Wordcraft – Cronin’s journey through apocalypse & back

The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

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Is it any wonder Justin Cronin seemed like a man released from a long incarceration when he appeared last Friday night at the Dallas Museum of Art to discuss the release of the last book of his Passages trilogy, The City of Mirrors, with local book reviewer Joy Tipping? "I basically spent the last 10 years locked in a room," Cronin said, finishing what he termed the "2,000-page novel" that his three apocalyptic volumes -- The Passage, The Twelve, and The City of Mirrors comprise. 

“Does it have to be the last book?” Tipping asked, echoing the sentiments of the room full of fans, many of whom have followed him since the release of the first book in 2010.

“Yes, it does,” he said. Not that seeing publication of the final book of the series about a race of medically-induced vampires, the havoc they unleash on the world, and that world’s ultimate redemption (or not – no spoilers here) necessarily means the end of that world’s story.

“At some point, I think I’m going to write a book of stories associated with the narrative. In fact, I’m writing it now, very slowly, because my brain is dead right now,” he assured fans. Plus, there’s always the possibility of movies or, more to Cronin’s wish, TV series to look forward to.

In the meantime, the Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Houston’s Rice University had plenty to say about the trilogy’s Texas influences, the joys of writing genre fiction, and, yes, the thing he has for red-haired heroines. He didn’t start out as a writer of books garnering not only critical and popular acclaim but what were rumored to be multi-million dollar advances. After writing the  very literary, very grownup award-winning Mary and O’Neil and The Summer Guest in the early 2000’s, his daughter Iris, then in the third grade, dared him to write the book she wanted to read. One that should be about a girl who saved the world. And it had to have a character with red hair, “because she’s a redhead.”

Although he was currently writing another book, Cronin and his daughter passed stories about this world-saving, red-haired girl back and forth. When he typed his notes, it came to 30 single-spaced pages that “wow – looked a lot better than the thing I was writing…my agent and I sent it out under a pseudonym because it was so different.”

Different as in “genre” instead of his previous “literary” fiction.

“I don’t think genre is a bad term,” he told Tipping. “But there is a difference between work that is constructed mainly to entertain and a book meant to endure. The difference is in the depth of characters.” Such depth that he feels confident about filling that other volume he spoke about with the stories he developed around the characters, stories there simply wasn’t room for in the trilogy. And there are plenty of those, with the appendix to The City of Mirrors listing more than 60 named characters.

And how about those "really long books in which which a lot of people die," as Cronin described  his trilogy? "I read that Larry McMurtry was a big influence on you,” Tipping said.

Texas author Larry McMurtry’s magnum opus, Lonesome Dove, was a great influence, Cronin agreed. Schooled in the classic Iowa Writers Workshop format of short stories – “miniature works of despair,” as Cronin described them, McMurtry’s book about a massive 19^th century cattle drive and its correspondingly enormous cast of characters was a revelation.

On a plane trip, he met a Texan “blathering about this book,” who insisted on forcing it on him. “I read (it) on the plane, then lay in a hotel room for three days (still) reading it. I saw the virtues and the power of a really huge story.”

As well as the revelation that “a book could fall within an established genre and still be a wonderful book."

Wordcraft -- Indie bookstores beyond metro city limits

Discovering the number of independent booksellers in Dallas with shops I could actually walk into, inspired me to expand the search to outlying cities. The choices in smaller cities within comfortable drives from Dallas were fewer, but always interesting.

(Given road conditions during the past week’s ice storms, I limited my search to areas other than Fort Worth and its neighboring cities. I’ll get to Fort Worth, which looks like promising territory for books, when the weather forecast looks less dire.)

Archer City -- I admit, this city about two and a half hours driving time from Dallas doesn’t fit into either the Dallas or Fort Worth orbit. Consider it a trip into Texas literary history to visit the home town of Pulitzer Prize winning Texas writer Larry McMurtry and Booked Up, Inc., the bookstore he opened on the courthouse square of this tiny town (population slightly under 2,000). The one-building store is considerably smaller than before McMurtry liquidated his three other warehouses of inventory in August 2012. But small is relative. Booked Up’s remaining Building No. 1 still holds 150,000 to 200,000 of McMurtry’s finest collectible volumes. At 216 South Center (although you couldn’t miss it if you tried), it’s open six days a week, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m., closed Sundays. For searching and browsing information, see www.bookedupac.com/.

