Lone Star ReviewsMichelle Newby, NBCC,

Contributing Editor

Texas ReadsGlenn Dromgoole

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Texas Reads: Miles and miles of Texas stories

Two Texas books have been published this fall with similar covers but quite different content. Both covers feature photographs looking down a long, empty, yellow-striped Texas road. But that’s the only thing they have in common.

Miles and Miles of Texas: 100 Years of the Texas Highway Department (Texas A&M University Press, $39.95) is a 400-page coffee-table history of what is now called the Texas Department of Transportation. Written by Carol Dawson with Roger Allen Polson and including nearly 400 photos, the book tells the story of the development of Texas’s model highway and farm-to-market road system as the highway department looks ahead to celebrating its centennial next spring.

Willie Nelson actually wrote the book’s foreword, inviting readers to “wave if you see me. I am out there on the road again somewhere.”

Governor Jim Ferguson signed the law creating the Texas Highway Department on April 4, 1917.

The other book is On Texas Backroads: Stories Found Along the Way by veteran Texas author Carlton Stowers ($16.95 paperback). It is a collection of more than forty stories, essays, and musings by Stowers, most of them previously published in the last few years in American Way (the American Airlines magazine) or other magazines or newspapers.

Included are such gems as the author’s remembrance of a perfect day at the ballpark with a grandson, a piece pursuing the far-fetched possibility that Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth actually escaped and made his way to Texas, a touching story about a special Christmas the author fondly recalls, a tribute to Ballinger’s still-operating Carnegie Library, a debate about the origin of the hamburger with a humorous note about how fried potatoes came to be called French fries, a tribute to the chicken-fried steak at Mary’s Café in Strawn, and a tale about how Wichita Falls came to have the world’s smallest skyscraper.

Stowers has written more than forty books and is in the Texas Literary Hall of Fame as well as the Big Country Athletic Hall of Fame. Fellow Texas storyteller Elroy Bode wrote the foreword, proclaiming “There is something here for everyone.”

War stories: Retired newspaper publisher Jerry Morgan of DeLeon didn’t have to leave home to find plenty of interesting stories for a book. In War Stories from DeLeon (Outskirts Press, $20.95 paperback), he relates the World War II stories told by sixteen local men. Realizing that the men were getting on up in years back in 2000, Morgan set out to get their stories in print before they died. The stories first ran in the DeLeon Free Press in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2004.

Of course, it had been more than fifty years since their war experiences and some of the men were a bit fuzzy in their recollections, Morgan said, but “I did not detect any obvious indication of grandiosity or exaggeration in their recounting.” All sixteen men are now deceased, but thanks to Jerry Morgan, their stories live on.

Glenn Dromgoole is co-author of 101 Essential Texas Books. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

>> Check out his previous Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life

Texas Book Festival lists full 2016 lineup

AUSTIN — The Texas Book Festival is excited to host a lineup filled with nationally renowned presend of prominent artists—actors, comedians, d longest-running book festivals in the country, the Festival continues to be free and open to the public thanks to sponsors and volunteers. Additionally, the Festival brings more than 40,000 attendees, live music, kids’ activities, food trucks, book signings and sales, and 100 exhibitors all in and around the State Capitol over two full days. >>READ MORE

Stephen F. Austin State University Press

Paperback, 978-1-62288-117-8, 120 pgs., $16.00; July 2016

“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” —Muriel Rukeyser

This is a collection of stories about stories. The characters are storytellers: journalists, poets, filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, speechwriters. Set on the Texas-Mexico border, primarily in the same county in the Rio Grande Valley, this series of linked stories features a common cast, following them over several years as the border changes, illuminating how these changes affect their lives.

The Road to Llorona Park: Stories is the new collection from chameleon and poet Christopher Carmona, a Pushcart Prize nominee and assistant professor at the Rio Grande Valley campus of the University of Texas. Carmona employs varying points of view—first and third, male and female, older and younger and in-between—to explore common themes of sexual betrayal in many forms, exploitation of both people and the land, and personal and political transformation, frequently spiked with the supernatural. >>READ MORE

Center Street

Hardcover, 978-1-4555-4024-2 (also available as an ebook, an audio book, and on Audible), 304 pgs., $27.00; September 13, 2016

In 2005, twenty-two-year-old Julissa Arce rushed to a hospital emergency room in Lower Manhattan with the symptoms of a heart attack: severe pain in her chest, unable to catch her breath, tingling in her left arm. The episode was diagnosed as an anxiety attack. Two weeks thence she was due to begin her dream job as a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs, a goal she had worked toward since high school. At a time when Arce should have been on top of the world, she was a physical wreck. An undocumented immigrant, living in the United States since she was eleven when her parents brought her to join them, Arce was petrified her secret was about to be exposed. >>READ MORE

LONE STAR LISTENS interviews >> archive

Kay Ellington, Editor and Publisher

10.9.2016 Two authors in one: Christie Craig/C.C. Hunter talks about YA, dyslexia, and “no such thing as plumber’s block”

Houstonian Christie Craig is an award-winning author whose nonfiction and photography have appeared in almost three thousand national magazines. A finalist in more than fifty Romance Writer of America–-sponsored contests, she is known for writing romantic fiction that has both witty humor and a suspenseful tone. But her paranormal young adult series written under the pen name C. C. Hunter have catapulted her career into new levels selling more than one million copies of the Shadow Falls series. She spoke with us via email last week.

