{"id":1352,"date":"2018-12-31T16:49:54","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T16:49:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1352"},"modified":"2018-12-31T16:49:54","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T16:49:54","slug":"lone-star-listensauthor-interviews-by-kay-ellington-lsll-publisher-51","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1352","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star ListensAuthor interviews by Kay Ellington, LSLL Publisher"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Each week Lone Star Literary profiles a newsmaker in Texas books and letters, including authors, booksellers, publishers.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span>Kay Ellington has worked in management for a variety of media companies, including Gannett, Cox Communications, Knight-Ridder, and the New York Times Regional Group, from Texas to New York to California to the Southeast and back again to Texas. She is the coauthor, with Barbara Brannon, of the Texas novels The Paragraph Ranch<\/span>A Wedding at the Paragraph Ranch.<\/span><\/p>\n

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/span><\/p>\n

Dan Jenkins<\/span> is an award-winning sportswriter and a best-selling novelist. After fifteen years of writing for newspapers in Fort Worth and Dallas, he became nationally known for his stories in Sports Illustrated<\/span> for more than a quarter century, and since then for his articles in Golf Digest<\/span>. Three of his bestselling novels\u2014Semi-Tough,<\/span> Dead Solid Perfect,<\/span> and Baja Oklahoma<\/span>\u2014were made into movies. Jenkins is one of only three writers to be inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame; he has received the PEN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sportswriting; and the Associated Press Sports Editors named him the 33rd recipient of the Red Smith Award, the highest honor in his profession. Jenkins and his wife, June, live in Texas.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

6.17.2018\u00a0 \u201cMy entire life has been a great gig\u201d: veteran Texas sportswriter Dan Jenkins on opportunities and opinions, and cranking out new books as an octogenarian <\/p>\n

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Dan Jenkins has spent seven decades writing about Texas<\/span> \u2014 both in journalism and fiction. Shown above left with his daughter, Sally Jenkins,<\/span> a sports journalist with the Washington Post,<\/span> and above right with his late contemporaries Gary Cartwright, Larry L. King,<\/span> and Bud Shrake,<\/span> who created their own brand of Texas New Journalism for the greater part of three decades, Jenkins honored Lone Star Lit with an interview via email this week. His newest book is forthcoming in August 2018.<\/p>\n

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE:<\/span> Where did you grow up, Dan, and how would you describe those days?<\/span><\/p>\n

DAN JENKINS:<\/span> I was born in Fort Worth and grew up on the south side of town in the neighborhood of Paschal High and TCU, where I was schooled. I was an only child and was spoiled rotten by the grandparents and aunts and uncles who raised me. Everybody in the family loved sports, football and golf especially, so I did too. They encouraged it. I started playing golf at the age of eight. I was blessed with a happy childhood.<\/p>\n

Golf and journalism have been a part of your life forever. How did you get started with both?<\/p>\n

All I ever wanted to be was a journalist, a sportswriter in particular. I don’t think I was ever a kid. I read the front page, the war news, and the sports section of the daily papers instead of the comics.<\/p>\n

You started work as a journalist during the Fort Worth newspaper wars of the 1950s. Some would call that a golden era of journalism. What were those days like for you?<\/p>\n

Blackie Sherrod<\/span> hired me as a writer at the now-gone Fort Worth Press<\/span> right out of Paschal High. I went to TCU with a byline. That would tend to make a freshman arrogant if he hadn\u2019t received proper training in the home.<\/p>\n

The Fifties at the Press<\/span> was a great time. We were always chasing the bigger, richer Star-Telegram,<\/span> but never caught them. Still, for a period we had a small but powerful staff that consisted of Blackie, me, Bud Shrake, Gary Cartwright, <\/span>and Jerre Todd.<\/span> We wrote for each other, and had the freedom to experiment.<\/p>\n

