The Texas Institute
of Letters
Newsletter,
January /February 2006
MARK YOUR
CALENDARS:
The 70th ANNUAL TIL AWARDS BANQUET will be held April 1, 2006 at the MARRIOTT
AUSTIN AT THE CAPITOL,
Jim Hoggard will be honored with the Lon Tinkle Award
for Excellence.
Cash Bar will open at 6:00 p.m. and the Banquet will begin promptly at 7:00
p.m. on Saturday. New members will be introduced, followed by the book awards
ceremony.
On Saturday afternoon at 4:00 p.m., new members will read selections from their
work at the Marriott Hotel.
Friday Night Reception, Sponsored by The Austin American-Statesman
March 31, 6:30 to 8:30 Flatbed Press and Gallery
More Information and order forms to come.
NEWS OF MEMBERS AND OTHERS
TIL Treasurer Jim Hoggard brings the splendid news
that the Houston Endowment is endowing the Jesse H. Jones Fiction Award and the
Jones Dobie Paisano Fellowship with $120,000 and
$240,000 respectively. TIL will be able to earn enough interest to pay the
awards the following year. It is a great and generous gift to TIL and we
appreciate their support through the years.
Tom Zigal’s
novel, The White
League, won the Violet Crown Award for fiction, given annually by the Writers
League of Texas. The novel has also been optioned for film.
The ABA Newsletter in February Picks from Bookselling This Week, touted The
Night Journal: A Novel, by Elizabeth Crook. “By weaving the tracks of the
railroad during its expansion in the West through the story, Crook exquisitely
brings together the risk takers involved in settling
PW reviewed University of North Texas Press Pride of Place: A Contemporary
Anthology of Texas Nature Writing, edited by David Taylor and including essays
that express an affinity for the natural landscape of Texas by Roy Bedichek, John Graves, Naomi Nye, Pete Gunter, Joe
Nick Patoski and a “particularly
powerful piece” by
Stephen Harrigan, describing a trip with his daughter
to the peak of Enchanted Rock, “a place that Native Americans held
to be sacred and
where, he says, a part of the original Texas still exists.”
Larry McMurtry won a Golden globe for the screenplay
of
L. D. and Laverne Harrell Clark appeared on the Visiting Writers’
Series of Arkansas Tech University, Russellville. L. D. read from his forthcoming novel, “The
Plains Beyond,”
scheduled for release in early 2006. Laverne read from her novel-in-progress, “Their
Eyes Were On the Chickadee.” The
The December Texas Monthly featured such writers as Larry McMurtry,
Jan Reid, Mimi Swartz, Oscar Casares, Gary
Cartwright, Skip Hollandsworth, Sarah
Bird.
Publishers Weekly reviewed Elmer Kelton’s
Brush Country: Two Texas Novels, saying that “the keystones of his suspenseful, carefully drawn style can be found in
these two early . . . full-length novels. . . . Both novels offer
frontier excitement, suspense, a bit of mystery and romance, and plenty of
flying fists and fast-shooting six-gun action. Kelton’s
first books are as good as his most recent work.”
Publishers Weekly also featured St. Andrew’s
Episcopal School of
Austin for refusing to pull Annie Proulx’s
short story, “Brokeback Mountain” from its reading list or lose a $3
million donation to
its building fund. The school has raised more than $3 million in show of
support of its stance on the subject. Several YA authors have contributed
autographed books to the school. The president of the American Booksellers
Foundation for Free Expression said that schools are often challenged on
controversial books, but the St. Andrew’s
situation may be unique.
The TIL office received an epistle from Joe Bob Briggs, admonishing us for not purchasing
his new book—Profoundly
Erotic: Sexy Movies that Changed History. He is saving copies for all TIL members, which
you can order from www.joebobbriggs.com. He says his friendship with all of us
depends on this.