Denton -- Recycled Books, 200 N. Locust, is also on its county’s (former) courthouse square. (Courthouse squares, often home to late nineteenth century buildings that, like Archer City’s and Dallas’s Old Red Courthouse, seem to vye for the title of most bizarrely-gothic public buildings in Texas.) Recycled Books itself resides in the 1901 Opera House. Although the stock is less elegant than McMurtry’s, the selection is vast, and more likely to be within the budget of noncollectors. I almost got lost wandering through the maze of shelves in the basement’s history section.

And that doesn’t include the main floor’s array of general fiction and nonfiction, children’s fiction, and owner Don Foster’s incredible record collection. The inventory is not computer-searchable, but volumes are arranged by subject, and usually alphabetically by author. Open seven days a week, 9 a.m. - 9 p.m. For additional information, see
www.recycledbooks.com/.

McKinney -- The Book Gallery, 207 N. Tennessee, a block off its county’s courthouse square, is smaller than either of the two previous gargantuan bookstores, but still far from tiny. It specializes in collectible, signed first editions by major modern American authors. But there’s room for works of classic non-U.S. authors and the popular but less famous, such as the late Tony Hillerman, and collections of Texana, military history, science fiction, religious and children’s books. It’s housed in a 1906 building, originally a bank, according to co-owner Jim Parker, with original tin ceiling. Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m., it sells online as well as through the store. Contact by phone, 972-562-0533 or email, JWPBooks@aol.com/.

Roanoke -- The Book Carriage and Coffee Shop, 304 N. Oak, is the newest of these stores, at five years, according to owner Angie Granados. Located in Roanoke’s historic downtown, it specializes in current books, including children’s, Texana, and works of local interest. An open mezzanine includes display space for artists from the area and Roanoke schools, and music. And along with its resident Wonderland Coffee Shop, The Book Carriage combines bookselling with community events, including signings by local and regional authors. It’s open Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m. - 6 p.m., Saturdays 9 -9, closed Sundays. For a calendar of events and contact information, see
www.bookcarriage.com/.

(Next Monday -- I follow up on what promises to be an interesting session at the upcoming Mystery Writers of America class in Dallas.)

Adventure classics -- Don on the range

Lonesome Dove

by Larry McMurtry

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In Books: A Memoir, Texas author Larry McMurtry credits, perhaps quixotically, his first inkling of the characters of W. F. Call and Augustus “Gus” McCrae to his adolescent reading of a condensed version of Don Quijote.

I think Cervantes’ knight would be delighted by the comparison. Not that Gus McCrae is in all respects a legitimate son of the Don, who was anxious to be known as “the purest, chastest lover,” the prologue to his adventures assures us. Still, it isn’t hard to find the antecedents for McCrae’s rescue of golden-haired and golden-hearted prostitute Lorena in Quijote’s compulsive desire to rescue damsels.

Or to see in Cervantes’ parody of chivalrous adventure stories the forerunner of McMurtry’s professed attempt to demythologize the Old West.

“I thought of Lonesome Dove as a book that would demolish the myths,” McMurtry stated in an interview with Texas Monthly magazine. “But instead it just enhanced them.”

And like Cervantes, McMurtry would bow to public demand, writing sequels to his popular work. (In McMurtry’s case, a sequel and two prequels. Not to mention the spawning of multiple television miniseries -- not all authorized -- media events unfortunately not available to the seventeenth century Spanish author.)

For fear of getting too far ahead of things, here’s a brief summary of Lonesome Dove. Now growing old and settled down in South Texas, former Texas Rangers (of the law enforcement organization, not the baseball team), Call and McCrae are joined by another ex-Ranger, Jake Spoon, who is fleeing a murder charge. Spoon’s tales of his travels in
the new territory of Montana excite the normally phlegmatic Call to try his luck at ranching in the North.

Spoon’s romancing of the local settlement’s only prostitute, Lorena, stirs McCrae’s jealousy, if not his ambitions. And as soon as Call, McCrae and their motley crew of cowboys can steal a herd of longhorned cattle from a Mexican bandit, they’re off on one of the longest cattle drives in the history of Western fiction.

Along the way, they endure sandstorms, hail storms, and attacks by venomous snakes; ford innumerable rivers; and fight off attacks by renegades both white and Indian. Most of them die, including (sorry for the spoiler) McCrae. Which is why he had to be resurrected in the prequels Dead Man’s Walk and Commanche Moon.

In a reversal of the usual sequence of events, McMurtry originally sold the story as the script for the 1970’s movie The Streets of Laredo (later used as a title for the sequel novel). When the movie deal failed to get off the ground, he bought the script back and a decade later adapted it into the novel that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1986. To
flesh out the story, McMurtry turned again to the Call-McCrae theme of dualism.

