Lowell Mick White
  • Home
  • Writer
    • NORMAL SCHOOL
    • BURNT HOUSE
    • Messes We Make of Our Lives
    • Professed
    • That Demon Life
    • Long Time Ago Good
    • Single Story Ebooks
    • Stories and Miscellaneous Writing
    • Interviews, Criticism
    • Misc Audio/Video
  • Teacher
    • Alamo Bay Writers' Workshop
  • Editor
    • Alamo Bay Press
  • Lowell
  • Blog
    • Podcasts
  • Links
  • Contact

Ordinary Horrors

John Kelso Wrote a Column about Me

7/30/2017

0 Comments

 
I am very sorry to hear of the death this week of Austin newspaper columnist John Kelso. As his former colleague Michael Corcoran said, “He loved his job and so he was better at it than he had to be.”

Kelso was the model for the character Wes Leonard in my story “Bad Guts” and my novel That Demon Life. When he interviewed me for the column below, he said that he approved. He even said That Demon Life was funny--as nice a thing as has ever been said.


Writer's Book Came Together Between Cab Fares

By John Kelso
Sunday, November 15, 2009
 
Lowell Mick White may be the only author to ever write a 182-page novel while driving a cab. 

OK, so he wasn't really driving the cab around Austin while he was writing "That Demon Life", a book full of colorful, sketchy and disreputable characters you probably wouldn't want running your Brownie scout meeting. While writing, he was parked between fares.

"I sat there with my clipboard and a cheap notebook I got at H-E-B, and I'd write," said White, who, from 1998 to 2002, spent time driving around Austin in a Yellow Cab putting his book together. "I'd find a place to park and I'd write 'til I got a call and I'd pick a passenger up. Yeah, I did it old-school with a pen."

Macs are for sissies.

This guy is no slouch with the words. He was the recipient of a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, which includes a six-month residency at J. Frank Dobie's former Hill Country Ranch and a payment of $1,200 to write out in the country.

But most of the book was composed in the cab, on Austin streets. White says you can tell from looking at the structure of the book when the passengers climbed in.

"You might have noticed those little short subchapters. That's where I got passengers in the cabs."

This is one of those deals where life imitates art, or steam imitates steam.

"They sat naked on the mussed bed eating greasy chicken and drinking warm beer, and Richard felt like nothing in his life — nothing, nothing, nothing, ever — tasted better," it says on page 35. "He was just so damn happy."

Then, in real cab life, White remembers the time the drunken wealthy attorney got in the back of his cab and did a strip tease as he was giving her a ride home. He didn't say if he had tinted windows.

"Her friends didn't want her to drive and they put her in the cab, and I was taking her home and she was taking her clothes off," White recalled. "And when I got her home she didn't have her (house) keys, so I was taking her back to the party. I had no place else to take her. But her daughter showed up" and let her in the house.

It's not easy writing a book in a cab. Your cab is your office. White recalls the four slobs who got in the cab and messed everything up.

"I worried a lot of the time that I might lose whatever notebook I was working in, or that it might get damaged," wrote White, who is working on his Ph.D. in English at Texas A&M. "I remember once on Fourth Street some older drunk guys got into my cab, four of them, three in back, one in front, and the guy who sat up front plopped his fat middle-aged butt down on my notebook before I could move it. I totally lost my temper — started cursing, yelling, kicked them all out before I even started the meter."

It's a fun book. There's a little round judge named Cantu, who has the hots for a chick named Giselle, who has a gigantic bird tattoo on her back. There's Paige, who will nail every male that breathes. There's a defense attorney named Linda, who hates her job and thinks all the criminals should be lined up and shot.

White appreciates his characters and loves Linda. He says at a book signing recently when a reader came down on Linda, it made him kind of mad.

"This guy said, 'I didn't like Linda very well; she's not a very moral character.' I said, 'I lived with Linda in the cab for years, she's a very moral character. I like her.' "

​Hey, at least she didn't throw up in the back seat of his cab, like some of his real customers.


