{"id":644,"date":"2023-12-02T10:45:15","date_gmt":"2023-12-02T10:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=644"},"modified":"2023-12-02T10:45:15","modified_gmt":"2023-12-02T10:45:15","slug":"695","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=644","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Listens: Donald Mace Williams"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Donald Mace Williams of Canyon is a true Renaissance man \u2014 or perhaps Anglo-Saxon or Texas frontiersman. His most recent novel, The Sparrow and the Hall<\/em> is set in seventh-century Northumbria, but his impressive verse chapbook, “Wolfe”, presents an adaptation of Beowulf<\/em> set in 1890s West Texas. A former city editor of the Amarillo Globe-News<\/em> who has taught at three universities (including journalism at Baylor and English at West Texas A&M) and worked for papers from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram<\/em> to Newsday<\/em>, Williams is our guest for a special Lone Star Listens interview for Labor Day weekend.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE:<\/strong> Don, tell us a bit about your background, especially in Texas, where you earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at our state\u2019s universities.<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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DONALD MACE WILLIAMS:<\/strong> I was born in Abilene and had lived in four states before I was five years old. But my parents, both of them native Texans, kept coming back to Texas, as I did when I was grown. Apart from my dad\u2019s restlessness, which I inherited, the family kept moving when I was small because somewhere, somewhere, there must be a job.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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It was the time of the Great Depression, which I, since I was born on Black Thursday (October 24, 1929), obviously started. My parents, my older brother, and I lived in two big canvas tents for a couple of years, in first the Oregon woods and then the South Texas brush country, near Uvalde. We kids loved it, of course. So did our mother, if you can believe it, but my dad, out of duty to us and against his conservative principles, eventually took a job as an educational adviser with FDR\u2019s Civilian Conservation Corps.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Many more moves then, in and out of Texas. When I was a newspaper reporter in Washington state and homesick for Texas, I found a job with the Amarillo Globe-News<\/em>. There I met my wife-to-be, Nell Osborne, and more moves followed. I worked for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram<\/em> and other newspapers for fifteen years with only two and a half years of college. Finally, in the hope that a college teaching job would give me more time to write fiction and poetry, I got two degrees in English from Texas Tech, then a Ph.D. from the University of Texas. Since I was forty-five by then and my doctorate was in Beowulfian prosody, I found no work in my academic field, taught journalism for seven years at three universities, including Baylor, then went back to newspaper work. My last job was as writing coach and weekly columnist for the Wichita Eagle<\/em>. I retired in 1998, since when Nell and I have lived in Canyon.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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You\u2019ve both practiced and taught journalism, and you\u2019ve written for papers large and small. What persuaded you to pursue a career in news?<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