Multiple pairs of complementary characters -- “good” prostitute Lorena/”bad” prostitute Elmira, “good” black scout Joshua Deets/“bad” black outlaw Frog Lip, Indian renegade Blue Duck/white renegade Dan Suggs, faithless lover Jake Spoon/faithful lover Gus McCrae, and so on, give the novel a cast of epic proportions. I suggest this technique to any writer who needs a lot of characters fast.

The novel is now as entrenched in Texas mythology as Edna Ferber’s Giant, discussed last week. McMurtry himself, now also in old age, views it dispassionately.

“I wrote novel after novel,” he notes in Books. “Most were good. . . None, to my regret, were great, although my long Western Lonesome Dove was very popular -- the miniseries made from it was even more popular. Popularity, of course, is not the same as greatness.”

(Put his comment in perspective by noting he considers only two of the innumerable volumes his bookstores have sold to be great. One was by Sir Isaac Newton. Four centuries ago, perhaps even Cervantes worried less about greatness than about popularity.)

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues a June of stories about Texas and the Southwest with N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn. Yes, I promised it to you today, but McMurtry’s mythologizing has been preying on my mind. A member of the same Kiowa tribe as the renegade Indians of Lonesome Dove, Momaday also won a Pulitzer for his work.)

Wordcraft -- The late, great Archer City book sale

I came to the small North Texas town of Archer City, home of legendary writer Larry McMurtry, to witness something historic -- the sale of more than 300,000 books from McMurtry’s equally legendary bookstore, Booked Up, Inc. The store billed it as “the last booksale from the town that brought you The Last Picture Show.”

The couple ahead of me in the line to attend the auction were bidder number 150 and guest. I must have done a double take. Only 150 people showed up to buy this many books? From the man who wrote the Pulitzer-winning Lonesome Dove? Not to mention, of course, The Last Picture Show. And dozens more.

“We thought we’d be lucky to get a hundred,” one of the women handling the paperwork at the registration table said.

“Most people would want to register before an auction,” a second said severely.

The third jotted bid numbers on bid sheets for potential buyers, or stick-on labels with the letter “G” for non-buying guests, like me. Despite the enormous number of books, some editions worth thousands of dollars, the process had a casual air. This, after all, was the bookstore comprising four warehouse size buildings where bookworms had been left on their honor to carry their finds down the street to the sole building with a cashier.

And a sale where the auctioneer, after puzzling for a moment over McMurtry’s handwritten notes, could tell the audience he wasn’t sure whether the reserve price on a book was $100 or $600, but he’d give us the benefit of the doubt and start at the lower price.

I’d walked in during the sale of what McMurtry had listed as one hundred favorite books from his shelves, the ones sold individually instead of by the shelf. The auctioneer’s guess was probably right -- most had a reserve price of not more than a hundred dollars. To my surprise, several didn’t even meet the reserve, to remain unsold. Until the last.

The sale catalogue listed the final individual item without title or author, as only “a rare collection of erotica.” The auctioneer from the firm of Addison and Sarova added that the collection was assembled during the 1930’s and 1940’s by an unnamed Texas oilman, and contained original typescripts. “Mr. McMurtry,” he said, “wanted to find something special for this sale.”

It was. The bidding, which had become lethargic, livened. The volume’s reserve price was $750. It sold for $2,750. 

Downtown Archer City assumed the solemn-festive air of a wake for the sale, probably the largest commercial transaction to take place in the last century in the town with a population in the neighborhood of 1,850. Drivers at the single blinking red light on the corner deferred to each other with the courtesy usually extended to funeral processions. Cafes around the courthouse square stayed open beyond their normal lunchtime hours. Even the public library, usually closed on weekends, advertised it would open  Saturday, August 11, the final day of the sale, to offer internet connections and air conditioning for auction guests.

Despite earlier fears, McMurtry, age 76, announced he was only reducing his stock, not closing. Booked Up will remain in business, whittled down to a single building and a mere 150,000 or so volumes. For days and hours of operation, see its website, www.bookedupac.com/.

Wordcraft -- To bear witness

Today’s guest writer is Julianne McCullagh, with reflections from this month’s 2012 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, sponsored by the Mayborn School of Journalism, at the University of North Texas.

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If you are at a writer’s conference and the first speaker of the weekend shares with you his ‘moment of grace’ where he received his commission in life, you should sit a little straighter, lean forward and tune up your hearing.

Luis Alberto Urrea went on a mission trip as a young man; he came back a writer.

What was this ‘moment of grace’, as he called it? He and his pastor were working among the most forgotten, the world’s cast-offs who lived and died in an actual garbage dump. Young Luis, notebook in hand, was writing his observations, thoughts, scenes, scribbling words on paper that he would turn into story. A resident of the dump asked what he was doing. Writing. About this place? This dump. About me? Yes, about this place and about you. “Tell someone that I was here.”

