Boot scootin' into Dallas...

Larry McMurtry and his writing partner Diana Osama are in Dallas, giving a talk I will not be attending. My absence won't be due to spite or poverty, but because I make a lousy audience. Unless my own writing is going very well, hearing from other authors just gets me pissed off and greenly jealous. If my writing is going gangbusters, then I'm only in the audience to see what I can thieve...a nice turn of phrase, perhaps, or a seductive plot-line. Like a lot of artists, my emotions are mostly low and suspect.

However, I'm in Texas entirely because of Larry McMurtry and I've already told him that, face to face. Right after my father died, unexpectedly and far too young, I found myself sealed up in his house with my step-mother. Gloom, weeping, and suburban boredom steamed up the atmosphere and, with nothing much to do, I tackled the fat paperbook I'd bought in the airport. It was Moving On by Larry McMurtry: a long rambling portrait of Houston and a very young tearful character named Patsy. Maybe it was because I felt so lost and at odds with myself, but I became entirely captivated with the book, with Patsy, and most of all, with Houston. Then and there, on our scratchy couch, in our generic salt box house on Military Road, I promised myself that I would get to Texas. By hook or by crook, by God, I would go there.

As it happened, after graduate school, just before heading off to be a museum director in Fort Dodge Iowa, I was offered a one year grant at North Texas and accepted on the spot. Within six months, I'd met the man I later married and, thirty years later, I'm still here, with no regrets about any of it.

I met Larry McMurtry at a faculty dinner party many years ago. I remember he had the blackest hair I'd ever seen, and the whitest skin. After dinner he talked about his bookstore in Washington DC and managed to be the most boring man I'd ever encountered. All of us were utterly stultified, as he mumbled tonelessly about the business ins and outs of bookstores. As for me, I could barely keep my eyes in focus. But just before he ambled off into the night, I told him my favorite book was Moving On. He brightened up considerably, since the critics had savaged it. "It's my favorite too," he admitted. I told him I'd come to Texas because of it, and he smiled.

Today he and his writing partner were interviewed on a local radio show. McMurtry, who is marvelously proficient, talked about his ease in writing fiction. "I guess I'm in a trance-like state when I do it," he said. I could understand that. I get the same way, but only after about an hour into it. What I'm really doing is transcribing a series of images in my head, that come to me, one after the other. Stephen King calls this, "...looking into the monitor." It's a hypnotic condition, but there's nothing sleepy about hypnosis, although it often looks that way from the outside. Really, it's a state of hyper-alertness. I think it's what hooks me into writing and painting both. It's the way I feel while doing it.

Artists like me, the ones who feel they're a part of the work as-it-occurs, are sometimes classified as haptic. They are not people who stand as observers. Rather they are emotives, while the detached observer types are classified as visuals. Most artists are a mixture of the two, with one aspect predominating. Visual types are the majority in our culture and, for a long time I went around thinking I wasn't a real artist, because I didn't draw horses or people, and I wasn't a real writer, because the sound of words interested me more than snappy plots. And then, time went on, and it didn't matter if I was comfortable as an artist. Just doing it was everything.

So, thanks, Larry. For the book, for Texas. For getting me here.