 On the last day of the 2010 AWP Bookfair, the powers allow non-AWP civilians to enter the arena to buy books and hobnob with writers, and I was sitting at the Slough Press table and a lady and a boy of maybe 10 or 11 came by and looked over my books. He was really taken with That Demon Life—which put me in an uncomfortable position.
I want everyone to read my books—everyone, including kids. But—but—when I tell people That Demon Life is a comic novel about lust and laziness, with lots of drinking and screwing and miscellaneous bad behavior—well, I’m serious. It really is. And is that appropriate for a kid?
My parents let me read pretty much anything. I moved pretty much from Dr. Seuss to adult novels. An example: I loved James Bond, so for Christmas in the 4th grade I got a boxed set of the complete works of Ian Fleming! That was so cool….
But I’m not a parent. (Thankfully!) I had never had to concern myself with thoughts of familial censorship or appropriateness until that day in Denver.
In the end I steered the kid over to Long Time Ago Good, and his mom bought it for him. I guess that’s good, right?
I’ve been thinking about these things since I read Steve Himmer’s essay, Making Room for Readers. Himmer was in a somewhat different situation than I was in, but at least my kid had a good mother who wanted him to read almost anything. It was me and not the controlling adult who thought my book might be inappropriate….
 Here's a nice little review of Long Time Ago Good appearing in The Hays Free Press....
I know one should not judge a book by its cover, but truthfully, many people do, and I am no different. On a recent trip to the Buda Library, I was browsing through their newly acquired books and a title grabbed my attention, “Long Time Ago Good: Sunset Dreams from Austin and Beyond” by Lowell Mick White. The picture on the front cover depicts a blurry, angry dog barking at an armadillo. I opened the book and discovered it was a collection of short stories. Based on what I saw on the cover, I had a feeling these stories might have some edge to them. I was right.Read the full review: "Check it Out, Neighbor."
 Years ago I was driving across Tennessee and came down toward Chattanooga just at dusk, and it looked so pretty looming up out of the impounded waters of the Tennessee River. I was moved—and I thought of moving there. I told a girl I knew then about my dream of Chattanooga, but she was unimpressed.
“You probably won’t be any more happy there than you are here,” she said. “Or unhappy.”
Which might have been true. Heck, was probably true. I never found out, though, for I never ran away to Chattanooga. But still—the main impulse is right, I think. Sometimes you just have to pack up and go. Hit the road and leave everyone and everything behind….
Janet put on a jacket and gathered up her purse and a battered Rand McNally road atlas. Seven times in the last eight weeks she had dropped Jay off at Steve's, then set out on long drives out of town, driving eight or ten or twelve hours, thinking, thinking, stopping late for a motel room—twice sleeping in the front seat of her car—then turning back in the early morning and heading home. Each drive—to Dalhart, Clovis, Carlsbad, El Paso, Big Bend, Wichita, Little Rock—she saw as a dry run, practice for when she really left town for good.
The opening scene with Janet and her son is taken from one of my earliest memories, a morning when I was sitting at the table with my mom when we were startled by a sonic boom….
“It's when a plane goes faster than the speed of sound,” Janet said. “You know what that is?”
Jay shook his head.
“Okay, let's say that airplane came busting through the wall just now”—Janet pointed with her cigarette at the wall just behind Jay—“and I yelled 'Get down, Jay!' But no matter how fast I yelled at you, the plane would still run you over, 'cause it would be going faster than my words.”
Jay twisted around in his chair and looked at the wall, as if judging the likelihood of a jet bursting through it at any moment. Then he turned back to his cereal and began eating, every now and then looking up at his mother. He didn't say anything.
Janet thinks, “…at the speed of sound, you could get a long way away, maybe before anyone even noticed you were gone.”
Several people have pointed out, correctly, that Janet’s decision to flee—to bolt and leave her kid behind—would be a selfish one. But sometimes we write about selfish people, and sometimes we are selfish people. Life is like that.
There are jets--RF4Cs, in fact--in this story, and so I'll run this video again....
 The tragic and untimely death of Amy Winehouse provoked many responses among my social network pals and on the various blogs I read—and most of the responses were sober and thoughtful and sad, though some were vicious, and some just clueless. It’s the clueless ones that here attract my attention.
“It was not a matter of if but of when” was a comment I saw in half a dozen places on Facebook. And reading these comments I thought, What? Huh?
Oh, clueless friends of Facebook friends, go look in the goddamn mirror. You see a person there? The one that looks somewhat like you? For that clueless person, too, death is not a matter of if but of when! Your reflection and you and me and all of us are sadly mortal, and death could come tap us on the shoulder at any moment.