My dad, who had been, among other things, a reporter in Dallas and Boston, was my inspiration. Besides, words had always interested me, and newspaper work seemed a way to use them for more or less a living. For most of my career, newspapers were still thriving. It was easy to get reporting and editing jobs, and I often found the work and the atmosphere exciting. Still, I really wanted to write things that might not vanish in a day. Partly because I had been a zealous student of classical singing since my late teens and spent a couple of hours every day vocalizing and studying music, and partly also because I was plain lazy, I couldn\u2019t or didn\u2019t find time for much \u201cserious\u201d writing. Nearly all of that has come since my retirement.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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When did you know you wanted to be a writer?<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I must have known somehow when, as a five-year-old, having been taught to read by my parents and brother, I wallowed in Robert Louis Stevenson\u2019s A Child\u2019s Garden of Verses<\/em> and A. A. Milne\u2019s Winnie-the-Pooh<\/em>. Next came The Adventures of Tom Sawyer<\/em>, which I practically memorized, Mark Van Doren\u2019s wonderful Anthology of World Poetry<\/em>, and reams of mostly awful stuff, in pulp magazines and Big Little Books, about cowboys, frontier heroes, athletes, and such. I hope the trash eventually set me a helpful example of how not to write. But I don\u2019t know that I wrote much outside of cute little themes for school until I was in my mid-teens, when I wrote a few poems and short-short stories, all of them fortunately lost. So to answer the question, I must have been in my early twenties before I wanted to write.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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These days you\u2019re retired in Canyon, Texas, where you\u2019ve frequently hiked the trails of Palo Duro Canyon \u2014 an inspiration for some of your writing. What brought you to the Panhandle?<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In 1955, I had been in California and Washington state for more than three years. My employer in Spokane, The Spokesman-Review<\/em>, had sent me out to Moses Lake in the West Texas\u2013like middle of Washington to cover five small towns in the Columbia Basin irrigation project. Though I reported all kinds of news, it wasn\u2019t good experience for me. No city editor gave me assignments or told me how I should have written this story or that. I had no experience of the extremely valuable kind of newsroom comradeship that goes to coffee and tells jokes about dangling participles. And most of all, the settlers of the irrigation project were young veterans, their wives, and their young children. young children. In my eight or ten months in Moses Lake I did not meet one unmarried, uncommitted girl. That was what brought me to Amarillo, where I did indeed meet such a girl, the one to whom I have now been married for nearly sixty years. As for what brought me, and her, to Canyon after retirement, there were two main factors. First, we loved and missed the Panhandle. Second, Nell\u2019s mother lived in Pampa, where we could see her often. We\u2019ve lived in Canyon better than seventeen years now and have always been glad of our choice.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Aside from news stories, you write in numerous genres and styles \u2014 including fiction, nonfiction, and epic and lyric poetry. Your first full-length book, now available as Italian <\/a>POWs and a Texas Church: The Murals of St. Mary\u2019s<\/em> (Texas Tech University Press, 2001), and your most recent, The Sparrow and the Hall: Love and Betrayal in Anglo-Saxon England<\/em> (Bagwyn Books, 2015) are worlds apart! How have you mastered such a wide range?<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know about mastery, but thanks. I guess I\u2019ve written in a variety of genres simply because I have always loved reading all of them, from Milton to Gibbon to Frost to Faulkner. In my writing, with ideas coming less and less often these days, I have taken up translation, especially of Rilke\u2019s poems. That way, I don\u2019t have to have ideas\u2014Mr. Rilke supplies them for me, and all I have to do is fall in love with one poem after another and have each of them in turn sit for its sound-portrait. Maybe I\u2019ll still have an idea of my own once in a while, too. We\u2019ll see.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Your epic poem, Wolfe,<\/a> takes an ancient tale and sets it in the Texas Panhandle. What inspired you to recreate the hero Beowulf as the 19th-century cowboy Billy Wolfe?<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Ignorance, to tell you the truth. Although I wrote my dissertation at UT on the prosody of Beowulf<\/em>, I never felt that I fully understood or appreciated the poem. Beowulf\u2019s heroism never moved me until the last episode, when he was old and nonetheless took on the fiery dragon. Maybe, I told myself, if I could imagine a more or less plausible, more or less modern recasting of the story, I could then think back 1,400 years, reinstating the substitutions, and come closer to the intended empathy.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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I had long been struck by the daring of certain cowboys on the XIT Ranch who crawled into lobo wolves\u2019 dens with a pistol in one hand and a candle in the other and fired when they saw the occupants\u2019 eyes glowing in the light. (J. Evetts Haley tells about the wolfers in The XIT Ranch of Texas.) Since the new story needed a touch of the supernatural, I took care not to identify the cattle-raiding, man-killing monsters in \u201cWolfe\u201d but only to suggest that they might be uncanny re-emergences of a long-extinct superwolf that had lived in those parts. It was fun writing \u201cWolfe.\u201d And I\u2019m still not sure I appreciate Beowulf<\/em>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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I wrote The Sparrow and the Hall<\/em> for somewhat the same reason I wrote \u201cWolfe.\u201d I wanted to get a feel for life on a small farm in Anglo-Saxon times. So I read for more than a year, spent a week on site in Northumbria to get close to the terrain and the weather, and then, in the writing, imagined how rural and small-town West Texas people would have acted back then and over there. The central character, Edgar, is in fact loosely patterned on my wife\u2019s late brother, Jim Osborne, who farmed near Panhandle. Writers who find rejection discouraging, by the way, might like to know that Bagwyn Books was the seventy-sixth publisher I had tried with The Sparrow<\/em>. If Bagwyn hadn\u2019t taken it, I was going to quit trying.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Which Texas writers have influenced you as reader and writer?<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

