Lowell Brown, a writer for the Denton Record-Chronicle, expressed in an essay appearing in the latest issue of MAYBORN magazine what many of us have experienced: “Writers who come here leave transformed,” becoming “real storytellers…beacons of the craft of artful nonfiction.”
Lowell might have been talking about the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference. Now in its fifth year, the conference has transformed the writing lives of many of our participants. Donna Johnson's memoir about growing up among Texas Pentecostals, Holy Ghost Girl, took top prize at the Mayborn's 2007 conference and was sold at auction to Gotham. The Mayborn's 2nd-place winner, Susannah Charleson, signed a six-figure contract with Houghton Mifflin for Scent of the Missing. Her book about her search-and-rescue missions is slated for hardback release in the spring or summer of 2010. And Bill Marvel, a 70-year-old freelance writer, left last year's Mayborn conference so energized that he went to work on a combat narrative about a U.S. Marine's World War II experiences in the Pacific War. Islands of the Damned was auctioned by Jim Hornfischer, a literary agent and regular Mayborn visitor, to NAL/Viking for six figures. Meanwhile, Dan Burns won the Mayborn's $3,000 first-place prize and a book contract with UNT Press for Saving Ben, about a gay man's turmoil and triumphs raising his autistic son. It's in bookstores now.
All of these once-obscure writers were transformed, reborn in a sense, after passing through the doors of the Mayborn Conference. “This is what the Mayborn does to you,” says Bill, who has attended every conference. “It gets you all jazzed up to go home and write.”
In his piece appearing in MAYBORN magazine, though, Lowell Brown isn't talking about the Mayborn Conference's transformative powers. He's writing about another place, with its own mythology, its own tales of the supernatural. I call it McMurtryland, home of Larry McMurtry and a five-year Writers Workshop operated by the Mayborn in conjunction with the conference. “Year after year,” Lowell says in his essay, “aimless and thirsty” writers journey to McMurtryland “to drink from his well.”
The well is McMurtry's mammoth book ranch in Archer City, Texas, stocked with over 400,000 lovingly collected, and by the collector himself, who opens up his home and his heart to the aspiring storytellers. Sitting around him in a semi-circle, the writers cling to Larry's every word, as he talks about books, reading and writing.
“Regularity is the heart of my writing process,” Larry told us last summer. “Very few of you can just write a few pages here and a few pages there and take a week off and ever accomplish anything. I do think you have to keep your nose to the grindstone. I suppose that's my advice.”
The awestruck writers dutifully nod their heads and scamper off as soon as Larry's lecture ends to try to find something to write about, along the dusty back roads of Archer County, the banks of the Little Wichita River, inside the jail, outside the Royal Theater or somewhere atop Idiot Ridge - the McMurtry Ranch that inspired Horseman, Pass By, Lonesome Dove and a large body of Larry's nonfiction work.
Lowell spent hours soaking up the landscape at the McMurtry Ranch, imagining horses galloping over the prairie grass, summoning the spirits that gave rise to a great writer. “I long to be haunted,” Lowell scribbled in his journal.
Out of the land and the dust and the spirits, Lowell and many young writers have found their voice. Writers like Michael J. Mooney, whose subculture pieces out of Archer City were published in the Mayborn’s first literary nonfiction journal, Spurs of Inspiration. Another, Stilettos, about life inside a seedy strip club, was published in Ten Spurs. His more recent literary nonfiction will appear in two of the vaunted Best American anthologies. Mike, now a writer for Village Voice Media, is the first graduate of the Archer City Writers Workshop to speak at the Mayborn conference. In McMurtryland, Mike says he learned how to paint people and places, to make them as “accessible and effective for readers as classic fiction.”
Audrie Palmer, a narrative writer for the Midland Reporter-Telegram, also found her voice in McMurtryland after spending two summers there learning how to harness her creative energies, how to craft stories that arouse readers' emotions. Her disturbing narrative, “Limp,” about a Costa Rican girl's dream of living in el Norte shattered by criminalcharges over her handling of an infant in her care, was selected by jurists for publication in this year's collection of Ten Spurs, Best of the Best Literary Nonfiction of the Mayborn Conference. So was “The Decision,” a provocative piece by another graduate of the Archer City Writers Workshop, Andrew Rogers. “The Decision” confronts the agonizing dilemmas of abortion from a man's point of view without moralizing or mongering in feel-good outcomes.
Forgive me, but I'd never hear the end of it if I didn't mention another graduate of the Archer City Writers Workshop, Spencer Campbell. Today, Spencer is winning major awards for his sports narratives at the Bristol Herald Courier in Bristol, Virginia. But in his early days in Archer City, no one, including me, expected Spencer to become an award-winning writer. He hung around Archer City's golf course and clubhouse for days in search of a story, playing golf, drinking beer, talking sports with the locals. His story ended up like a lot of his putts, swerving hopelessly off target. But somehow, Spencer found his mark - his voice - in writing a haunting tale, “A Troubled Heart,” about a mother's painful choices to keep her son's heart beating. The piece won second-place for outwardly focused narratives and was published in our 2008
edition of Ten Spurs and on the front page of The Dallas Morning News. Spencer's editor told me “A Troubled Heart” was largely responsible for Spencer's landing his plum job writing narratives for the Bristol Herald Courier.
