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The Mayborn Tribe
Like everyone who attends the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest, I think of myself as a storyteller. And when I tell a story, I’m drawn to images that evoke the deepest meaning—the existential and emotional truth of the story.
For me, if there’s one image that defines what the Mayborn Conference story is about, it’s Craig Hanley, seated outside the ballroom of the Hilton Hotel in July 2007, surrounded by our confreres requesting his signature on his debut literary nonfiction book, William & Rosalie. Directly across from Craig sat Joyce Carol Oates, a literary legend who had just delivered a keynote speech titled “Turning Nonfiction Into Art.” Ms. Oates was also surrounded by a swarm of our confreres and speakers seeking her signature on On Boxing and some of her other bestselling books and novels.
Hearing Craig, once a struggling carpenter, chatting about his new book published by UNT Press and the Mayborn Graduate School of Journalism, and his new life as a contributing editor for D Magazine, was enough to make a crusty old journalist like me choke up. I set my copy of William & Rosalie on his table, asked him to autograph it and left without saying another word. I didn’t want the throng gathered around Craig to see that the Mayborn’s writer-in-residence had become a sniveling, teary-eyed mess. I fled for the nearest exit sign. When I returned, I picked up William & Rosalie, opened the cover and read, “George, you changed my life for the better with this break…Thanks Brother.”
Holding Craig’s autographed book in hand, I looked across the hall at Ms. Oates, one of the most prolific, versatile and distinguished writers of the last century. I thought of her literary pedigree, her unparalleled literary achievements. When she received the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2005, the Tribune’s cultural critic wrote that Ms. Oates “chronicles the breath of the American experience as no other author ever has, striking every important national touchstone—social justice, sports, race, gender, terrorism—but not as broad categories, not as labels, but through stories about people —people and the places in which they thrive or falter, dream or don’t dream, live and die.”
And then I looked back at Craig, looked at the cover of William & Rosalie—his narrative of the Polish newlyweds enduring the Holocaust by refusing to allow evil to destroy their dignity, their spirit and their love for each other. In that instant, I realized that Craig and Ms. Oates had become kindred spirits—practitioners of literary art, storytellers of the highest order. Both share an understanding that inspiration, vision, and morality are invoked in the process of writing. And both realize that the creative effort, which transforms inchoate thoughts and ideas into art, is a mysterious undertaking that transcends our intellectual powers.
In her heartfelt book, The Faith of a Writer, Ms. Oates speaks of our narrative craft with the sort of reverence and awe that people customarily associate with the spirit world. “I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral, to participate in something mysterious and communal called ‘culture’–and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born. The individual voice is the communal voice. The regional voice is the universal voice.”
In Ten Spurs: Best of the Best Literary Nonfiction of the Mayborn Conference, Vol. 2, I believe the essays and narratives cross the high bar, transcending the “merely finite and ephemeral,” embodying “the highest expression of the human spirit.”
While reading and editing the jurists’ selections, Ms. Oates’ voice kept ringing in my ear: “…we work to create art that will speak to those who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born. The individual voice is the communal voice. The regional voice is the universal voice.”
Taken together, the essays and narratives in Ten Spurs, penned by writers from different regions of the country, form a “communal voice,” a voice that speaks of universal truths, of painful realities, of the human condition like nothing else you’ve ever read.
Take Julianne McCullagh’s emotionally-charged essay, “Sláinte,” about her late brother, Gene, the angry, rebellious “black sheep” of the family and “an uncomfortable fit in the world.” After years of subjecting Julianne and other members of the McCullagh clan to “his own particular form of terrorism and abuse,” Julianne learned after her brother’s death that that he supported homeless shelters and befriended women who had been abused and molested. Now she finds herself wishing to launch “all those discussions she and Gene never had” out of fear, out of self-defense.
Who among us hasn’t had a similar experience with a brother, a sister, an in-law, a “black sheep” in our family, and now wishes we had been a little less protective, a little more vulnerable? Or consider Spencer Campbell’s narrative, “A Troubled Heart,” that speaks of a different kind of family terror: a mother living in fear that her son’s heart will stop beating at any moment. Her son, Colby, born with congenital heart failure, survives four open-heart surgeries before his first birthday. But Colby’s mother, Sheila Elliott, knows her son’s surgically repaired heart will eventually give out—at which point, only a heart transplant can save him.
A heart specialist had urged Sheila to take her newborn home and let him die rather than subject him to the torture of surgeries, agonizing recoveries and, inevitably, a heart transplant —none of which would guarantee his survival. But what mother or father—given the choice between death or surgeries, no matter how complicated or costly—would choose to let their child die at home? After reading and editing Spencer’s piece, I wondered how many parents, under different circumstances, face these kind of painful choices. And I wondered how their lives were irrevocably altered by the choices they made. A universal truth? A story that speaks to the human condition? Read “A Troubled Heart” and decide for yourself.