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: I understand that you’re originally from Alabama, but now you call Texas home. What brought you to the Lone Star state?

C. C. HUNTER: A good-looking Texan. I had moved to Los Angeles in 1984 and met a Houstonian engineer who, because of the oil bust, had moved to find work. When the economy improved we moved here.

What surprised you about Texas when you arrived here?

I would have to say it was the small-town flavor with big-city rewards. Houston has some of the finest museums, restaurants, and entertainment venues, but still has Southern charm. >>READ MORE

Texas’s only statewide, weekly calendar of book events

Bookish Texas event highlights 10.9.2016
>> GO this week Michelle Newby, Contributing Editor

FESTIVALS AND SPECIAL EVENTS IN TEXAS THIS WEEK: Houston, Dallas, Archer City, IrvingAUSTIN Mon., Oct. 10 BookPeople, Photographer, Screenwriter, & Author BILL WITTLIFF speaking & signing The Devil’s Sinkhole, 7PMHOUSTON Mon., Oct. 10 Brazos Bookstore, David Cay Johnston discusses and signs THE MAKING OF DONALD TRUMP, 7PMHOUSTON Tues., Oct. 11, Murder By the Book, Charlaine Harris will sign and discuss All the Little Liars, her first Aurora Teagarden mystery in 13 years, 6:30PMSAN ANTONIO Tues., Oct. 11 The Twig Bookshop, Paulette Jiles reads and signs NEWS OF THE WORLD, 7PMDALLAS Wed., Oct. 12, SMU – Hughes Trigg Theater, Hispanic Heritage Month at SMU presents Sonia Nazario, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Enrique’s Journey, 6PMSAN MARCOS Thurs., Oct. 13, TSU – Alkek Library, Wittliff Collections presents a visiting writers series reading with Julia Pierpont, 3:30PM (Also appearing at the Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center in Kyle, Fri., Oct. 14, 7:30PM)AUSTIN Fri., Oct. 14, BookWoman, reading and signing for Catherine Musemeche’s new book, Hurt: The Inspiring, Untold Story of Trauma Care, 7PM (Also appearing at B&N – Lakeline Crossing, Austin Sat., Oct. 15, 2PMAUSTIN Fri., Oct. 14, Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, David Todd and Jonathan Ogren discuss and sign The Texas Landscape Project: Nature and People, 12 & 2PMMARBLE FALLS Sat., Oct. 15, Falls on the Colorado Museum, meet and greet with visiting historian Melvin C. Johnson, author of Polygamy on the Pedernales: Lyman Wight’s Mormon Villages in Antebellum Texas, 1845-1858, 10AM

News Briefs 10.9.16

Lone Star Literary’s Tour of Texas, Fall 2016

Back in September, the National Cowboy Symposium and Celebration found us here on our home turf of Lubbock. Among the many cowboy poets and songwriters, storytellers, and book dealers (including our friends at Texas Tech University Press, and bookman Len Ainsworth of Lubbock) was YA novelist S. J. Dahlstrom, signing copies of his Wilder Good for some of his up-and-coming fans.

Next week: coverage of Dallas, where we were back in the Big D during the opening days of the State Fair of Texas.

Friends of Fort Worth Public Library inducts 2016 Texas Literary Hall of Fame author honorees at Nov. 4 event

The Friends of the Fort Worth Public Library are proud to present the seventh biennial Texas Literary Hall of Fame induction celebration Fri., Nov.4, 2016, at Fort Worth Botanic Gardens, Oak Hall, 3200 Botanic Garden Blvd., Fort Worth, TX 76107.

The event begins with an author reception at 6:30 p.m., followed by the induction program at 7:00. Names of the author honorees will be added to a plaque placed below the “Texas Tales” mural that hangs in the West Wing of Fort Worth Central Library.

The 2016 honorees (from top left) are: H. W. Brands, Jane Pattie, George Sessions Perry (1910–1956), Rick Riordan, Joyce Gibson Roach, Dorothy Scarborough (1878–1935), and Carmen Tafolla. >>READ MORE

Abilene’s beloved “Nickel” to celebrate twenty years of art, 1997–2017

Since 1997, the National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature (NCCIL, or as it’s known locally, “the Nickel”), has celebrated picture books while nurturing and fostering creativity through art and literature. The NCCIL is the first museum to exhibit, tour, collect, and preserve original art from the finest children’s literature. Located in Abilene, the Storybook Capital of Texas, the NCCIL collaborates with award-winning artists to produce high-quality exhibitions of their picture book artwork that are distinctive and appealing to museum visitors of all ages. In addition to this unique artistic partnership, following its debut at the NCCIL gallery, each exhibition travels to museums, public libraries, and galleries nationwide. >>READ MORE

Poets Northwest hosts Fall Poetry Workshop Oct. 15

Poets Northwest will host a full day of poetry Sat., Oct.15, 2016, from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. This Poets Northwest event (open to both members and non-members) will feature hands-on writing workshops, a contest, and a group lunch with fellow poets at nearby Gringo’s Mexican Kitchen. For registration details, please email Lynn Grice at texaspoet@hotmail.com.

For more information, visit www.poetsnw.com/workshop.html. >>READ MORE