I can't find a link to the column on the American-Statesman website. The story "Bad Guts" is included in Long Time Ago Good. And of course you need to read That Demon Life.
Picture
0 Comments

Flat Tires

3/18/2017

0 Comments

 
I’ve had more flat tires than anyone I know. There are probably several reasons—mainly, I guess, because I’ve driven many miles over the years. I was formerly a professional driver, a cab driver, and tires would go out on a fairly regular basis in the cabs I drove. Also, for a while I lived across the street from the facility where the Austin laundry chain Kwik-Wash repaired their washing machines, and the street and alley were littered with little machine screws, and it seemed like every month or so I had to pull those damn things from my tires. And also—in my impoverished youth I drove a lot on lousy cheap used or recapped tires.

The worst flat I ever had was in June, 1994. It was the day OJ Simpson went missing. I was driving north on I-35 to attend a writing workshop at the University of Iowa when my right front tire blew out. Man, that sucked. It was about 105 miserable degrees that day, and I-35 was as usual scary busy and I had to crawl around on the hot gravel changing that tire worried that some fool was going to smash into my pickup on the shoulder…though eventually I got the tire changed and I made it to a motel room in time to see OJ’s low-speed chase.
​
Flat tires make appearances in my writing, of course. Here, in the story, “Bad Guts.”
“Why don’t you just change the tire?”
“Can’t,” Wes said. “I’m driving on the spare—it’s the spare that’s flat.” That stupid fucking donut spare. He’d been driving on it for six months….
Anyway—boom boom boom. Flat tires have always been a part of my life.
​
So I wasn’t too surprised when I looked at my car the other day and saw this:
Picture
Yes, that tire is flat. Unfortunate, right? But—I know what to do. Change the tire!
​
But then I was faced with--this:
Picture
Yeah, the spare was flat, too.

Luckily the guy across the street heard me cursing at the Tire Gods and came over with his portable air pump, and we got some air in the spare and I got back on the road.
​
But—it could have been worse!
Picture
Yeah—three flat tires at once. May, 1983. A personal record!

0 Comments

Out of Context Excerpt 7

2/28/2015

0 Comments

 
The list/rant/whatever from the story "Bad Guts," in the collection Long Time Ago Good.
Picture
“No kidding,” Wes said. He looked at the neon beer sign hanging behind Jillian—a rainbow trout leaping for a mayfly—and felt sad. Like weeping, almost. There would be no cool water in Pflugerville—no fame, no fun. Just heat and hog guts, chitterlings or chitlins, menudo or hog maws, or whatever that stuff was, and who wanted to write about any of it?  In the 23 years the newspaper had been running his column he had written about barbecue (chicken, sausage, ribs, brisket), country music, tractor pulls, pro wrestling (he had a fondness for old school wrestlers like Ivan Putski and Mad Dog Vachon), ice cream, fraternity hijinks, sorority snootiness, the color orange, rodeo, Juneteenth, Confederate Heroes Day, the NAACP, the Ku Klux Klan, beer (local beer, imported beer, cold beer, the meaning of beer), homosexuals, lesbians, zoophiles, necrophiles, Aggies, airports (airports in general, the old airport, the new airport, funding for the new airport, the land scandal surrounding the place that almost became the new airport, and why the old airport was better), light bulbs: incandescent versus florescent, thunder, lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes, ice storms, floods, droughts, cold, heat, rock’n’roll, nose rings, nipple rings, navel rings (he wrote a penis ring story, too, but the editor said it didn’t belong in a decent family newspaper), motorcycles, skateboards, in-line skates, pogo sticks, dogs, cats, parrots, grackles, ostriches, golden-cheeked warblers, fire ants, millipedes, cockroaches, mosquitoes, blind salamanders, tooth spiders, carp, trout, bass, catfish, bats, mice, rats, raccoons, possums, lions, tigers, bears (grizzly bears, black bears, and teddy bears), old cars, new cars, art cars, pickup trucks, and diesel mechanics. He had attended the Budafest, the Wurstfest, the New Highway Fest, the International Barbecue Fest, the Aquafest, the Cedar Chopper Fest, the Sorghumfest, the Pecanfest, the Cotton Pickin’ Fest, the Very Best Fest, the Locust Fest, the Big Ol’ Bull Fest, the Chiggerfest, and the Crappiefest, along with Catfish Days, Frontier Days, Cicada Days, Buffalo Days, Pioneer Days, Prickly Pear Days, Crazy Daze, the Rattlesnake Roundup, the Chilympiad, the White Bass Run, the Mesquite Burn, the Skunk Wallow, and Spamorama. He had been to dozens of county fairs and stock shows—dozens. Three times a week for 23 years he’d written about colorful, folksy stuff—all kinds of colorful, folksy stuff—and he was popular, and he won awards, and people actually read his column.