Judy Alter reports in the TCU Press newsletter that she will begin working
half-time in January, still as director. She will have more time to write, but
she will also keep her hand in the publishing at TCU Press she loves. Judy also
turned in another interesting column in the Dallas Morning News on Jeff Guinn
and his success with his Santa Claus books, starting with The Autobiography of
Santa Claus in 1994. Guinn has written other books, including Our Land Before We Die: the Proud Story of the Seminole Negro, but
his publisher wanted more Santa Claus, since the reprint of the first one made
the New York Times best- seller list. He followed with How Mrs. Claus Saved
Christmas, just released. The next one up, “The Santa Show,”
is due out Christmas 2006.
The Points section in the Dallas Morning News on October 30, carried the
following on Texas Writing and Writers: Dagoberto Gilb talks with Macarena Hernandez about Texas culture and
his students; Carol Dawson: Texas novelists used to be stuck on their
inner cowboys: But not anymore; Dick Holland identifies the seven most
important figures in Lone Star Letters: Larry McMurtry,
Katherine Anne Porter, John Graves, Stephen Harrigan,
Terry Southern, Cormac McCarthy, Edwin (Bud) Shrake.
Paul Ruffin, director of Texas Review Press, was recently featured in an interview
in the 2006 Novel and Short Story Writer’s
Market. His recent
publications include a new novel, Castle in the Gloom, from University Press of
Mississippi, and a book of essays, Here’s to Noah, Bless His Ark, from Stone
River Press. Hs has recently had fiction in Idaho Review and Connecticut
Review. Ruffin has recently been a featured author at the Eudora Welty
Symposium, the Tennessee Williams Festival, and the Southern Festival of Books.
In addition, Jack Myers and Paul Ruffin were readers at the Writer’s
Garrett “Upstairs
at Paperbacks Plus” in
THINGS TO PONDER
Amazon’s
Newest Patent Play
Amazon continues to be aggressive in defining and protecting intellectual
property. The e-tailer was recently awarded a patent
for many elements of encouraging and allowing customers to post online reviews,
including the very process of using a Web site to fill out a review form.
Internet News reports it also covers “encouraging consumers
to write reviews of items they’ve purchased by determining the optimal times
to send them e-mails or reminders,” and “in
one embodiment of the
patent, the system sends consumers a message inviting them to write a review in
a predetermined amount of time after the purchase.”
Two other patents granted cover the company’s
Purchase Circles, and “a method of discovering and delivering as search results
related products from multiple categories, such as books written by Steve
Martin, as well as DVDs of movies in which he appeared.”
Interestingly, today Yale’s business school released an overview of a study
that concludes customer reviews “do have an impact on what consumers buy”
at Amazon and
BarnesandNoble.com. Observing randomly selected titles, they found “the
addition of favorable reviews at one site increases book sales at that site relative to
the other retailer. It also finds that negative 1-star reviews carry more
weight with consumers than do positive 5-star reviews. The impact of a negative
review is more powerful in decreasing book sales than a positive review is in increasing
sales.” Bear in mind, though, that the researchers were not using actual sales data; they
were just working from posted sales rank data.
NEA’s Big
Plans for
Recently arrived NEA Director of Literature David Kipen has hit the ground running in shaping the launch of
the agency’s The
Big Read program, which he discussed with MobyLives.com proprietor and Melville House publisher
Dennis Johnson.
As Kipen describes it, the idea is to create “a
citywide reading kit in
a box, and a little dough on the side, so that they don’t have
to invent these
things from scratch.” (The dough, according to the RFP, is grants of $25,000 to $35,000
for now.) The program is designed “to create
conversation” about and engagement with literature all across the country, and to
stimulate and inspire “Americans reading for pleasure.”
The first Big Reads are expected to launch next February or March.
Municipalities in “the high two-figures” submitted applications for the
first spots. The original plan was to start with six cities, but that may
expand. Kipen says, “Because we received many terrific
applications, we hope to involve a few more than six, but the final number is
not set.”
TO DO:
1. Pay your dues NOW!
2. Mark your calendar for April 1 banquet.