Now, Mr. Urrea did not say that the sky opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him. But novice writer Luis knew that this moment, standing in a cathedral of trash, was his commission, his anointing, his sending forth. He was tuned in to the energy of the moment; he was paying attention.

That is what we, as writers, are asked to do. Pay attention, and as my friend, the writer Bill Marvel, likes to say, bear witness.

We are to bear witness to history in its small moments and its large moments. Bear witness to people, to changes in the atmosphere, to changes in attitude. Pay attention to the new and to the ancient that threads through the now. Be an instrument of history, a commentator, a sense maker, a question raiser.

Writers sift through the materials of life and choose a bit of this to expand on, a bit of that to explore. We churn and tumble and wrestle with the stuff of life long after they have moved into silent history and then we snatch them back and give them a place on the page.

“Tell them I was here”’ is our common plea.

It is also our job.

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Julianne McCullagh’s work has appeared in Volumes 1 & 2 of Ten Spurs, Best of the Best, and was the winner of The Mayborn Conference’s 2007 Nonfiction Prize for Literary Excellence. She has taught writing at The Writer’s Garret in Dallas, has a series of articles for Loyola Press and has recently completed a novel. Excerpts from the novel have been published in Rose and Thorn Literary Journal. You can read more of her work at gracenoteslive.com.

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First Texas author Larry McMurtry’s Archer City bookstore, Booked Up, announced it
First Texas author Larry McMurtry’s Archer City bookstore, Booked Up, announced it was holding “the last book sale.” Now it says it’s selling about three-fourths of its massive inventory at auction August 10-11 but will continue to operate in its main building on the Archer City courthouse square. Per an email from Khristal R. Collins at Booked Up, the shops will be open for browsing August 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 and 9. However, purchases can only be made currently and during the preview days at Building One. For more information go to www.bookedupac.com/.

The heat doesn’t stop literary events in Texas. In connection with Richardson’s “One Book Event”, registration is in progress for the August 25 “The Write Stuff” writers’ workshop with C. J. Critt, writer for Radio Disney. Contact the Richardson Public Library at 972-744-4376. For more information, see www.cor.net/index.aspx?page=1003/

And there’s still room in the FenCon writers’ workshop led by science fiction author Karl Schroeder. The deadline for the con’s separate short story contest has been extended to August 1. For details on workshop and contest, see
www.fencon.org/.

Wordcraft -- All Booked Up in Archer City

Booked Up

216 S. Center (on the courthouse square)

Archer City

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When author Larry McMurtry left his hometown of Archer City, Texas, he promised himself that if he ever returned, he’d bring a copy of every book he would need. He’s more than kept that promise with Booked Up, the bookstore that now occupies four buildings around the courthouse square in the tiny North Texas town.

When I left Dallas, I worried that I hadn’t googled a map of Archer City, although I knew, at least, that the bookstore was near the courthouse. No need to worry. The stone courthouse in Archer City (county seat of Archer County) is the most conspicuous sight for miles in the short-grass prairie landscape. And as Highway 25 transposed into East Main Street, a storefront labeled Booked Up, Building Four, appeared near the stoplight. I turned in front of the courthouse onto South Center to find the remaining buildings within a block of each other.

The most impressive storefront belonged to Building One, the only place I found employees on my weekday visit. The front room contains an array of rare and first editions. Although shelf space at my house is limited, I knew I’d have to have a souvenir of this visit. But there was so much more to see -- more than 400,000 volumes, according to the Archer City website, www.archercitytx.com/ The back of Building One contained a cat and a warehouse worth of shelves housing genre fiction and biographies in the only un-air conditioned room I found. But the annex adjacent to the rare books room was cooled, with a wonderful collection of Americana and Texana, including works by Texas authors.

A list in Building One describes the contents of each store, but I had to peek in all of them before working my way around to Building Four. I couldn’t be expected to resist temptation much longer, not when the floor was stacked with back issues of Firsts: The Book Collector’s Magazine, at a dollar each. I’d made my choice, vowing to come back for more someday, when two other browsers mentioned that there was a twenty-five percent off summer sale. I asked the cashier back in Building One how long the sale could last, and she said, as long as McMurtry decides it will.

Booked Up is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. However, signs in the buildings advise shoppers that the individual buildings close at 4:45 p.m., and that purchases of more than five items need to be brought to Building One no later than 4:30 p.m. The stores don’t list a website, but for additional information, call (940) 574-2511 or email bookedupac@aol.com/