Pastures of the Empty Page

July 10, 2023
This revealing collection compiled by journalist Getschow (editor of The Best American Newspaper Narratives) brings together reflections on Lonesome Dove novelist Larry McMurtry from his friends, family, and fellow writers. A few essays offer literary analyses, such as retired McMurry University library director Joe W. Specht’s piece on McMurtry’s ambivalence toward the energy industry’s grip on Texas, embodied in the Last Picture Show and Texasville character Duane Moore, an oilman who strikes it big in the 1970s before falling oil prices bankrupt him. Most of the selections focus on the author’s personal life, however. In “The Larry McMurtry I Knew,” journalist Skip Hollandsworth remembers the novelist as a curmudgeonly interview subject but gregarious dinner host who would opine on “everything from eighteenth-century Russian poetry to the joys of Dr Pepper.” Mike Evans—a former creative writing student of McMurtry’s in the mid-1960s—recounts free-form classes when he would read aloud from his upcoming novel, The Last Picture Show, or, on one occasion, recite dirty limericks. The elegiac remembrances offer intimate glimpses into McMurtry’s life (collaborator Diana Ossana recalls the “emotional breakdown” he suffered after a heart attack), with no shortage of surprises (two contributors note his “extensive pornography collection”). McMurtry’s fans will want to track this down.

July 15, 2023
A conclave of writers gathers to consider the late Larry McMurtry (1936-2021). "He was the first novelist I read who took Texas seriously but not reverently, who made it possible for me to see my own state as fair game, as a legitimate literary place that I didn't have to feel self-conscious in either writing from or about." So writes Stephen Harrigan, novelist and historian, who is among the better known of the writers who reflect on and remember McMurtry's life and work. A number of themes emerge. One is the lonely nature of small-town life in Texas, which afforded McMurtry material for his breakthrough novel, The Last Picture Show; another is the author's essential place in the literature of his native state. Fond of wearing a sweatshirt bearing the motto "Minor Regional Novelist," McMurtry was a scrappy and sometimes steely fellow in real life. Informed by a herpetologist, Harrigan remembers, that water moccasins don't bunch up and attack unwary cowboys en masse, as they do in Lonesome Dove, McMurtry "just looked at my friend as if he were staring at a blank wall." As Joe Specht writes, nor did McMurtry ever work on an oil drilling rig, which explains why he sometimes got the language of oilmen wrong. He may have been ornery and sometimes hermetic; however, as his longtime writing partner Diana Ossana notes, he was also loyal and kind. Above all, he was a reader, famed for turning his hometown of Archer City into a town of concatenated bookstores. Indeed, he did his seven-days-per-week of work of writing five pages--no more, no less--first thing in the morning so that he could get back to reading, and his advice to would-be novelists was always the same: "Read, read, read." Other contributors include Sarah Bird, Geoff Dyer, and Alfredo Corchado, and the book features an introduction by the editor and a foreword by novelist Stephen Graham Jones. Sprinkled with surprising revelations, this is a good collection for every McMurtry fan's library.

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