Other Writing
7 Books Featuring a Chorus of Voices of Color
Electric Lit
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A novel in many voices can show not just a place but a culture, not just a shared setting but a shared history and identity and blood. We can pass down individual tales while also telling a greater one. …
We Were Known For Our Rivers
Texas Highways
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We knew—and still know—the spots and crossings just for us locals, where four-wheel drive is best, where a drive or a walk along the shifting rocks may be necessary in our blistering summers to find those pools of water tucked away. Fourteen months ago, you may have heard of us for a variety of reasons, or you may not have heard of us at all.
I am from Uvalde.
We were known for our rivers once. …
Wildcatters and Hell-Raisers: On Being a Writer From Texas
Literary Hub
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I was a young writer and a Texan dreaming big dreams about publishing around the world, and it discouraged me. We have been told and re-told the world over; what more could be said? Another book set here would simply be a small voice shouting within the roar of a crowd—a crowd with multiple Pulitzers.
Is there room for me in all this? I wanted to ask. I am here, we are here, can’t we be Texas, too?…
Not Eagle, Not Star
Contra Viento
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The thing about you, your father likes to say, is that you’re dumber than the barnacles on a whale’s ass. Which shouldn’t hurt when you think about it, because he knows as well as you this is Eagle Pass, two hundred fifty miles away from the closest ocean which is a murky saltwater gulf where there are no whales just as here there are no eagles, no passes. …
The Seedy Corner
DIAGRAM
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The house in Galveston, in Fish Village, on Albacore Avenue specifically, is no longer yellow but I will always think of it so: a pale milky yellow, like I imagine cream with a pat of butter stirred in to be—but that sounds so Midwestern, doesn’t it, that cream and butter shit, and apart from one trip to Wisconsin and a friendship with some Minnesotans I know fuck all about the Midwest—so instead let’s say it is a golden-white like sunlight, why don’t we, the scorching sunlight of the Texas coast that I know well…
The Queen Signal
Creative Nonfiction
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He mentions how, the first time they saw the bees, he swatted at them, and Mom scolded him for it.
We laugh. She didn’t mind creeping things, not the way Lindsay and I do, flailing and squealing dramatically when they enter our orbit. She was the one who crushed scorpions on the kitchen floor with little fanfare, or pretended to pluck wolf spiders from the wall and throw them at us as we shrieked and she cackled. She had strong feet, callused from a lifetime of walking barefoot—on our tiled floor, our stubby grass, and before that the hot, damp gravel of Galveston, and before even that the provinces of Mindoro, the island in the Philippines where she was born…