But 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.

 “We’ve got the seventeenth-largest city in America,” Wes said, “and there’s going to be all these people running around worrying about hog guts.”

“That’s what makes Austin fun,” Jillian said. “It’s weird.”

“It’s all a big lie,” Wes said. “And I’m a big liar.”

“Poor Wes,” Jillian said again. “You’re just feeling sorry for yourself.”

“If you were me, you’d feel sorry for me, too.”

“No, I probably wouldn’t,” Jillian said.

Wes just stared at her.

“Really—I wouldn’t.”

“You’re part of the problem,” Wes said. He took a sip of beer and looked at the television. Some rich bastard was putting. He said, “This is going to be the worst day of my life. The very worst day."

0 Comments

A Project: Single Story Ebooks

9/7/2014

0 Comments

 
Like any writer or educator, I occasionally have to send off samples of my writing—to apply for a job, or a fellowship, or whatever. Sometimes someone just wants to see a sample of your work. I usually just send along a PDF of a published story, or an excerpt from one of my novels.

But a month or so ago, I was fixing to send out a writing sample, and it occurred to me to make it better than a plain PDF—to make it sort of like a little standalone ebook. And then, not just send them out as a sample to whatever lucky person was asking to see my work, but to make them publicly available.

And—so I did.

Below are the first two Single Story Ebooks. Each one has two versions of a single story in it, an early version, and a later, revised, published version, along with a short essay about the writing of the story. I’ll probably have a few more over the next couple of months. They're available on Kindle….
Picture
From experience I know that hard travel makes people cranky and prone to make bad decisions, and crankiness and inept decision-making can increase when people are tired and forced into physical if not emotional intimacy.  So, writing: imagine a tired and cranky man and woman. Give the woman a legitimate complaint. Make the man unaware/uncaring of her complaint. Stick them in a truck in the middle of the Yukon and see what happens...
Deep Eddy, available on Amazon Kindle....
Picture
The story grew out of a prompt that novelist W.P. Kinsella gave me in a writing workshop many years ago—a title, “Bad Guts.” In developing a story to go with the title I tried to imagine a morally exhausted man who does not want to go to work—and how, when he does finally go to work, everything falls apart. This story contains beer and clowns and heat and chitlins—a extraordinarily odd and volatile combination….
Bad Guts, available on Amazon Kindle....
0 Comments

    Lowell Mick White

    Author of the novels Normal School and Burnt House and Professed and That Demon Life and the story collections  Long Time Ago Good and The Messes We Make of Our Lives.