The question that then faces us all is pretty basic: what should we do in the meantime? How should we spend these few precious remaining hours?
When she looked back on her life, Bonnie Chamberlain could see that she had always lived in a tortured world. Not just tortured through the normal heartbreaks of dying parents and stupid boyfriends and husbands—though, of course, like anyone else she had experienced those minor personal tortures—but tortured by time itself, vast, scary time, a span where mountains rose and eroded, oceans flooded and withdrew, where earthquakes and volcanoes went off, and strange creatures walked and flapped and swam.
She felt the pain of the world most of her life; when she was nine years old, some 45 million years after the last seas finally receded and the land that would become Texas emerged wet and steaming from the gunk, Bonnie found a fossil shark’s tooth in the bed of a dry creek on her grandparent’s farm. Long as her finger, black and gray and still sharp and scary-looking ages after being shed, the tooth was suddenly precious to her, a link to a hidden world—holding it in her hand, even as a child, she could almost feel the power, the mystery, the danger, the delight, the very life of the long-dead shark. Later she remembered looking up into the hills above the creek and being thrilled and scared to know that this had once been the floor of the ocean—and before that, a mountain range—and before that, and that, and that—something had always been there. She could feel the world spinning back, endlessly.
In the story “Reliction,” Bonnie’s response to mortality is to find solace in the physical world. Some people create art. There are other possible responses. Some are more dangerous than others.
 I really love these photographs. No up or down about it.
I came across them when searching through public
photo archives for work I could use for the cover of my book, Long Time Ago Good—and from first glance I was wholly captivated. They’re the work of Marc St. Gil, who produced them for the Environmental Protection Agency as part of the Documerica Project.
Documerica hired 100 or so photographers to document the American environment of the mid-1970s. Over 15,000 photos were taken for the project, and every one I look at I find consistently amazing and astonishing and miraculous. I can—and have—lost hours staring into the computer screen, connecting with this past world, or trying to….
Though the project as a whole covered the entire US, I’ve concentrated on St. Gil’s Texas pictures. They really fit well with the stories in my book.
Who are these kids? What happened to them? There is an intense mystery here in these images that totally captures my heart…they're part of the great forgotten.... I don’t just love the photos—I love these people, too. I hope they’re all alive and well and happy…. In addition to the book cover, I used a series of these St. Gil photos to make a trailer for Long Time Ago Good:
As I mentioned in an earlier post, this was the original shot for the book cover….
Which became this….
 Here is a story about being depressed and then having your life turn to shit….
I had only been working at my new job for seven weeks but I was already dreading going to work. Every day I grew increasingly depressed. It wasn’t the job itself that depressed me—I corrected billing statements, boring and repetitious and stupid billing statements, for a big law firm—but the woman I worked with, Debbie Peterson, who shared my office cubicle, and who seemed to be slowly, steadily, scarily, going mad.
Each morning’s elevator ride up to our office was stressful: sometimes Debbie would show up early to answer the phones until the receptionist arrived, and the doors would slide open and Debbie would be behind the reception desk grinning at the doors, at me, grinning happily but with cold blue glittering eyes. I hated that. I so much preferred to start my day calmly, to step off the elevator into an empty, quiet room.
And on my last day at work, I got what I wanted—got that much, at least….
The first time I read this in public, a woman in the audience asked, “So, did that really happen?”
I was an inexperienced performer then. I was surprised and thrown off by her question.
“What?” I asked. “No, not really.”
“Well, how really? Is that crazy woman based on somebody?”
“Uh…I’ve known a lot of crazy people.”
Some crazier than others, some crazy like this bat in the audience, right?
“But are any of them the inspiration for the woman in the story?”
“Uh…no.”
Fuck no, crazy! I thought with an exclamation point, but I answered with a mumble.
I handle some things better now—I hope….
 A story about being trapped, and being mad about being trapped….
At Bluebonnet Lake they were still fishing. Shannon’s father and the girls had their lines in the filthy water, and Margie stood behind them. One of her hands was bandaged. Shannon stood by the concession stand watching them, for a long time. Strangers, she thought. She felt at the left front pocket of her shorts; the car keys were still there, and again for a moment she was tempted to turn and quietly go to the car and drive off—somewhere. Somewhere—not home, but anywhere. But then she realized there was no place, really, to go. Shannon walked back down to the pond and sat on a bench. No one saw her, noticed her: the twins, her father, Margie. It was a lonely world.
 In my creative writing classes last week we discussed a story by Oscar Casares, “Yolanda.” It’s a very fine, bittersweet coming-of-age story that features a narrative frame, where the present-day adult narrator sets up the narrative, then tells the story of what happened when he was 12 years old, then returns to the present and closes out, putting the action into perspective. It works really well. By coincidence, this week's Soundtrack Sunday story also has a frame—well, almost. Sort of.
