Literary Austin panel to kick off 2007 Texas Book Festival
The Harry Ransom Center and the Texas Book Festival present a panel on the anthology Literary Austin to kick off the festival on Thursday, November 1, at 7 p.m. at Jessen Auditorium in Homer Rainey Hall.
Moderated by Austin writer Stephen Harrigan, panelists Robert Draper, Literary Austin editor Don Graham, Bill Minutaglio, Karen Olsson, John Spong, and Marion Winik will discuss their contributions to the anthology.
Seating is free, but limited. Visit HERE for maps of the University campus.
Literary Austin brings together the history, color, and character of Texas's capital city since 1839 when it was selected, on the advice of Mirabeau B. Lamar, as the site for a new capital of the then-Republic of Texas.
Essays, fiction, and poetry reveal avariety of literary responses to Austin through the decades and are organized in a roughly chronological fashion to reveal the themes, places, and personalities that have defined the life of the city.
Graham states in his introduction that "just about everybody's Austin appears in these pages." Listen to the contributers describe "their" Austin and what about Austin inspires literary creativity. To listen to excerpts from their interviews, click on the audio icons to the left.
  LISTEN to Literary Austin editor Don Graham talk about the origins of the book. |
Don Graham: Literary Austin is the second in a series. TCU Press started this series, and they published a group called Literary Fort Worth, and it seemed to them that Austin might well have more writers than Fort Worth, although Fort Worth has some. And so they asked me to do it. And I was really busy, but I decided I would do it because I thought it’d be interesting. And it turned out to be one of the most interesting anthologies I’ve done.
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| LISTEN to Graham define "his" Austin. |
Alicia Dietrich: In your introduction you say that "just about everybody’s Austin appears somewhere in these pages," and I was wondering how do you define your Austin, how do you describe Austin to people? Graham: Oh, you know I’m not as funny; I’m not as crazy about Austin as a lot of people are. Mainly for two, two reasons: The allergy situation here is very bad for me and my wife. And I’m not as—, I don’t think Austin has great restaurants. I know that runs against current theology, but that’s—, I prefer places like Houston to dine. I do like the way Austin is growing. I’m not in favor of Keeping Austin Weird, for example, I like the fact that it’s getting, that it has a Neiman Marcus, and so on. So that’s, I mean I would like for it to feel like more a city, which is where I think it’s headed. That’s the exact opposite direction of what a lot of people [think], but anyway you asked me what I thought.
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| LISTEN to Graham talk about his short story "Ghosts and Empty Sockets" in the anthology. |
Graham: I did pick that one because it deals with the most famous, it deals indirectly with the most famous book written in Austin and about Austin, and that’s Billy Lee Bramer’s The Gay Place. And this was just a fictional response based on a real party that my wife and I attended, and it was a lot of fun to turn it into a kind of--, in novels there’s something called a roman á clef, which is a—, it means a novel has a key to it, that all the characters are based on real, identifiable people. And we don’t have a term for short stories that do that, I guess we should, some French term. But anyway, that’s what it is. Maybe, is the French word for story conte? C-o-n-t-e. I think; I’m not sure. Anyway, it’s something with a key, and anybody who’s familiar with The Gay Place can recognize, and with the Austin scene, can recognize some of those people.
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 LISTEN to Draper discuss his essay "Adios to Austin" in the anthology. |
Draper: It was written for GQ magazine, and it was written just a few months after I left Austin and moved to Asheville, North Carolina. At the time that I moved, the bubble had burst. And a certain level of humility had not yet descended on the city, but would in time. And the essay is meant to some degree to be tongue-in-cheek, meant to be a self-lacerating memoir, but it reflects as well the ambiguous relationship I’ve had with this remarkable city. I think it’s fair to say as Robert Frost once said about himself, Frost said, ‘I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.’ And I think that applies to my relationship with Austin.. |
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 LISTEN to John Spong discuss how he defines Austin. |
One of the cool things about Austin for me is, it’ll sound a little cliché, but it’s all the music. But in more than just a going to shows kind of way, like everybody does when they’re in college or graduate school. I ended up becoming friends with a bunch of guys that were in bands. I can’t play anything, but I became friends with a bunch of guys that were in bands in the 90s when I was in law school. When I was practicing law and I had this kind of grown-up job with the suit every day, or whatever, I just had all these buddies—you know, I’d have to be at work at 7, 8 in the morning. They wouldn’t ever have to go to bed. And so, it was, you know, it was the Austin music scene. It was very much a part of the city. It was also something that I was really jealous of and that I ultimately quit the law firm, I think, in large part just so I could stay up all night hanging out with my buddies. It had a pretty big effect, and I’m really glad I didn’t stay at the law firm, and I chose this other thing to try and do, which is write magazine stories. And as silly as that may sound, a big part of it was hanging around creative types. On the one hand, they don’t have to go to bed. On the other hand, they spend their time reading stuff to turn them on and working on something that’s fulfilling in a very different way from working at a law firm.