One was the man I named above, Haley. Both the XIT book and his biography of Charles Goodnight carried me along with their enthusiasm, though I doubted that Goodnight was as benign a character as Haley would have had us believe. I\u2019d like to say that Stephen Harrigan, with The Gates of the Alamo<\/em>, influenced my writing of The Sparrow<\/em>, but the fact is that I had finished that manuscript before I read Harrigan\u2019s powerful novel. No doubt Larry McMurtry\u2019s characters and dialogue, at least those of his first two or three books, got favorably stuck in my mind and ear, and I imagine his later efforts, especially Lonesome Dove<\/em>, influenced me negatively, as in Don\u2019t, for heaven\u2019s sake, write like that. Elroy Bode\u2019s buffed straightforwardness has to have affected me as a writer. The prose of A. G. Mojtabai impresses me as something unattainably (by me) subtle and precise. And my late friend Richard Phelan, in his book Texas Wild <\/em>and especially in his many letters and e-mails to me, showed a keen critical faculty, a delightful wit, and a fastidious simplicity. Since coming to Canyon I have also read and admired the work of several Texas poets, including William Wenthe, Larry Thomas, Wendy Barker, and Catharine Savage Brosman.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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What do you feel is the role of form in poetry today?<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Modern poets keep saying that their work, far from being mere prose set off in lines, actually has form and musicality. I keep trying to understand, but really, I have to agree with Frost about playing tennis without a net. The trouble is, not many professors and editors think as I do. I write almost exclusively in meter and often in rhyme, and I find that only a few stout hangers-on among editors of literary magazines will readily look at what I submit. Sorry, I guess, but I grew up on real form, real musicality, as in Keats, Goethe, Dickinson, Frost. As for the role of formal poetry today, I have to say it\u2019s minimal and will get more so as fewer people grow up on the masters. And civilization will have sunk another few inches into the muck.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Print journalism has changed drastically in the past decade, with digital content, online delivery, citizen journalism and blogs. (This publication, for instance, was \u201cborn digital\u201d in 2015 and reaches readers via website and email.) What\u2019s the future of the newspaper industry, as you see it?<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I suspect that real newspapers, printed on paper, will hang around as long as the muscles of people my age and maybe my children\u2019s ages remember the acts of unfolding, spreading, and reading. But the surviving papers will also have strong presences online, as many of them already do. Those will be less and less like newspapers of sixty years ago. Graphics and photographs\u2014often \u201cshopped\u201d\u2014will keep on shouldering words aside. Fewer and fewer reporters and editors will write well and read critically. Fewer subscribers will know the difference.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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And yet, can\u2019t we hope that some readers of discrimination will always demand quality in newspapers, so that a few big papers will be able to keep going? Those would have to cover large circulation areas, maybe the whole country, the way the Wall Street Journal<\/em> does. But what will come of stories about drug arrests on I-40? Where will the obits go? I persist in thinking of such matters as reported in black type on white paper. Wishful thinking, and wistful, I know. For the most part, I\u2019m afraid paper papers are going the way of rhyme and meter.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Last question, for our Labor Day weekend. You\u2019re an outdoors enthusiast, familiar with Texas and the West. What\u2019s one destination you believe no visitor to Texas should miss?<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I thought of Palo Duro Canyon, of the Big Bend, and even of ordinary ranch country on the High Plains, which I love. But no. Nothing in Texas can really approach the springtime display of flowers, especially bluebonnets, in a large part of the state, from northeast of Tyler to southwest of Kerrville. I doubt that any other state has flower scenery to match.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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* * * * *<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

An excerpt from Donald Mace Williams\u2019s “Wolfe”<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Tha com of more   under misthleo\u00feum<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Grendel gongan,   Godes yrre b\u00e6r. \u2014Beowulf<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

When he arrived at the cave or den, the hunter took a short candle in one hand, his six-shooter in the other, wiggled into the den, and shot \u2026 by the reflection of the light in her eyes.  \u2014J. Evetts Haley, The XIT Ranch of Texas<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Fat Herefords grazed on rich brown grass.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Tom Rogers watched three winters pass,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Then, all his ranch paid off, designed<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

A bunkhouse, biggest of its kind<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In that wide stretch of Caprock lands,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

To house the army of top hands<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

That rising markets and good rain<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Forced and allowed him to maintain.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

At night sometimes a cowboy sang<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Briefly to a guitar\u2019s soft twang<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

While others talked, wrote letters home,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Or stared into brown-bottle foam.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Rogers, white-haired as washed gyp rock,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Stood winding Cyclops, the tall clock,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

One night and heard the sleepy sound<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Of song across the strip of ground<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Between the bunkhouse and the house.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

He smiled and dropped his hand. Near Taos,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

At night, pensive and wandering out<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

From camp, a young surveyor-scout,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

He had heard singing just that thin<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Rise from the pueblo. Go on in,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

A voice kept saying, but he stood,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

One arm hooked round a cottonwood<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

For strength until, ashamed, he whirled<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

And strode back to the measured world.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Strange, how that wild sound in the night<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Had drawn him, who was hired to sight<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Down lines that tamed. So now, he thought,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Winding until the spring came taut,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This clock, this house, these wide fenced plains,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

These little towns prove up our pains.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

He went to bed, blew out the light<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

On the nightstand, said a good night<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

To Elsa, and dropped off to sleep<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Hearing a last faint twang.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

                                                  From deep<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In the fierce breaks came a reply,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

A drawn-out keening, pitched as high<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

And savage as if cowboy songs,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

To strange, sharp ears, summed up all wrongs<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Done to the wilderness by men,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Fences, and cows. With bared teeth then,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Ears back, the apparition skulked<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Across the ridges toward the bulked,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Repulsive forms of house and shed,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Till now not neared. The next dawn\u2019s red<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Revealed a redder scene. The pen<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Where calving heifers were brought in<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In case of need lay strewn and gory,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Each throat and belly slashed, a story<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Of rage, not hunger; nothing gone<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

But one calf\u2019s liver. His face drawn,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Rogers bent close to find a track<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In the hard dirt. Then he drew back,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Aghast. Though it was mild and fair,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

He would always thereafter swear<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

There hung above that broad paw print<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

With two deep claw holes a mere hint,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The sheerest wisp, of steam. He stood<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Silent. When finally he could,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

He said, \u201cWell, I guess we all know<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

What done this. No plain lobo, though.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve seen a few. They never killed<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

More than to get their belly filled.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This one\u2019s a devil. Look at that.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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