WHAT TEXANS ARE READING

LONE STAR LISTENS interviews   >> archive

Author interviews by Lone Star Lit staff

8.26.2018   Randy Kennedy on his debut novel, Presidio, reporting for the NYT, and visual art’s resistance to being written about

Randy Kennedy grew up in Plains, Texas on the Llano Estacado and entered the journalism program at UT Austin where he was a stringer for the New York Times. Upon graduation, Kennedy moved to New York City where he was a clerk at the Times before being promoted to reporter two years later. He wrote for the Times for twenty-five years, first as a city reporter and then covering the art world, before leaving to manage special projects for the international art gallery of Hauser & Wirth. A collection of his Times metro columns, Subwayland: Adventures in the World beneath New York, was published by St. Martin’s Griffin in 2004. His debut novel, Presidio, comes out this month from Touchstone Books.

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: How did growing up in Plains, Texas, shape you and impact your writing?

RANDY KENNEDY: I was a bookish kid from the start and not at all built for football, the state religion, so a small, mostly uneventful town gave me long, uninterrupted stretches of reading time. By the age of fourteen or so, I knew I wanted to be a writer. Like many people longing to escape a rural existence, I built up a huge reserve of resentment and grievances, which made for awful, melodramatic writing when I was young. But at least it propelled the writing — and gave me something to atone for later when I wrote a book about West Texas.

You moved to NYC from Austin and wrote for the New York Times for twenty-five years. What or who inspired you to become a journalist?

I fell into journalism in college, at the University of Texas, because I could write pretty well and pretty quickly, and I also had as a role model a cousin, Bob Horton, from Lubbock, who’d had an illustrious career in journalism with the Associated Press and U.S. News and World Report. I thought I’d probably end up making a living as a writer in academia, not journalism. But a daily newspaper, even one run by students, was a thrilling place to be, and I loved it immediately. I started stringing for the New York Times while in college and managed to get a few news pieces into the pages. So, when I graduated in 1991, a Texas friend and I pointed his Honda north toward New York, and I lucked into a job at a Manhattan trade magazine. Nine months later the Times hired me as a clerk and promoted me to reporter within a couple of years.

For the you were a city reporter and also covered the art world for many years. What was it like to move from the Texas Panhandle to the country’s largest metropolis and report on NYC? Were you thrilled and excited or terrified or both? Perhaps neither?

I had Austin as a way station between Plains, Texas (pop. 1400) and New York City. But New York was still overwhelming and sometimes, especially in the early ’90s when crime was so bad and I was sent into crack-war territory with just a notebook in hand, indeed terrifying. For years, I experienced epic mood swings between loving New York with all my soul and wanting to wake up one morning, rent a car, and drive away for good. The pendulum’s arcs are less dramatic now, but every time I look down from a window to see New York City spread out below me during approach, I’m still overcome with joy and wonder that I get to live here. (I have to watch myself, in fact, not to fall into the mindset John Updike once described so astutely: “The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”)  >>READ MORE

Texas’s only statewide, weekly calendar of book events
Bookish Texas event highlights  8.26.2018>> GO this weekMichelle Newby, Contributing Editor

SPECIAL EVENTS THIS WEEK

• Friends of the Dallas Public Library Annual Book Sale, August 24-26
• Explore Other Worlds with Smith County Libraries, Tyler, September 1
• Lone Star Zine Fest, Austin, September 2

ONGOING EVENTS

• Oliver Jeffers: 15 Years of Picturing Books, Abilene, June 7-September 30

AUSTIN  Mon., Aug. 27 BookPeople, DAVID CORBETT speaking & signing The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday, 7PM

AUSTIN  Mon., Aug. 27  LBJ Library, LBJ Library presents Lyndon Johnson’s Birthday celebration, 9AM

HOUSTON  Tues., Aug. 28 Murder By the Book, Steve Hamilton will sign and discuss Dead Man Running, 6:30PM

HOUSTON  Wed, Aug. 29  Houston Public Library, Attica Locke discussing her latest book, Bluebird Bluebird (in conversation with a Houston Chronicle guest reporter), 6:30PM conversation with Bryan Mealer), 7PM

BRYAN  Thurs., Aug. 30  SEAD Gallery & Bookshop, Author Talk with Bob Pankey, 6:30PM

DALLAS  Thurs., August 30 Wild Salsa, The Writer’s Garret hosts “Dine Out. Do Good. Back-to-School Fundraising Dinner,” 5PM

SAN ANTONIO  Fri., August 31  The Twig Book Shop, Carmen Tafolla reading and signing New and Selected Poems, 6PM

TYLER  Fri., August 31  Half Price Books, 1st anniversary celebration: live music, birthday cake and a donation to The Literacy Council of Tyler, TBA

EL PASO  Sat., Sept. 1B&N – Sunland Park, Félix Valenzuela signing The Salsa Culture Invades America, 2PM

EDINBURG  Sun., Sept. 2  Museum of South Texas History, Sunday Speaker Series: “Texas or Territory? The 1850 Brownsville Separatist Movement” featuring Joseph Fox, 2PM

News Briefs 8.26.18

Shame the Stars by Guadalupe García McCall chosen for 2018 Texas’ Great Read

The Texas Center for the Book at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission has chosen Shame the Stars by Guadalupe García McCall as Texas’ Great Read for 2018. Every year, the Library of Congress asks each state to select a book that represents the state’s literary landscape to highlight at the National Book Festival.