Another essay in Ten Spurs, “Borrowed From God,” speaks to a universal truth of motherhood in a different way—through the voice of a grief-stricken mother watching her nine-year-old daughter, Lisette, succumb to Stage IV Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare childhood tumor. Erin Burdette, the author of the essay and a mother herself, speaks for Lisette’s mother, for Colby’s mother, for all mothers, when she writes: “To a mother, the death of her child is contrary to natural order; it causes her to question the very ground beneath her feet. It crosses every boundary—social, demographic, economic—and meets in a place all differences disappear. A body failing not because it is aging and not her own—but of her—the fragile body of her charge to deliver to the world strong and happy.”
This isn’t a feel-good story. Neither are any in the collection. Ten Spur’s essays and narratives address life’s realities, the human condition, without even a thin coat of varnish to pretty things up. Every piece in the collection adheres to Thomas Agee’s principle of nonfiction storytelling: “To perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is.”
Ron Powers read the collection and concluded that readers will find “plenty of Agee’s cruel radiance in the works that make up Ten Spurs.” Coming from the author of Flags of Our Fathers, Mark Twain: A Life and other bestsellers, that says something about the capacity of Ten Spurs to take readers on a journey into the real world that they won’t soon forget. As Ron points out in his Introduction, truth and information “hold immeasurable aesthetic power”—the power to enchant, enrage, enthrall and inspire.
You will be enthralled reading “The Tobacco Queen of Texas,” a painstakingly detailed narrative about the foibles, follies and misfortunes of Alice L. Webb, “a statuesque, mysterious woman with a shady past and a way with men.” She and her Chicago-based partner arrive in Deep East Texas with a proposal to import two hundred families from Holland to grow tobacco on a red-dirt farm that, she claims, will rival Havana’s finest. Dubbed “The Tobacco Queen of Texas” by a local newspaper editor taken in with her scheme, Madam Webb soon fleeces one of the Dukes of tobacco fame (proprietor of the famous “Duke of Durham” label), a local bank, the Nacogdoches Business League and other investors before she hit the road.
The saga was played out on the front pages of the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune in the early 1900s. Yet it’s a saga that continues to play out in small towns across America that fall prey to fast-talking promoters promising they have the key to their town’s economic salvation. Will Gary Border’s piece, “The Tobacco Queen of Texas,” endure in the annals of nonfiction literature? Does it reveal universal truths and aspects of the human condition that illuminate and enlighten our understanding of the world? Read Gary’s piece and decide for yourself.
And who among us who has lived through drought and other afflictions of Mother Nature wouldn’t turn the cover of Ten Spurs to “Saint George and the Dragon.” Joan Donaldson, who along with her husband operates a blueberry farm along Lake Michigan, skillfully employs the epoch story of Saint George the Dragon Slayer to dramatize the battle she and all farmers face against drought, wind and other elements month after month, year after year. “The struggle never ends,” she writes.
Donaldson’s essay, like all the others in this collection, offers readers an intimacy with real-world experiences that no fiction can match. And that explains why our genre continues to attract some of the nation’s finest storytellers. Ron Powers makes this point, eloquently, in his Introduction: “The urge, no, the necessity to speak in print to one’s fellow man and women about important truths, and to speak these truths out of direct experience, is woven into the origins of our Republic.”
I believe that everyone who comes to the Mayborn Conference shares this yearning: journalists, academics, authors, mechanics, homemakers, educators, lawyers, and all the rest. We are all members of the same tribe, all working as one to create a culture of storytelling in the Southwest. There’s an energy, enthusiasm and camaraderie among our tribal gathering that’s palpable from the moment we assemble at the Austin Ranch on Friday night to celebrate the arrival of our confreres and presenters until the last session on Sunday afternoon.
We talk about burning nonfiction subjects seldom discussed at most literary conferences. Subjects like, “What becomes of detail when the writer squints so as to make out a story’s essence the way Monet must have squinted at those haystacks.” Or, “Beneath the layers of meticulously gathered information descriptions and quotations lay emotional truths that make narrative capable of transcending both its context and its medium. How far should we reach toward those emotional truths as writers?” Or, “The cruel conundrum of the travel writers: Good travel generally makes for bad stories. Bad travel, if you’re very lucky, may make for a good story. And lousy, awful, please-hand-me-that-gun-so-I-can-shoot-myself-in-the-head travel—while getting you into more trouble than you ever imagined and making you wish you’d never, ever, left home—can potentially take you into the realm of potentially great adventure writing.”
At our tribal gathering, it’s hard to distinguish the chieftains from the rest of the tribe. After Mary Roach, who authored a book about the post-mortem life of cadavers, gave an hilarious and instructive presentation at our last conference about “stalking colorful sources, priceless moments and other essential ingredients for memorable nonfiction,” she took her seat among the tribe—listening to the other lectures, taking copious notes and talking about stories with our other tribesmen in the hotel bar until the beer tap shut down.
One of our 2006 keynote speakers, Hampton Sides, a Santa Fe author of two bestsellers —Ghost Soldiers and Blood and Thunder—returned last year just to hang out with his tribe and lob a few embarrassing questions at his pals presenting at the podium. After Mary Roach shared her peculiar adventures reporting about flatulence, Hampton asked her to describe the specific organ of the body from which gas originates and is passed. “Thanks a lot, Hampton,” Mary responded, fumbling around with an anatomical description that wouldn’t send the faint of heart scrambling out the back door.