      Sign Up for Occasional Updates

    Submit

    RSS Feed


    Categories

    All
    1920s
    1960s
    1970s
    1978
    1979
    1980
    1981
    1982
    1983
    1984
    1988
    1990s
    2000
    2020
    2021
    9-11
    .99 Cents
    Academia
    Advice
    Aging
    Alamo Bay Press
    Alamo Bay Writers Workshopdcff08d18c
    Alamo Hotel
    Albert King
    Ali
    Alice Flaherty
    Allan Shivers
    All My Children
    Allusions
    Alysa Hayes
    Amazing
    Amazon
    #amediting
    American Eagle
    #amprepping
    #amwriting
    Amy Winehouse
    Anger
    A Night At The Opera
    Animal Industries
    Annie Leibovitz
    Answers
    Anxiety
    Aong And Twenty Miles
    Apache Trout
    Appalachia
    Architecture
    Armadillo
    Art
    Atomic Mutant Dogs
    Austin
    Austin Central Library
    A Visit From The Goon Squad
    Awards
    Awp
    Baby
    Back Pain
    Bad Baby
    Bad Behavior
    Bad Guts
    Barn
    Bars
    Baseball
    Basketball
    Beatest State
    Beer
    Bergstrom
    Best
    Big LAAH
    Big Tex
    Big Tex[t]
    Birth
    Birthday
    Black Box
    Blizzards
    Blocker Building
    Blood
    Bluer Even Than The Sky Above
    Bob Dylan
    Body Count
    Book Club
    Books
    Bookstores
    Book Trailer
    Boredom
    Bourjaily
    Bourjaily Writing Quote
    Bow Wow Wow
    Brag
    Brains
    Bricks
    Bridges
    Brilliant
    Brindled Pit Bull
    Bruce Noll
    Buda
    Bullying
    Burnt House
    Busy
    Cab Driving Story
    Carnegie Library
    Cats
    Chance
    Change
    Chaos
    Character
    Chattanooga
    Chekhov
    Childhood
    Child Labor
    Christmas
    Chuck Taylor
    Cicadas
    Civil War
    Clash
    Club Foot
    Comp
    Complaining
    Conroe
    Country
    Coup
    Covid
    Cox's Mills
    Crazy
    Creative Writing
    Creativity
    Crime
    Cursing
    Dachshunds
    Dakota
    Danger
    Daniel Pena
    Dare Me
    Dave Oliphant
    Dead Professors
    Deep Eddy
    Denver
    Depression
    Desk
    Destroy All Monsters
    Deven Green
    Diane Keaton
    Diane Wilson
    Dirty Mind
    Dissertation
    Distractions
    Disunion
    Dogs
    Dog Soldiers
    Dope
    Dorothea Lange
    Drawing
    Driving
    Driving At Night
    Driving In The Rain
    Driving In The Snow
    Drought
    Dry Line
    Dullness
    Dystopian Romance
    Eagles
    Ebook
    Editing Process
    Editings
    Education
    Election
    Elizabeth Hand
    Emerson
    Engl 347
    Enrest Hemingway
    Eternity
    Extended Narratives
    Eyeballs
    Faculty Incivility
    Falklands
    Fame
    Fascism
    Fiction
    #fiction
    Five Things
    Flannery O\'connor
    Flat Tires
    Fly Fishing
    Found Items
    Fredo
    Free
    Friction
    F. Scott Fitsgerald
    Furniture
    Game Of Thrones
    Gang Of Four
    Garbage
    Genya Ravan
    Ghosts
    Gila Trout
    Gival Press
    Giveaway
    Glue
    Godfather
    Goodreads
    Gorillas
    Grackles
    Grading
    Grad School
    Grand Central
    Greatest
    Great Gatsby
    Grubbs Hall
    Guilt
    Gulag State
    Gulf Coast
    GUTS :(
    Gutter Brothers
    Handicapped
    Handwriting
    Happiness
    Happy Endings
    Harvey
    Head
    #heartbreak
    Higher Education
    History
    Holidays
    House
    Hunter Thompson
    Ice
    Ice Storm
    Ideas
    Impeach
    Improvisation
    Insane
    International Relations
    Internet
    Intertextuality
    Interview
    Intro
    Irs
    Isaac Rosenberg
    Its A Wonderful Life
    Jack Kerouac
    Jake Pickle
    Jennifer Egan
    Jimmy Carter
    Job Interviews
    John Domini
    John F. Kennedy
    John Kelso
    Johnson City
    Kansas
    Keith Richards
    Keller Bay
    Keos
    Keybard
    Kim Addonizio
    Kindle
    Koop
    Larry Heinemann
    Larry Mcmurtry
    Laura Leigh Morris
    Laziness
    Leakey
    Leaves Of Grass
    Lebron James
    Lee Grue
    Lewis County
    Lightning
    Lightnin Hopkins
    List
    Lists
    Literacy
    Long Time Ago Good
    Louisiana
    Lou Reed
    Love
    Lowell
    Lowell Mick White
    Lucinda Williams
    Lumbar
    Lust
    Lyndon Johnson
    Mad Max Fury Road
    Malvern Books
    Malvinas
    Mankato
    Manure
    Manuscript
    Marc St Gil
    Masks
    Maud Hart Lovelace
    Mavis Staples