Stories like Spencer's stir the busy mind of Mitch Land, director of the Frank W. Mayborn Graduate School of Journalism and inventor of the Mayborn Conference. He thought: Why not offer our conferees the chance to experience the magic that has rubbed off on our young Mayborn students? So off we go. The Mayborn is taking a busload of conferees to McMurtryland on Friday morning before the conference convenes. Larry will be there to welcome everyone to his West Texas version of Hay-on-Wye, Wales’ world-famous booktown. They'll get to meander through the bookstores, the old jail, the American Legion and the burned-out hull of the Royal Theater, the scene of Larry's iconic cinematic wonder, “The Last Picture Show.” We're hoping they'll discover what our young writers have discovered each year: Archer City is much more than a tiny dot on the Texas map. It's a place of mind, a place to nurture our imaginations, to set ourselves on fire for writing.
This year's excursion to Archer City builds on the mission of the Mayborn Conference itself: to support an ever-growing, ever evolving community of writers who possess an unflinching faith in the narrative craft. Writers like those whose work appears in this edition of Ten Spurs. Each of these ten pieces accomplishes what all great narratives are supposed to accomplish: to illuminate, to instruct, to provoke, to make us think, to make us feel. Some of the pieces involve first-rate reportage; others first-rate observation and first-hand experience. All involve that kind of attention to detail that Joyce Carol Oates told us is essential to storytelling, allowing readers “to see, hear, witness, as if first hand” what the writer has witnessed.
And while the form and structure of each of the narratives in the collection have little in common -- no more than the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building - they all are supported by the same steel of truth, grounded in a reality that's both palpable and transcendent.
Acknowledgements
It's important, I think, that every reader who picks up Ten Spurs knows something about its literary heritage. Ten Spurs and the Mayborn Conference owe their existence to the vision of Mitch Land. It was his idea to bring together nonfiction writers and editors from around 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 observations about this strange place and its people, and began to see stories in a new light.
Out of this experience grew the Mayborn'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 classes I teach at the Mayborn and the Archer City Writers Workshop are all important parts of our literary heritage, a heritage that I treasure. I also treasure the Mayborn's “patron saints,” Nick and Ann Ricco, who contributed their resources to produce Ten Spurs, and to the Spurs' staff who contributed their time and talent without charge to create it.
Judith Kulp, our production and design coordinator, kept Ten Spurs on track despite a series of snafus, including a meltdown of the Adobe software we use to produce it. Judith dealt with her panic attack in her inimitable style. “I took many deep breaths, swore a bunch, intoned ohms and recited Sufi meditation poems…” After buying and installing new software, Judith drank some Pinot Grigio, prayed and struck the execute button on her keyboard: “I was able to reopen all files and they are (happily) untouched by corruption problems,” she reported with glee. We all breathed a sigh of relief. Ten Spurs simply wouldn't be in your hands now if it weren't for Judith, another graduate of the Archer City Writers Workshop whose artistic talents shine on every page of Spurs of Inspiration and every volume of Ten Spurs.
Martha Stroud, who designed all the artwork for previous editions of Ten Spurs, showcases her aesthetic gifts once again in Vol. 3. She created drawing after drawing, image after image, all the while dealing with a fastidious editor. After wrangling over this year's cover, I deferred to Martha's choice of a high-roping vaquero atop a pony, with one proviso: I wanted dust swirling under the pony's feet, symbolizing the dark and dusty trail facing most writers at work. Martha, as always, was gracious. “Dust coming up…” she wrote. I hope you'll agree that Martha's cover is our best ever.
Bill Marvel has done it all for the Mayborn cause since our inception, serving as presenter, workshop leader, jurist and confrere. This year he accepted another duty: associate editor of Ten Spurs. We poured over the pieces, discussing occasional instances of clumsy dialogue, faulty diction, passages that felt tacked-on, endings that fell flat. The editing process consumed a great deal of time and energy, but Bill never once complained - even when I was barking at him that I needed the stories EDITED, LIKE RIGHT NOW! Bill told me not to worry, he'd get them done, and was “more than happy” to do it. “Deep down, I like editing,” he said. “Those old writing instincts kick in: How can I make this better? It's an awesome responsibility.” With his penetrating eye and sharp pencil, Bill would have rated a salute from Max Perkins, the editor extraordinaire at Charles Scribner's Sons, who edited the leading literary lights of the twentieth century.
Lastly, I owe a special thanks to Ken Wells for composing a masterpiece in the Introduction to this year's collection. The eloquence of Ken's prose, in which he speaks of that golden moment in nonfiction storytelling called the shock of recognition – “the moment at which the reader sees with clarity through a lens of empathy the conundrum of the human condition” - should, as I told Ken, be put on a pedestal with a spotlight beaming across it at the Poynter Institute. Ken's words call attention to the majesty and transcendence of narrative nonfiction storytelling.
That is and always will be our mission at the Mayborn.