When I began writing “Mexican Brick,” I planned to build a frame around it—Garza coming back to the apartment complex years after the action, seeing it much unchanged though now with different occupants…then falling back into the narrative of that celebrated youthful summer…then closing with—something. Some sort of contemporary action. I never figured out what—never had to—because as the narrative developed, with its cycle of violence and betrayal, it became apparent that the frame was unnecessary. The action from the past stood on its own and did not need mediation.
I wanted to write a ghost story, and this is what happened: the ghost flittered away, leaving behind a bunch of people sitting around an apartment complex during a humid drowsy Austin summer, and the complex itself in many ways became the most important character.
 Driving a cab is a hard way to make a living. You work ten to twelve hours a day, driving, driving, fighting traffic and the elements, and the people you pick up often treat you very poorly indeed—a few measly dollars spent on the fare can be enough to bring out the inner despot and tyrant in many normally polite and well-behaved individuals.
When I was working on my MA I was in a cw class and wrote a cab driving story about a driver whose life is bad and gets worse. It was supposed to be…tragic, I guess. It was supposed to be sad! But when I first read it aloud, people—laughed. My audience thought it was funny! And every time I’ve performed this story since then, people laugh. I'm not really sure I want to understand the response—but of course at any rate it’s beyond my control. Once you write or tell a story, it’s not yours anymore: it belongs to the reader, the listener.
At any rate, “Riff-Raff” is set in a hard world….
 This is one of my favorite stories to perform—the narrative is pretty strong and the rising level of ridiculosity always seems to keep the audience hanging in there. “Guts :( ” [and my blogging platform can’t handle the strikethrough on GUTS or the little frowny-face that follows] is another story about a city in a time of change and dislocation. Wes Leonard is the humor columnist for the Austin newspaper, and he is assigned to go cover a chitlins cookoff. But he's tired of writing about colorful and folksy community events, and he doesn’t want to go—he’d rather spend the afternoon in a bar getting drunk.
*
...colorful and folksy was getting harder and harder to find: the city had changed, was changing. There were big-assed skyscrapers downtown now, and tech millionaires cruising around in Maserattis, and waves of immigrants from California and Mexico—and everywhere else on the planet, seemingly—had changed the texture of the town. Colorful and folksy, real colorful and folksy, was getting hard to find. Wes tried a few times to write about the new city he was seeing all around him—he wrote about the gentrification of the east side, about inappropriately huge mansions in old neighborhoods, about traffic and traffic and traffic, about air and water pollution, about the loss of friendly old bars and restaurants, and the snootiness of new bars and restaurants—he wrote columns about the new city, and nobody liked them. They were downers. They sounded like the carpings of a cranky old man. Nobody wanted to read that. People wanted colorful and folksy—at least from him, they wanted colorful and folksy. He went back to recycling old topics. In the end all it got him was a gig as the celebrity judge at the Greater Southwest Chitlins Cookoff and Jamboree.
*
An obvious choice for music here is “My City Was Gone,” by the Pretenders. Though perhaps it’s too obvious. And over the years the song has been co-opted and appropriated for evil purposes. Also it’s about Ohio. How about:
My first visit to Austin was in August, 1978. I was coming down from Minnesota on I-35, and after I crossed the Red River, I veered off and hit US 281 at Jacksboro and headed on south. When I got past Johnson City I struck east on US 90, and came into Austin in the late afternoon, and just past the Y in Oak Hill I fumbled around looking for a radio station and found KLBJ-FM—ha! I KLBJ! That was pretty funny, I thought, and I had much to learn about Austin and Lyndon Johnson—and then Genya Ravan and Lou Reed came surging out of the speakers, brassy and sexy and exciting. It's not the kind of song that that most people might think of when they're considering Austin, but for me it capured a moment. A new place! New possibilities!
What was I doing in Texas? Exploring. Seeing what was there. There was a lot to see—something new every day. A lot to explore. Four years later, The Clash came to Austin for a pair of concerts and filmed a video for “Rock the Casbah.” The RF4Cs at 2:34 figure in a story we’ll come to later, “The Speed of Sound.” At 3:08 you can see—me—off to the side of the screen. I was trying to stay out of the camera range, and of course now I wish I’d been up front jumping around. At 2:04, you can see the characters running west on Sixth Street toward the Alamo Hotel, a place that figures in my novel, That Demon Life, and whose bar, the Alamo Lounge, was no doubt a favorite hangout of Wes Leonard. But that’s all in the past. “GUTS :( ” is a story that takes place in the present, and it's Wes’s doom is to live unhappily in that present while writing about traces of the golden past.
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