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 LET'S FACE IT, despite a long literary history -- one as rich and as varied as that of New York or even Paris -- Texas isn't bookish. How can it be, when its storytellers began as rough-riding myth-makers, outlaws and freedom fighters, cowboys and cattlemen whose larger than life escapades didn't warrant putting pen to paper for fear that the record would trap them and render them mundane. These guys could fight, and drink, and win the west -- they were even poets in their own right. But could they write?
The fact that the literary legacy of the Southwest comes from folklore has been a hindrance to its being taken seriously, relegating Texas stories to vintage hardbacks embossed with bucking broncs who protect weighty yellowing pages. But it is experience that breeds storytelling, and the modern Texas experience is both unique and universal, delivering in its literature a borderless common ground untethered in spirit. |
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 Texas has nature and endless sky, free-thinkers and brave souls, technological pioneers, and a diverse population with a number of ethnic backgrounds, the largest of which -- the Hispanic population -- is as integral a part of our culture as anything else. We've got liberal academics and Baptists, staunch Bible-belt conservatives, political progressives, the urban, the rural -- Texas holds the voices of an entire country. Thankfully, it's these voices that give life to the Texas Bound anthology, two collections of short stories edited by Kay Cattarulla of National Public Radio's "Selected Shorts" fame, and now three audio cassette programs made up of a selection of these stories read by Texas actors (produced by the Dallas Museum of Art in conjunction with its Arts and Letters Live series). This quite "bookish" compilation manages to brandish the Texas aesthetic and challenge it at the same time.
on to The Printed Page
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