    Mckenzie
    Mcmurtry
    Memoir
    Memorial Day Flood
    Memory
    Messes We Make Of Our Lives
    Mexican Brick
    Mick
    Midnight Disease
    Minneapolis
    Miracles
    Misfit
    Mistake
    Morgantown
    Mortality
    Mother Earth
    Movies
    Moving
    Murder
    Muses
    Music
    My Sharona
    Mystery
    Nature
    Nebraska
    New Haven
    New Mexico
    New Orleans
    New Years
    Nixon
    Noir
    Norah Jones
    Normal School
    Nose
    Notebook
    Novella
    Novels
    Now Playing At Canterbury
    Office
    OJ
    Olivia
    Oscar Casares
    Outerbridge Reach
    Outlines
    Out Of Context
    Out-of-print
    Pain
    Pandemic
    Pandemic Life
    Parades
    Parker Lane
    Passion Planner
    Pedagogy
    Pens
    Photo Archives
    Photography
    Phrenology
    Pickup Trucks
    Pinball
    Planner
    Podcast
    Poetry
    Police
    Porn Star
    PowerPoint
    Prince
    Prison
    Productivity
    Professed
    Prophecy
    Psu
    Ptcd
    Punctuation
    Punk
    Questions
    Radio
    #rage
    Rain
    Ralph Nader
    Rant
    Raul's
    Ray Bradbury
    Reading
    #reading
    Readings
    Realization
    Rebel Drive-In
    Recapitulation
    Redneck Village
    Rejection
    Reji Thomas
    Reliction
    Republican Debate
    #research
    Rest
    Reunion
    Revelation
    Reviews
    Revisions
    Riff Raff
    Riff-Raff
    R.L. Burnside
    Robbery
    Robert Caro
    Robert Olen Butler
    Robert Pirsig
    Robert Stone
    Rock And Roll
    Rocky Fork
    Rolling Stone
    Rolling Stones
    Ronald Reagan
    Rosanne Cash
    Salmon
    San Antonio
    Sand
    San Quentin
    Scapple
    Scar
    Scary Objects
    Scholars
    Scrivener
    Self-loathing
    Shade Trees
    Sharks
    Shelby Hearon
    Shindig
    Shitty Jobs
    Shoot
    Skinny
    Sleaze
    Sleep
    Soft Eyes
    Soiree
    Solace
    Soundtrack
    Soundtrack Sunday
    Speed Of Sound
    Spring Break
    Squalor
    State Fair
    Steelhead
    Stevie Ray Vaughn
    Stoicism
    Storms
    Stuckness
    Students
    Stupid Job
    Sub
    Sublime
    Sucker-punch
    Suicide Commandos
    Summer Fun
    Sun Also Rises
    Sunshine
    Super Bowl Kickoff
    Super Bowl Kickoff Time
    Sway
    #tamucw
    Taxicabs
    Taxi Driver
    Teaching
    #terror
    Texas
    Texas A&M
    Texas Graves
    That Demon Life
    The Best Years Of Our Lives
    The Clash
    The Dead Weather
    The Edge
    The Forgotten
    The Future
    The Last Educations
    The Man Who Came To Dinner
    Themes
    The Past
    The Wire
    Thom Jones
    Thugs
    Thunder
    Thunderstorm
    Time
    Tolstoy
    #TolstoyTogether
    Tolstoy Writing Quote
    Tomcat
    Tom Wolfe
    Tornado
    Torture
    Transcendentalism
    Treason
    Tropes
    Trout
    True Believers
    Turkey
    Tweet
    Twitter
    University Of Texas
    Vaccine
    Video
    Violence
    Virus
    Vision
    Vote
    Vultures
    Wall
    Wallaby
    Walt Whitman
    Warren Zevon
    Watergate
    Watermelon
    Weather
    Weirdness
    West Virginia
    Where I Lived
    Wildlife
    Wildlife Rehabilitation
    Windows
    Winter
    WIP
    Wisdom
    Witness
    Wonder
    Word Processing Software
    Work
    Working
    Writer At Work
    Writers
    Writing
    #writing
    Writing Process
    #writingprocesses
    Writings
    Writing Tools
    Wrong Number
    Xmas
    Yearning
    Young Adult Reading
    Youth

    Archives

    July 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    February 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    October 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    January 2012
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    November 2010
    September 2010
    August 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010
    May 2010

    RSS Feed


    Sign Up for Occasional Updates!

Submit
  • Home
  • Writer
    • NORMAL SCHOOL
    • BURNT HOUSE
    • Messes We Make of Our Lives
    • Professed
    • That Demon Life
    • Long Time Ago Good
    • Single Story Ebooks
    • Stories and Miscellaneous Writing
    • Interviews, Criticism
    • Misc Audio/Video
  • Teacher
    • Alamo Bay Writers' Workshop
  • Editor
    • Alamo Bay Press
  • Lowell
  • Blog
    • Podcasts
  • Links
  • Contact