Contributors
Bruce McCall
Artist, writer, and funnyman Bruce McCall, perhaps best known these days for his whimsical New Yorker covers and regular presence in Vanity Fair, applied his satirical brush to the state’s emerging obsession with natural gas for his debut in Texas Monthly (“The Mildcatters,”). “That gas is the new oil was all news to me,” says the Canadian-born New Yorker. “I wanted to convey gas as the new cash cow for energy explorers.” McCall, who has no formal art training and claims to never work on improving his technique, took three days to draw his illustration but only two to paint it. “The drawing is everything,” he explains. “The rest is paint-by-numbers.” The author of Zany Afternoons, Thin Ice, All Meat Looks Like South America, and The Last Dream-O-Rama, he is currently working on a children’s book.
Jim Lewis
“Africa is a place that’s really interesting to me, as are its people,” says Austin writer Jim Lewis, who has visited the continent several times in the past couple of years. So when he heard that a Somali Bantu refugee family was arriving in San Antonio, it seemed only natural to tell their story (“Exiles on Main Street,”). Before meeting Ali Mohamed and his family at the airport in February, Lewis visited with their relatives, also recent refugees. “They are Texans now,” he says. “Today we have Bantu Texans, Kosovar Texans, Sudanese Texans. My grandparents came over and couldn’t speak English either—it’s a cycle. It’s heartening that we can still do that as a country.” Lewis has written three novels, most recently The King Is Dead.
Eric Chase Anderson
Eric Chase Anderson became an illustrator sort of by accident. “I started making maps to help myself develop the plots of stories I was writing and to give away as Christmas presents,” he says. But people were so taken with his precise drawings that soon he was illustrating the DVD packaging for his director brother Wes’s movies (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou) and doing work for publications like Time magazine. For Texas Monthly, he revisits his Houston roots in “The Anderson Boys Grew Up in Texas”. “My brothers, Mel and Wes, were smart, creative, and fun,” he recalls. “Almost nothing was more interesting to me than hanging out with them.” Anderson now lives in New York (he returns to his home state as often as he can), and Chronicle Books has recently published his first novel, Chuck Dugan Is AWOL.
Bruce McCall
Artist, writer, and funnyman Bruce McCall, perhaps best known these days for his whimsical New Yorker covers and regular presence in Vanity Fair, applied his satirical brush to the state’s emerging obsession with natural gas for his debut in Texas Monthly (“The Mildcatters,”). “That gas is the new oil was all news to me,” says the Canadian-born New Yorker. “I wanted to convey gas as the new cash cow for energy explorers.” McCall, who has no formal art training and claims to never work on improving his technique, took three days to draw his illustration but only two to paint it. “The drawing is everything,” he explains. “The rest is paint-by-numbers.” The author of Zany Afternoons, Thin Ice, All Meat Looks Like South America, and The Last Dream-O-Rama, he is currently working on a children’s book.
Jim Lewis
“Africa is a place that’s really interesting to me, as are its people,” says Austin writer Jim Lewis, who has visited the continent several times in the past couple of years. So when he heard that a Somali Bantu refugee family was arriving in San Antonio, it seemed only natural to tell their story (“Exiles on Main Street,”). Before meeting Ali Mohamed and his family at the airport in February, Lewis visited with their relatives, also recent refugees. “They are Texans now,” he says. “Today we have Bantu Texans, Kosovar Texans, Sudanese Texans. My grandparents came over and couldn’t speak English either—it’s a cycle. It’s heartening that we can still do that as a country.” Lewis has written three novels, most recently The King Is Dead.
Eric Chase Anderson
Eric Chase Anderson became an illustrator sort of by accident. “I started making maps to help myself develop the plots of stories I was writing and to give away as Christmas presents,” he says. But people were so taken with his precise drawings that soon he was illustrating the DVD packaging for his director brother Wes’s movies (Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou) and doing work for publications like Time magazine. For Texas Monthly, he revisits his Houston roots in “The Anderson Boys Grew Up in Texas”. “My brothers, Mel and Wes, were smart, creative, and fun,” he recalls. “Almost nothing was more interesting to me than hanging out with them.” Anderson now lives in New York (he returns to his home state as often as he can), and Chronicle Books has recently published his first novel, Chuck Dugan Is AWOL.
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