These were my marching orders to the nineteen aspiring writers assembled for the opening day of class at the Spur Hotel. One or two stood around afterwards asking exactly what I wanted them to do, and how I wanted them to do it. But most of the students stormed out the double glass doors of the Spur like thirsty cattle stampeding toward the nearest watering hole.
They left their footprints all over Archer County—along the dusty back roads, the banks of the Little Wichita River, inside the jail and outside the Royal Theater, at Pat’s Café, the rocky Grotto to the Blessed Virgin, the American Legion and its broken brotherhood, and the cemetery on the outskirts of town. They left their mark along cattle trails wandering through the McMurtry Ranch and other pastures in Archer County—a once vast, untamed frontier where Comanche and Kichai Indians terrorized the settlers and where the U.S. Cavalry terrorized them.
Everywhere they went they found places, landscape, creatures, characters and images that were so far outside their everyday experience that they might just as well have been walking across Uranus. Traveling the back roads at night, they heard packs of coyotes howling across the prairie, and spotted a few of the yellow-eyed dogs hiding in a rocky ridge awaiting their next meal.
Meandering across a high plateau in search of Indian burial grounds, one student heard a loud hiss and leaped like a billy goat across two big boulders to escape what he figured must have been the sharp fangs of a rattler poised to strike. Turns out it was a buzzard that didn’t like company.
They watched horses clopping down Center Street alongside buses filled with book buyers from Dallas coming to visit McMurtry’s book ranch. They met drillers and roughnecks, wranglers and waitresses, who spoke a different language, dressed in different clothes and considered them all “outsiders.”
They filled their notebooks with prose about this strange place and its people, and kept coming back for more. Larry’s sister, Sue, and brother, Charlie, dropped in for a few lessons in literary nonfiction at the Spur. So did several authors, journalists and students who joined our tribe after hearing about our ways and customs of writing, revision and late-night workshops.
Mitch Land, director of the Mayborn Institute, came down for a day, brought his mother and dad, and heard my tribe speaking as one, imploring him to make the Spur Hotel a permanent writing center, a homestead for a new narrative nonfiction writing and publishing program. Dr. Land was hooked and we’ve labored to transform that dream into reality. The Mayborn Institute’s first literary nonfiction journal, Spurs of Inspiration, is the first fruit of our labors.
One student, Brantley Hargrove, says last year’s class “set me on fire for writing.” He’s already moved to Uvalde County to become a rancher and writer just like McMurtry. Paul Knight, co-editor of Spurs of Inspiration, is moving back to Archer County after he graduates in the fall to write a book about the Old West.
As the class was winding down last summer, Paul had a hard time pulling himself away. In his journal, he wrote, “I’m beginning to fear the end of this place, not being here, not having this place to come to. It’s awful and I want to be here forever, in this place of mind.”
Paul had it right. For members of my tribe—the Mayborn Writers Colony—Archer County isn’t just a place on the map. It’s a place of mind, a place to nurture our imaginations, to discover who we are as writers. In this place of mind, I’m convinced, a new generation of writers who plant themselves here will flourish like the green mesquite spreading across the Old West.
– George Getschow, mentor
[ More Spurs of Inspiration | The Rancher and the Writer ]
