2017 Kids’ Summer Reading: Check it out!

sponsored by Blue Wilow Bookshop

From read-to-me books to early readers, chapter books to middle readers to YA, you’ll find these terrific new titles at your neighborhood bookshop or online. >>READ MORE

LONE STAR LISTENS interviews   >> archive

Kay Ellington, Editor and Publisher

7.9.2017  Jan Reid talks about his long career as journalist, biographer, and novelist

Jan Reid has lived the quintessential life of a Texas writer — born in West Texas, raised in Wichita Falls, and a Dobie Paisano fellow following grad school at UT Austin. He was nurturing a fledging reporter’s career at the New Braunfels newspaper when he pitched a few story ideas to a brand-new magazine called Texas Monthly in 1973. Since then he has had a front row seat to history in the Lone Star State—from the rise of Redneck Rock to the rise — and fall — of Ann Richards and Karl Rove. Reid himself was taken down by a robber’s bullet in Mexico, but came back to walk and work again. Last week, he was in Marfa at an event with Joe Ely promoting his latest novel The Sins of the Younger Sons when he spoke with us via email for this interview.

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: For a generation of Texans, Texas Monthly was their Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner all delivered in their mailbox—long-form wordsmithing that spoke truth to power. How did you get the call to join the storied publication?

JAN REID: In early 1973 I was a few months out of graduate school, writing well enough but just learning the craft of reporting at small newspapers. On my way to such a job at the New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung, I heard about Texas Monthly and dropped off a couple of unpublished nonfiction pieces. They had formed the staff but not brought out their first issue. To my great surprise some days later I got a short note from Greg Curtis, who had been Bill Broyles’s first hire and later succeeded him as the magazine’s most long-standing editor in chief. Greg said they couldn’t use those pieces but they liked my writing and hoped I would get back to them if I had any ideas. I did, initially for a brief story about a San Antonio “ice house” robbery, a hundred-mile shootout with TV copters trying to follow, and a wild chase that ended with a hundred bullet holes just in the dead driver’s door after a rollover in New Braunfels.  >>READ MORE

Texas’s only statewide, weekly calendar of book events

Bookish Texas event highlights  7.9.2017
>> GO this week   Michelle Newby, Contributing Editor

News Briefs 7.9.17

Archer City Story Center offers two workshops in July

ARCHER CITY — The Archer City Story Center is offering two workshops in July. “Writing the Non-Fiction Book Proposal” will be held July 14–16, 2017, and “Literary Nonfiction Workshop” runs from Sun., July 23 through Sun., July 30.

The Archer City Story Center is a program of the Royal Theater, a non-profit theater group operating in Archer City since 1993 with its first production, Tumbleweeds. The Royal Theater, a small-town silver screen, was the inspiration for Larry McMurtry’s 1966 novel The Last Picture Show, which was adapted into the Oscar-winning 1971 film starring Cybill Shepherd and Jeff Bridges. A fire gutted the theater in 1965 and the building stood in ruins for decades before being rebuilt by the Archer Community Foundation in 2000. The new theater sits adjacent to the original space, which now houses outdoor amphitheater programs.

In its new life, the 230-seat theater quickly became a leader in North Texas and beyond as a listening and live performance venue as well as a gathering spot for the arts. For generations, the Royal Theater has been more than the symbol of an iconic book and movie. It has been the soul of the town, a place for the community to gather with, as McMurtry once said, “something to do.”  >>READ MORE

Texas authors, performers featured at Texas Plains Trail Region Roundup, July 19–21, in Plainview

PLAINVIEW—The 9th annual Tourism & Preservation Roundup, a heritage tourism conference presented by the Texas Plains Trail Region, will feature authors Joe W. Specht on West Texas music history and Ryann Ford, creator and photographer of The Last Stop, during its three days of programming, July 19–21, 2017, in Plainview.

Destination marketers, museum workers, parks personnel, elected officials, and followers of Texas history are all welcome. Registration for the full conference, which includes:

• Wednesday afternoon tour of the Jimmy Dean Museum and other museums on the Wayland Baptist University campus, 400–5:30 pm;

• Wednesday evening reception (cash bar) and barbecue banquet at the Plainview Country Club, with a talk on West Texas music heritage by historian Joe W. Specht, author of The Roots of Texas Music and The Women There Don’t Treat You Mean: Abilene in Song, preceded by Texas piano stylings of Lucy Dean Record and cowboy poetry performances by students of Boys Ranch, beginning at 5:30 pm;

• Thursday morning and afternoon sessions on museums, historic highways, trails, and more, including a presentation by Ryann Ford on The Last Stop: Vanishing Rest Stops of the American Roadside;

• Thursday lunch with a program on the new Texas Music Trail;

• Thursday evening performance at the Fair Theatre, with actress Zoe Kirkpatrick of Post as Cynthia Ann Parker in the late Marybeth Little Weston’s one-woman show “The Comanche with Blue Eyes”, 7:00 pm;

• Friday hands-on session on publicizing your community’s music heritage, 9:00–11:00 am.

• Vicki Hamblen, author of the revised edition of E. Hamblen’s The Rim to Rim Road: Will Hamblen and the Crossing of Texas’ Palo Duro Canyon, will also be on hand to sign copies of her book, publishedin 2014 by Texas Plains Trail Books.

The all-inclusive registration fee (dinner and lunch included) is only $99.00. Tickets to “The Comanche with Blue Eyes” are only $10 ($15 at the door). Special hotel rates are available at the Comfort Suites for overnight guests.

A full schedule of all presentations, sessions, and activities is at /www.TexasPlainsTrail/Roundup, along with online reservation and ticket reservations.  >>READ MORE

Marfa to host first Poetry Festival Aug. 9–13

The first annual Marfa Poetry Festival—organized by Canarium Books and friends and hosted by Marfa Book Company and Hotel Saint George—will begin the evening of August 9 and end the afternoon of August 13, 2017. There will be readings, a book fair, film screenings, exhibitions, conversations, live music, and more. All events are free and open to the public. >>READ MORE

Cortez, Vanishing Points garner prestigious awards

wards in the U.S. celebrating achievements in Latino literature.  >>READ MORE

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

Lone Star Listens compilation available Aug. 1, 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 Fall 2017

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.

• Lone Star Listens will be available for preorder May 31 and will ship around Aug. 1.
• Examination and review copies will be available May 31 in watermarked pdf format.

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