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| LISTEN to Spong discuss how the Ransom Center fits in with Literary Austin. |
There’s kind of a hidden gem quality to the Ransom Center. It’s not as hidden now as it used to be. When I was in college, I knew nothing—at UT. I was at UT for four years undergrad and three years of law school and didn’t know the Ransom Center as anything more than that fairly unattractive building on the Drag. I had no idea what it was or what went on there. When I quit lawyering—I got out of law school in 1993, and I practiced law for about two-and-a-half years, and then I quit. I’d saved up a fair amount of money, what felt like a fair amount of money, and in Austin kind of was, you know. Somebody, a friend of mine who had been a Daily Texan photographer and went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning international correspondent war photographer dude. John McConnico. He was over at the Ransom Center a lot, in graduate school, looking at old pictures. And he was the first one to talk about it with me and some friends. He said, “You know about all the stuff over there.” It was like, “Noooo.” And he said, “Oh yeah.” And the big thing he always talked about was Jack Kerouac’s notebook, which at this point had been looked at by enough students, as much of a secret as it was, it had been looked at by enough students where you couldn’t get the actual thing. And instead of his dog-eared notebook, you got the dog-eared Xerox of the dog-eared notebook, which still was very, very meaningful to a lot of people. And so, I remember the first time I went over there, I had no idea that I would have to go through this big process, applying to be able to look at stuff. It kind of shortened my bona fides, not really, but kinda. And so I jumped through those hoops, and I’d written down that I wanted to look at Jack Kerouac stuff, and the woman who was ushering me in said, “You know, it looks like you’re interested in the Beat writers. Well, I hope you realize, you need to realize, that if you want to look at Jack Kerouac stuff, you don’t want to look in the Jack Kerouac files because that’s going to be filled with letters written to him. You want the Neal Cassady files because that’s where Jack Kerouac’s letter wound up.” And I said, “Really?” And so, then you fill out the specific folders you want to look at, and you go sit at the desk, and I mean, I was a complete idiot. I handed my things off to one of the librarians, my requests, and then, ten minutes later, I’m handed these files with these postcards and letters and scraps of paper with notes on them and stuff, and you’re flipping through it, and it’s like—it was one of the coolest days of my life.
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| LISTEN to Spong discuss how handling materials at the Ransom Center provides inspiration. |
They [the writers] go from becoming literary icons or whatever to being very human. One of the things that really excited me most, for some reason, was a postcard Jack Kerouac sent to—I want to say it’s got like a beach scene on the front, I’m not sure, but on the back it says, you know, “The publisher has The Road, but they won’t put the book out. I’m kinda broke. Would you please—he sent it to Neal Cassady—he said, you know, “The publisher has The Road, they won’t put the book out, I’m broke, please send $25. If you can’t afford to send $25, please send $15.” And send it to this address. I forget the fake name that Kerouac used, but it was care of Bill Burroughs at an address in Mexico City. And there’s actually a money order receipt for $10 that comes with that postcard. And Cassady had sent him the money. And at that point, it’s not, you know, this great iconic writer and his muse. It’s two buddies, you know, and they become very human at that point. And to go a step further, even, there’s the letter that Charlie Parker wrote to Ross Russell, who was the president or the guy in charge of Dial Records, and it was the Ross Russell collection that’s got so much of the great bee-bop stuff in it at the Ransom Center. And Charlie Parker had just been committed to Camarillo State Hospital in California, and I think it’s on Camarillo State Hospital stationery, and it’s just this kind of very fragile and vulnerable scrawl that says, “Please come get me out of this place before I blow my wig.” And that’s becoming really human at that point. And there is some rush you get, and maybe it does get to celebrity, maybe it’s something else, but there is a rush that comes with holding that letter in your hand and looking at it and thinking at some point in the past, this was held by Charlie Parker as he was trying to save his own life ‘cause he was having such an awful time through that period. And when they give you those documents, it’s almost like, if it has to be explained to you, ah, you’re not gonna get it. Maybe just don’t go to the [Ransom] Center. It’s so very cool. It’s so very cool. And so inspirational.
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 LISTEN to Karen Olsson discuss the excerpt from her novel Waterloo that appears in the anthology. |
The excerpt is a kind of a pastiche of a guidebook entry for the city of Waterloo. And I’m trying to remember what my state of mind was when I wrote it. I think it was both—I think I was interested in doing that, in making kind of a pastiche of a guidebook entry and start out exactly like a guidebook entry and get into some of the less pleasant or at least less Chamber of Commerce-y elements of the city. So, you know, it starts out with what’s pleasant about the city but then goes into, I think, the heat, something that’s less pleasant, into a writer who died of a drug overdose, which is an allusion to Billy Lee Bramer, whose novel The Gay Place, I think of as the best and most, kind of well-known Austin novel.
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| LISTEN to Olsson discuss writing about Austin. |
Well, I hadn’t written about it very much as a journalist, which was one reason I was interested in writing fiction about it. But it’s really hard to say what your city is. And part of what the book’s about is that very difficulty. That, what is this place, and what is my relationship to it? And is it even a distinctive place anymore, or is it generic? Is it relevant to know the history and also why are we so nostalgic? One thing that I was really interested in about Austin is the very heavy element of nostalgia that people have, and how “It’s not as good as it used to be.” And that’s twinned with, or butting up against, a fair amount of ignorance about the history, I think, relative to some other places. People here don’t have a strong tie to the history. Or, a lot of people like me, who are transplants. People who have lived for generations have more of a tie to the history of the city, but I think it’s a lot of the transplants who are the most nostalgic and say, “Well, it was better in 1977 when I first got here.” So, in that sense, I think for a lot of people, their Austin is the Austin of whenever they arrived in Austin, which is kind of ironic because that’s the moment in which you least own a place, when you first arrive there. And I think that nostalgia is often a replacement for that sense of actual history. You know, it’s missing something that never was. But whichever way you slice it, nostalgia is a pretty potent—there’s a pretty potent strain of it here, and that’s one thing that I wrote about.
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| LISTEN to Olsson discuss how she defines Austin. |
I feel like it took me a whole book to say that, or to figure out how I defined |