Texas Center for the Book invites Texans to read Shame the Stars and to take part in a statewide book club by using the hashtag #TXGreatRead. For more information on the 2018 Texas Great Read program, visit www.tsl.texas.gov/greatreadtexas.  >>READ MORE

Writers’ League of Texas 2017 Book Awards announced

The Writers’ League of Texas has announced their 2017 Texas Book Award winners, finalists, and Discovery Prize winners. Each category includes a winner and several finalists and a Discovery Prize.

Fiction

Winner: Spoils by Brian Van Reet

Finalists:

Disasters in the First World by Olivia Clare

Hollow by Owen Egerton

White Fur by Jardine Libaire

Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

Wait Till You See Me Dance by Deb Olin Unferth

Discovery Prize Winner: Fight Like A Man and Other Stories We Tell Our Children by Christine Granados >>READ MORE

Odessa Arts receives Big Read grant for coming year

Arts organization one of 79 organizations nationwide to receive an NEA Big Read grant; will read and aelebrate Station 11 from September 11 to November 25

ODESSA — Odessa Arts is a recipient of a grant of $15,000 to host the NEA Big Read in Odessa, Texas, during the coming year. A national initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest, the NEA Big Read broadens our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the joy of sharing a good book. Odessa Arts is one of 79 nonprofit organizations to receive an NEA Big Read grant to host a community reading program between September 2018 and June 2019.

The NEA Big Read in Odessa Arts will focus on Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel. Activities will take place September 11 to November 25, 2018.  >>READ MORE

Dallas’s Arts & Letters Live announces fall 2018 lineup

DALLAS — In its 27th season, Arts & Letters Live has announced tits fall 2018 author lineup. As always, the list is an impressive lineup of award winners and best sellers, including Sarah Bird (Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen, September 20), Doris Kearns Goodwin (Leadership in Turbulent Times, September 26), Andre Dubus III (Gone So Long, October 7), and Jesmyn Ward (Sing, Unburied, Sing, November 1).

Arts & Letters Live is a literary and performing arts series produced by the Dallas Museum of Art that features award-winning authors and performers of regional, national, and international acclaim. The series is recognized for its creative multidisciplinary programming — combining literature with visual arts, music, and film — and for commissioning new work inspired by works of art in the museum’s collection and special exhibitions.  >>READ MORE

 ——­——— A D V E R T I S E M E N T —————

Lone Star Listens compilation available summer 2018, for readers, fans, and writers everywhere

The present generation of Texas authors is the most diverse ever in gender, age, and ethnicity, and in subject matter as well.

Week in, week out, Lone Star Literary has interviewed a range of Texas-related authors with a cross-section of genre and geography. To capture this era in Texas letters, we’re pleased to bring you

Lone Star Listens:

Texas Authors on Writing and Publishing

edited by Kay Ellington and Barbara Brannon; introduction by Clay Reynolds

Available in trade paper, library hardcover, and ebook Summer 2018

360 pages, with b/w illustrations and index

Featuring novelists, poets, memoirists, editors, and publishers, including:

Rachel  Caine • Chris  Cander • Katherine  Center • Chad S. Conine • Sarah  Cortez • Elizabeth  Crook • Nan  Cuba • Carol  Dawson • Patrick  Dearen • Jim Donovan • Mac Engel • Sanderia  Faye • Carlos Nicolás Flores • Ben Fountain • Jeff  Guinn • Stephen  Harrigan • Cliff  Hudder • Stephen Graham Jones • Kathleen Kent • Joe R. Lansdale • Melissa Lenhardt • Attica Locke • Nikki  Loftin • Thomas  McNeely • Leila  Meacham • John  Pipkin • Joyce Gibson Roach • Antonio  Ruiz-Camacho • Lisa  Sandlin • Donna  Snyder • Mary Helen Specht • Jodi  Thomas • Amanda Eyre Ward • Ann  Weisgarber • Donald Mace Williams

As a collection of insights into the writing and publishing life, the book will be useful in creative writing classes (not just in Texas alone) and other teaching settings, as well as for solo reading and study—and a great Texas reference volume.

• Examination and review copies will be available fall 2017 in watermarked pdf format.