Joe Lansdale = modern-day Mark Twain

I interviewed Joe Lansdale for Kirkus Reviews about his great new novel. Here's how it starts:

Even if the prolific Joe Lansdale created an imaginary twin (don’t put it past him), the two combined probably wouldn’t have enough fingers and toes to count all of his published novels. So when he says Paradise Sky was the most fun one to write, take heed.

A fictionalized story of the real-life Nat Love, the picaresque tale follows its African-American protagonist on a jaunt through post-Civil War adventures that lead him into careers as a marksman nicknamed Deadwood Dick, a Buffalo soldier and a marshal, all the while being tailed by a racist miscreant bent on killing Love for a mostly imagined slight.

Lansdale had read the real Nat Love’s autobiography, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" by Himself and saw an avenue to tell a tale often overlooked—African-American contributions to the Old West mythos. He’d pitched it as a novel as far back as the late ‘70s, but agents and editors then saw no audience for a story with black heroes.

Read the rest here.

Texas as seen through recent fiction

I regularly interview Texas authors for the San Antonio Express-News. Tomorrow they'll run my interview with Bret Anthony Johnston, a Corpus Christi native who sets his debut novel Remember Me Like this there. Here's how my piece begins:

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.

Read the rest here.

I also recently interviewed Jim Sanderson, whose two new books are set in West and East Texas. Here's a taste:

East Texas and West Texas might as well be on separate planets, but Jim Sanderson straddles the divide and puts both under the microscope in his two recent books of fiction.

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.

Read the rest here.

'Thieves' tells fictional truths about a writer's life

This piece ran in today's San Antonio Express-News. It's behind a paywall, so here it is in its entirety (along with a photo I took of David):

By Joe O'Connell, For the Express-News

January 12, 2014
SAN ANTONIO — A sign by David Marion Wilkinson's writing desk reads “Joy.” It was his guiding principle as he attempted to write the ultimate comic novel, but life and the book took a different turn.

The result is “Where the Mountains are Thieves,” a solid novel that is equal parts funny and tragic, but 100 percent honest about human failings and what it means to be a writer today.


“I came to this place where writing a comic novel wasn't possible,” said Wilkinson, who is best known for writing historical novels of the West.

“Thieves” follows Jesse Reverchon, a middle-aged author fresh from rehab and an affair who moves with his wife and young son Travis to Alpine to patch their lives together. Reverchon coaches his son's baseball team and tries to buckle down and get his writing career back on track. Along the way, the reader is warned of an accident lurking in the pages ahead that will rock Jesse's world.

Jesse says, “I came to understand that most novelists are strictly observers. At first I struggled with it, agonized over it. And then, about the time Travis was born, I accepted it.”

But in heartwarming and funny moments, Little League baseball proves Jesse's salvation. Á la “The Bad News Bears,” he tries to whip a ragtag group of misfits into a team.

“It's his catalyst to getting connected,” Wilkinson said. “His only success is impacting the lives of fatherless boys, but what he comes realize is they are saving his life.”

Wilkinson's latest novel is itself a lesson in the vagaries of the publishing industry and the human heart.

Like his main character, Wilkinson had moved his family to Alpine (he has two sons and, unlike his character, no history of drug or alcohol abuse) to make a new life in the Big Bend region. He became writer-in-residence at Sul Ross State University, built a house overlooking Cathedral Peak, and befriended the sometimes-eccentric residents of the beautiful but isolated place. But his real-life marriage was falling apart.


Courtesy

David Marion Wilkin-son's new novel, “Where the Mountains Are Thieves,” follows a middle-aged author who moves with his wife and young son to rebuild their lives.

“You could sit there and watch the sun go down with a sense of peace and a feeling that everything's OK, but then you look around and see it's not,” he said.

Careerwise, it actually started in 2001. After three years of work, Wilkinson's last novel, “Oblivion's Altar,” was hot off the presses and receiving positive reviews when the events of 9/11 changed everything. The nation was in turmoil, and no one was reading fiction. Wilkinson turned instead to nonfiction with “One Ranger,” a biography co-written with famed Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson.

Suddenly nonfiction agents were hitting him up with work-for-hire projects, and he realized they saw writers as interchangeable widgets. Like his character Jesse, Wilkinson was desperate to prove he still had fiction-writing chops.

Nearly broke and recently divorced, he found himself back working oil fields as he had in his youth. He didn't write for two years. When the words came, “Where the Mountains are Thieves” became a different, better, more honest book.

“There's a little anger in the book, along with frustration, sorrow, regret,” he admitted.

It's the writer's story of when art meets commerce. Wilkinson cites Herman Melville, who stopped writing and became a customs inspector. Only after his death did perhaps his best novel, “Billy Budd,” see publication.

These days, Wilkinson is not sure about his next novel. His writing career has taken another turn. He's been working as a writer on a History Channel miniseries about the Texas Rangers, and another in development about women spies during the Civil War.

“It changes every day,” he said of writing for television. “I'm good at that from what I've been through.”


Joe O'Connell is an Austin writer. Reach him at therealjoeo@gmail.com.

Joe Lansdale to make film of his Xmas zombie tale

Joe Lansdale is one of Texas' finest writers (here's an interview I did with him in 2009, and he's got a little cred in the movie biz as well after Don Coscarelli made his short story "Bubba Hotep" into a film of the same name a few years ago. Now Lansdale is beating the filmmakers to the punch. His son Keith Lansdale is adapting Joe's about-to-be-released story "Christmas with the Dead" for the big screen. Joe will executive produce and they'll do it all in his hometown of Nacogdoches in June with students from Stephen F. Austin State University assisting.

Here's the story: "“It was a foolish thing to do, and Calvin had not bothered with it the past two years, not since the death of his wife and child. But this year he decided, quite suddenly, that tomorrow was Christmas Eve. And zombies be damned, the lights and decorations are going up…”

Book-signing hell: Nobody's there

Parnell Hall is a mystery writer, and he has a tough lesson to offer on becoming an author. Welcome to book-signing hell. (A tip of the hat to author Karen Harrington.)

Joe and Kasey Lansdale

I had the pleasure of interviewing legendary Texas author Joe Lansdale this week for an upcoming Austin Chronicle story, and learned a lot of his stories began as dreams. Here he is after lunch at Threadgill's with his daughter Kasey Lansdale, who is a singer/songwriter.