored cloth with elegant blank lettering on the spine. $29.95 http://www.ttup.ttu.edu/

The jacket carries a Rushing quotation, “The land of West Texas encompasses more than climate and landscape; it’s a breed of people, a style of life, a way of freeing and extending the mind and imagination.”

The title to chapter 2, “A Regionalist Without Apology,” tells much to the reader, and Lou Halsell Rodenberger, professor emerita at McMurray University in Abilene is the one to tell this story well. Rodenberger’s purpose “in this work is to convince readers that an unbiased study of Jane Gilmore Rushing’s fiction leads to the discovery of a courageous writer, whose angle of vision on West Texas’ past is consistently from the point of view of women.” From the now vanished Texas hamlet of Pyron, Rodenberger traces Rushing’s life with particular literary criticism on her writings (six novels between 1963 and 1984, non-fiction books, and other). Rushing often wrote of the reality of people, often good people, caught in the contradictions of life, the hypocrisy, out of step with the norm or the often unacknowledged norms of women’s lives. Throughout, the Rolling Plains under-gird the stories where friends, neighbors, and strangers express their religion and work, courage and cowardice, romance and cruelty and murder, and hopes and fears in a dynamic relationship with the codes of conduct. Rushing may bring to mind Dorothy Scarborough and Katherine Ann Porter. This reviewer may add this West Texas writer to his list of “Revolting Texas Women Novelists.”

Wouldn’t you, as did Rushing, love to see Halle Berry and a red-headed cowboy in a movie adaptation of Mary Dove?

From Syria to Seminole - Ed Aryain

From Syria to Seminole: Memoir of a High Plains Merchant,

By Ed Aryain, Edited by J'Nell Pate, Foreword by John R. Wunder, Afterword by Edward Aryain and Jameil Aryain. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2006. xxxvii, 260 pages. 27 photos, 2 maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 0896725863 $29.95 cloth (Plains Histories Series) http://www.ttup.ttu.edu/

When cowboys ride horseback to town to your funeral, you’ll know you were respected and loved. They did so for Ed Aryain. The narrative traces his life from birth in 1897 in Henna, Syria among blue-eyed Christian Druze, onward to his adolescent departure for America, his traveling salesman days on the plains, and his settlement, marriage, and life as a successful Texas merchant, Seminole being is final hometown.

It’s a warming and inspiring life, as American and Texan as one can get. Possibly most novel to readers are his descriptions of his peddling days, now almost a vanishing trade. Carrying suitcases from town to town, house to house, partnering, strategizing, ordering merchandise, he and often his Syrian compatriots lived in boarding houses and customers’ spare rooms, rode horses and wagons through small towns and to distant farms. He began setting up storefronts in Oklahoma with the oil boom and then Texas. In 1925 his store in Navarro burned, but soon he met Miss Etta E. Stone, so smitten, so married. As expected the Depression days were challenging. Finally, in 1939 he followed the oil boom to Seminole where his family took root and remained. While not the subject of heavy discrimination, Aryain found immediate friendship and encouraging business to support his growing family.

They throve. And so will your delight reading the book, first dictated in Ed’s Texan-Mid Eastern accent to Etta who typed it.