Which sports journalists inspired you, and did you emulate any of them?<\/p>\n

I was totally taken with the humorists, and they are still my literary heroes \u2014 John Lardner <\/span>(one of Ring\u2019s sons), Red Smith, Damon Runyon, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Dorothy Parker.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the 1960s you had made such a mark as a sports journalist that you made the move to Sports Illustrated<\/span> at a time when the magazine had one of the largest audiences of any media. What are your takeaways from your days with the magazine?<\/p>\n

I made Sports Illustrated<\/span> discover me by selling them four or five freelance pieces\u00a0 in \u201962. They hired me; I went there the first\u00a0 week of \u201963 and stayed twenty-five years. That was where I also became a novelist. I\u2019m now working on my thirteenth novel, and my current collection is my 12th non fiction book to be published.<\/p>\n

I was at at the right time, and helped make it so. We had a powerhouse lineup of writers. It was a great time. The magazine sent me all over the world. It opened a lot of doors.<\/p>\n

From Sports Illustrated<\/span> you moved to writing books, and then Hollywood came calling to make your books into movies. How would you describe those experiences?<\/p>\n

While I was at I had three of my novels made into, movies, and two the screenplays for two of them. It was fun, but I quickly learned that movie-making can be boring. And Hollywood is not about art. It\u2019s about money only. And nobody knows whether a film is any good, especially those who are making it, until it makes money.<\/p>\n

After seven decades as a journalist, you made the move to social media, and you\u2019re tweeting and engaging a new generation of fans. What made you decide to get into social media?<\/p>\n

\u00a0I took early retirement from SI in \u201985 and went to Golf Digest,<\/span> which is where I’ve been ever since. It was Digest<\/span> that asked me to tweet along with writing essays. I took to it immediately. What\u2019s best about it is, you get to spill thoughts that would not fit in the theme of a story.<\/p>\n

Tell us about your latest book.<\/p>\n

My latest book, Sports Makes You Type Faster,<\/span> is a bunch of things I want to say about a lot of sports. Mostly attempts at humor, but a good bit of forgotten history, and heavy on personal opinion. It\u2019s all fresh stuff.\u00a0 I do try to keep in mind the words of Dorothy Parker: \u201cWit is grounded in truth \u2014 jokes are just calisthenics with words.\u201d<\/p>\n

What is your creative process like? Do you write every day?<\/p>\n

I used to be a typing machine \u2014 twelve hours a day. My three great kids joke that they used go to bed hearing me clacking on the old manual typewriter, and wake in the morning to the same sound. Now it\u2019s only a few hours each day, never at night.<\/p>\n

What’s been the best thing about your life \u2014so far?<\/p>\n

My entire life has been a great gig. I have a gorgeous wife, June, of nearly 60 years, three great kids \u2014 our daughter Sally Jenkins<\/span> is an award-winning sports columnist for the Washington Post.<\/span> I would do it all over again, and not change a thing. Other than some sentences and paragraphs, perhaps.<\/p>\n

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Praise for the work of Dan Jenkins<\/h1>\n

\u201c…the best sportswriter in America.”
\u2014Larry King<\/p>\n

\u201cDan Jenkins is the nearest thing to Ring Lardner this generation has ever seen. No one has captured the essential lunacy of the twentieth-century sports (and TV) scene as accurately and hilariously as this.\u201d
\u2014Los Angeles Times<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDan Jenkins is a comic genius.\u201d
\u2014Don Imus<\/p>\n

\u201cDan Jenkins has been among America’s best and funniest sportswriters for more than six decades.\u201d \u2014The New York Times<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cJenkins is hilarious, providing more laughs per page than any other writer in the \u2018bidness.\u2019\u201d
\u2014People<\/span><\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Each week Lone Star Literary profiles a newsmaker in Texas books and letters, including authors, booksellers, publishers. Kay Ellington has worked in management for a variety of media companies, including Gannett, Cox Communications, Knight-Ridder, and the New York Times Regional Group, from Texas to New York to California to the Southeast and back again to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1352\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}