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East Texas

Film & TV|
January 21, 2013

Lights, Camera, Carthage!

Nearly fifteen years after Richard Linklater and I started talking about turning a Texas Monthly story into a major motion picture, it’s finally hitting the big screen, with a little help from Jack Black, Matthew McConaughey, Shirley MacLaine—and a seventy-year-old retired hairdresser from Rusk named Kay Baby Epperson.

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True Crime|
January 20, 2013

The Beating of Billy Ray Johnson

The short, slight, mentally disabled black man was found on the side of a road in Linden, huddled in a fetal position. He was bloody and unconscious—the victim of a violent crime. But another tragedy was how residents of the East Texas town reacted.

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Recipes|
January 20, 2013

State Fare: East Texas Onion Pudding

Dean Fearing, the guitar-strumming executive chef at Dallas’ swanky Mansion on Turtle Creek, hits all the right notes when he’s in the kitchen.The Eastern Kentucky native and graduate of New York’s Culinary Institute came to Texas in 1979 to explore new frontiers in cooking and ended up pioneering Southwestern cuisine.

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The Wanderer|
September 6, 2012

Choose Your Own Texas Adventure

The first column I wrote for Texas Monthly appeared in the March 2000 issue. The article was titled “Voting Rites,” and I argued that the Voting Rights Act, which Lyndon Johnson had proposed to a joint session of Congress 35 years earlier, was the greatest accomplishment of his

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Letter From Cleveland|
June 30, 2011

The Worst Hard Time

My hometown of Cleveland has become the most disgraced community in America because of a brutal, unspeakable crime that has set everyone against one another.

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Rick Bass|
August 31, 2010

Fish Story

One more trip—would it be the last?—to Toledo Bend Reservoir with my dad.

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Feature|
May 31, 2009

Court Order

Location:: East TexasWhat You’ll Need: Full tank of gas, love of graniteSo you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like to plan your weekends. You don’t want to worry about reservations. And you absolutely, positively don’t want to fool with timetables. Then I’ve got two words for

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Diagram of a magnolia tree.
The Culture|
March 1, 2009

How to Plant a Southern Magnolia

The pecan may be our state tree, but the Magnolia grandiflora, or Southern magnolia, has long been the belle of our arboreal ball. With its dramatic canopy, glossy leaves, and creamy blooms, this elegant evergreen is the centerpiece of many Texas gardens. Where does it thrive? “Magnolias prefer warm, rainy

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Feature|
May 31, 2004

Life and Meth

Around the Piney Woods, most people will tell you that they know someone who’s addicted to homemade speed. Drug recovery centers are overwhelmed; court dockets are backed up; jails are filled. There’s no end in sight.

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Music|
April 1, 2004

Pure Country

"I don't believe anything in this world could ever disturb or upset me enough to make me start drinking again."

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Feature|
April 1, 2000

The Sins of the Father

For Tom Cherry, the precise place where loyalty to his dad ends and a larger obligation to society begins lies deep in the woods of East Texas, at the intersection of history and conscience, where the truth about a church bombing during the struggle for civil rights in the South

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True Crime|
March 1, 1983

Blood of the Lamb

A high school teacher shot up the First Baptist Church in the East Texas steel town of Daingerfield, and the agony lasted longer than anyone could have imagined.

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Politics & Policy|
January 1, 1983

God’s Happy Hour

Every year communities scattered across Texas hold wet-dry elections. Each one pits the forces of fundamentalism against the forces of realism. This is the story of one such election.

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Being Texan|
April 1, 1978

The Petrified Forest

Behind the pine curtain of deep East Texas is a world trapped in the past and hidden from the future: lush woods, poor whites, the descendants of slaves, and an aristocracy still breathing the rarefied air of the Old South.

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