Coyote Songs by Gabino Iglesias
A couple of years ago, I was talking with the famous East Texas crime novelist Joe Lansdale about genre and the way it sticks to writers. He has always avoided being pigeonholed and told me, "I write the genre of Joe Lansdale." The same is true for the author Gabino Iglesias, whose work is so astonishingly fresh and new that he's coined a term for it–"barrio noir"–and everyone has said, "Yep, that's exactly what it is." The opening chapter of his new novel, Coyote Songs, is perfect: creepy, off-kilter tone; charged sentences, and a moment that literally made me gasp in shock.
Iglesias starts with something familiar and then veers off in unexpected directions. This scene, with a man teaching his son how to fish, sounds like it could be a setup for a Rio Bravo Old Man and the Sea:
"Así you're gonna be ready for anything, entiendes? El pez caimán es inteligente…very smart. That's why we have to hide the hook. Fishing is lying, and lying to a smart fish is almost impossible. We also have to see him before he sees us. He stays in the water, unmoving, like a log. Igualito que los caimánes. Sometimes you don't see it until it's too late. Most fish are stupid, but not this one. When you go fishing for pez caimán…you have to think of it as going to war with a man, not a fish."
Just a hint: Iglesias uses this scene to take the reader places Hemingway never imagined.
Black Light: Stories by Kimberly King Parsons
Just as the title entails, Parsons puts her characters under a black light so the reader can see what is so often left in the dark–things that are all too real and frightening to explore. When a writer takes such risks, it's helplessly enthralling. And there's much to be said of her prose: harrowing, ethereal, gives you the good kind of shivers because you feel that as she's dissecting her characters' souls she is, in turn, dissecting your own.
Meet the Members: Joanne Easley
"I have attended several Texas Writes sessions and each time have come away feeling inspired and ready to write. "
— Joanne Easley
A member of the Writers' League since January, Joanne currently lives in Medina.
Joanne Easley: Accessible Literary Fiction.
JE: Stephen King. I'd ask him about his nightmares.
JE: The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving.
JE: I have attended several Texas Writes sessions and each time have come away feeling inspired and ready to write.
JE: I've written fiction off and on for years. Now it's my full-time job. In addition to my upcoming novel, I have two others in first draft and am jump-starting a third with NANOWRIMO.
JE: Yonderings by Ben H. English, a personal account of the life and people of the Big Bend.
JE: My debut novel, Sweet Jane, is set for release on March 19, 2020 from Black Rose Writing. My book was a 2019 Faulkner/Wisdom Writing Competition Finalist. A brief synopsis: By age six, Jane, a lonely and precocious child, knows vodka makes Mama mean. After years of dodging her drunken mama, Jane runs away at sixteen—during the Summer of Love. Despite seventeen years of keeping secrets while searching for love in dysfunctional relationships, Jane looks good on paper: married, graduate school, coin-carrying member of AA. But her carefully constructed life is crumbling. Returning for Mama's funeral catapults her back to the events that made her the woman she is.
Sweet Jane is now available for pre-order here. Use the promo code PREORDER2019 to receive a 15% discount.
Thank you, Joanne!
This Is My Body by Cameron Dezen Hammon
This Is My Body is an honest and compelling memoir, an exploration of the author's evolving faith coupled with a candid look at her marriage as she and her husband find themselves growing apart. Cameron is an accomplished musician and songwriter and it shows in her lyrical prose. I was lucky enough to meet her at last month's Texas Book Festival and can confirm that she's the real deal: open and thoughtful with some great insights – on faith, on feminism, on love – to share.
Watershed by Mark Barr
As a first-time congressman, a young LBJ made rural electrification his top priority. He'd grown up without electricity and knew that going from electrified Austin to the dark Hill Country was like traveling to another country and another time. In his debut novel Watershed, Mark Barr plays up the drama caused by the changes that electricity brought. If your house had lights, if your kitchen had an electric stove and refrigerator–if, in other words, your entire world order was upended by a transformation nearly as drastic as moving from The Flintstones to The Jetsons–what would you do? In this passage, one of the main characters, a young mother named Claire whose husband has given her a venereal disease, begins to get a taste for what other transformations might be possible.
Her anger ran like a strong, black current. It puzzled her how easily love rolled over to become something darker, colder. And beyond the sting was the surprise at how easily it all fell away. Everything that she'd worked toward since she was a girl, finding a man to marry, starting a family, making a home, Travis had soiled with his betrayal, leaving her life split open along the seam that had joined her to him. Her sudden freedom was bewildering and a shock, but pleasing as well, though she couldn't quite put a name to the sensation. She knew she'd have to go back to him, for the children's sake, if not her own. But not yet. Let him stew a while more. Let him drive that car around alone for all the town to see. She knew there'd be gossip, but she was beyond caring about that now.
Samantha Babiak, Member Services Manager
This memoir is a must-read for absolutely everyone. Its visceral, lyrical prose grabs you from the first sentence to the last. Jones weaves his coming (out) of age story with short vignettes that paint a vivid and honest portrait of what it is like to grow up as a gay, Black man in the South.