Two other speakers from last year’s conference—Erik Calonius, author of The Wanderer and a long-time writer for The Wall Street Journal, and Kevin Fedarko, a travel writer and former editor at Outside Magazine—are taking their seats among our 2008 tribal gathering, hoping to enhance the quality of their writing like everyone else.
Bill Marvel, a freelance writer formerly with The Dallas Morning News, has attended every conference—as a presenter, workshop leader, jurist and confrere. Bill came to last year’s conference in a funk over the status of several writing projects. But by the time he left Sunday afternoon, Bill, who is seventy, says he was so energized by the conference that he went right to work rewriting a book proposal until 1:30 a.m. And he couldn’t stop writing. The moment he woke up, Bill grabbed a cup of coffee and began working on a narrative about a childhood friend, a Mafia enforcer named Tony. “This is what the Mayborn does to you,” Bill told me. “It gets you all jazzed up to go home and write.”
Thanks to Bill, the authors of Ten Spurs, and all our confreres and presenters, our mission to create a culture of storytelling in the Southwest is gathering momentum. We now have an ever-growing, ever-evolving community of writers who believe in what we’re doing, and who possess an unflinching faith in the narrative craft. And that is why I believe our tribe
of storytellers will endure and flourish until kingdom come.
Acknowledgements
It’s important, I think, that every reader who picks up Ten Spurs knows something about its literary heritage. Ten Spurs owes its existence to the vision of Dr. Mitch Land, director of the Mayborn Graduate School of Journalism. Dr. Land had an idea: to bring together nonfiction writers and editors from the Southwest for a weekend conference focusing on the age-old art of storytelling. Wouldn’t it be nice, he thought, to hold the conference in Archer City, the actual and literary birthplace of world-renowned storyteller, Larry McMurtry. He asked me to help him realize his ambition.
For logistical reasons—Archer City is a two-hour drive from the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport—we realized that holding a conference there wasn’t practical. But, Dr. Land thought, Why not create a writers’ colony in Archer City as a component of the conference? “What better place to do that than in McMurtry’s backyard,” he told me.
Thus, in July 2005, a few weeks before the start of the inaugural Mayborn Conference, a group of students assembled at the historic Spur Hotel in Archer City. They walked across the same land and talked to the same characters that inspired Horsemen, Pass By, The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove and McMurtry’s other literary achievements. They filled their notebooks with scribblings about this strange place and its people, and began to see stories in a new light.
Out of this experience grew the Mayborn Institute’s first literary nonfiction journal, Spurs of Inspiration, a collection of narratives about Archer County and its famous writer. McMurtry sent me a letter. He called Spurs of Inspiration “a very attractive production, indeed.”
Ten Spurs, therefore, traces its roots to McMurtryland. It and Spurs of Inspiration, The Mayborn Conference, the narrative nonfiction class I teach at the Mayborn and each summer in Archer City are all important parts of our literary heritage, a heritage that I treasure.
I also treasure the people who contributed their time and talent without charge to create Ten Spurs:
Judith Kulp, our production and design coordinator, kept Ten Spurs on track despite a series of setbacks that could have easily derailed the project. Judith’s production schedules kept reminding all of us working on the collection what we had to do, and her quiet demeanor kept us calm in the midst of our chaotic schedules. Ten Spurs simply wouldn’t be in your hands now if it weren’t for Judith.
Martha Stroud, who designed all the artwork in the collection, is an artist of the highest order. She created drawing after drawing, image after image, until all of us working on the collection felt she had achieved perfection. Take a look at the cover of Ten Spurs. It’s no small achievement. In an email, I asked Martha to “… come up with something equally eloquent to last year’s cover, but entirely original, while still preserving the spur, an emblem of our heritage. Consider a Southwest image—a sketch of a pair of cowboy boots, with spurs, of course, standing on a desert landscape.” Martha drew three pieces of art for the cover, and all of them evoked the simple-yet-eloquent image we all were hoping she’d achieve. Choosing among these, the best of the best, is a problem any editor would love to have. Thank you, Martha.
Todd Bensman, my associate editor and a projects writer for the San Antonio Express-News, demonstrated how he can size up the strengths and weaknesses of a piece and figure out ways to fix them without damaging the sensibilities of the writer. In his memo to one of authors in Ten Spurs, Todd wrote: “Well done. This narrative…brought me to a place I could not have expected” yet the piece suffered from some poorly connected points. Thanks to Todd’s erudite editing, the piece no longer contains those loose ends. In Todd, as in Martha, Hearst Newspapers shared with us two of the most talented people I’ve worked with in journalism. Hearst’s support, both moral and financial, was invaluable.
Lastly, I owe a special thanks to Ron Powers for composing an Introduction to this year’s collection of essays and narratives. It is a masterpiece. The eloquence of Ron’s Introduction, in which he speaks of “the redemptive power of truthful language,” ought to be inscribed in stone and read by nonfiction storytellers across the planet. It contains so much wisdom and inspiration that I suspect it will sustain our narrative craft for at least another century or so.
Ten Spurs, Vol. 100. Now that’s a lovely thought.
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