Jones is a master storyteller. There is so much to learn about craft in terms of narrative structure, language and the possibilities of memoir, but also about trauma, childhood, and family dynamics. I cried, laughed, gasped, and ached reading this. At once healing and heartbreaking, How We Fight For Our Lives is one of my favorite books of the year and I can guarantee, it will be one of yours too.
Meet the Members: Ed Fischer
"The WLT has great online classes, informative newsletters and support/coaching for new writers."
— Ed Fischer
A member of the Writers' League since October, Ed has lived most of his life in the state of confusion. He currently lives in Dallas.
Ed Fischer: I'm new to creative writing. I'm writing creative non-fiction/memoir now.
EF: I'm not sure what they drink in South Africa but I'd love to have a drink with Nelson Mandela. WLT can bring him back, right!
EF: Either an Idiot's Guide to Climbing Palm Trees or The Book of Joy by Douglas Abrams with the Dalai Lama and Bishop Tutu.
EF: The WLT has great online classes, informative newsletters and support/coaching for new writers, even folks from the state of confusion.
EF: No Joke. I think it will get me killed. I actually hope it will…just not too soon… since it will mean I'm having a positive impact.
EF: I'm a fan of Longmire and Ain't Nobody, Nobody by Heather Harper Ellett more than matches Longmire.
EF: I want to use my first book (working title: Walking for Water, Fleeing for Our Lives) as a platform to help impoverished Guatemalans in Guatemala as well as the refugees coming to the US. I expect to continue writing about Guatemalans telling their stories and pushing for policy changes with a heart and sense of responsibility for what "we" have created. My character arc shows a crazy Eddie Fischer chasing attention and adrenaline rushes before and after turning my life around. Instead of bar room brawls and one nighters; I lived among the poor in a shantytown and then the Mayan highlands, walked from Guatemala to Philadelphia raising $350,000 for water systems, was chased through the streets of Guatemala at gun point, landed on a death squad hit list, was taken out to an isolated spot on the Mexican airport to be executed, studied to be a Catholic priest and continue to stand up to injustices and rigged economic and political systems. Oh, yes. I made a whole slew on dumb decisions too.
Thank you, Ed!
Meet the Members: C.M. Mayo
"It's very encouraging that there are so many writers in Texas, and so many opportunities to learn from one another."
— C.M. Mayo
A member of the Writers' League since September, C.M. is between a lot of places right now but her forwarding service is in Wichita Falls, TX.
C.M. Mayo: Fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
CMM: Edith Wharton. I'd ask her about her dogs.
CMM: Tolstoy's War and Peace. That would do for about a month. That's my max for deserted islands.
CMM: That I wish I lived in Austin! But seriously, it's very encouraging that there are so many writers in Texas, and so many opportunities to learn from one another.
CMM: I'm going deep into questions about Texas in the book I've been working on for a while, tentatively titled World Waiting for a Dream: A Turn in Far West Texas. I see myself finishing it, then moving on to complete a collection of essays, many of them about Mexico and the US-Mexico borderlands–– a part of the world that has absorbed me for many years, in fact, most of my books to date. For me, writing is at once a journey towards understanding and play, pure play. Any day I can get some writing done is a very good day.
CMM: I found Ty Cashion's Lone Star Mind: Reimagining Texas History, at once fascinating, thought-provoking, and mega-crunchy––and by the way, it combines well, like a good wine with a good cheese, with Lawrence Wright's God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State.
CMM: My latest book, Meteor, won the Gival Press Award for Poetry. My blog, Madam Mayo, www.madam-mayo.com posts every Monday, the second Monday of every month being dedicated to my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing. And I invite you to listen in anytime at www.cmmayo.com/marfa to the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project, with 20 of 24 projected podcasts to date.
Thank you, C.M.!
Meet the Members: George Arnold
"[I've learned] there exists a small universe of wacky, driven, and skilled individuals who, against all odds, manage to write books and get them published."
— George Arnold
A member of the Writers' League for 17 years, George lives in Garland, TX.
George Arnold: My 25 published books include five genres: Detective mysteries (10), semi-bilingual international adventures for YA (11), non-fiction humor (2), how-to for writers wanting to be published (1), and historical fiction (1).
GA: Winston Churchill, one of the best craft-persons of the English language ever. What do you think would have happened if you had been Prime Minister in 1938 instead of Neville Chamberlain?
GA: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.
GA: I'm not the only one. There exists a small universe of wacky, driven, and skilled individuals who, against all odds, manage to write books and get them published.
GA: I set out to write 25 books. I've accomplished that. I may concentrate on marketing these books and writing short stories, a form that has fascinated me.
GA: Not sure of publication years, but any of the Hackberry Holland books by James Lee Burke are worth reading, if for no other reason than the brilliant use of descriptive language.
GA: I sold the manuscript of my first book to the first publisher I approached. Didn't know it's supposed to be hard. Never had a rejection. Borders Books asked me to write a how-to book on that subject. The result is BestSeller: Must-Read Authors' Guide to Successfully Selling Your Book. I have conducted free 90-minute workshops, principally, in Barnes & Noble stores, to help writes get started in the right direction. Available to conduct workshops if anybody's interested.
Thank you, George!