Notes From Texas: On Writing in the Lone Star State

4. Why I Write

R O L A N D O H I N O J O S A - S M I T H R O L A N D O HI N O J O S A - SM I T H serves as the Ellen Clayton Garwood Professor in the English department at the University of Texas at Austin. Aside from his English and Spanish novels, parts of his works have been translated into Dutch, French, German, and Italian. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. He earned a baccalaureate degree from the University of Texas, a master’s from New Mexico Highlands University, and a PhD. from the University of Illinois, which awarded him its prestigious Alumni Achievement Award in 1998. His work The Klail City Death Trip Series consists of fourteen novels. 63 Marsha Miller W H Y I W R I T E I C O M E F R O M a family of readers; my parents read to each other and, as the youngest of five, I also saw my older brothers and sisters reading individually or as a group. Until I was ten or so, I thought most people read and that they did so for pleasure or amusement. I certainly did until high school when my oldest sister showed me how to read as a writer: how and when the writer introduced a character or the setting, how the story was moved by using adverbs of place and time, how a character behaved or what the character did, how this created what she called an attitude in the reader’s mind. This was a revelation, and although she wasn’t a writer, she knew how writing worked. She and my other older sister became teachers as did an older brother. I did not give one thought to teaching when I was in high school. My interests lay in sports, reading, and girls. I was a normal enough adolescent, I suppose, although I had given some thought to being a journalist. My reading continued as did my interest in all manners of reading: humor, mostly, from James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, S.J. Perelman, Corey Ford, Robert Benchley, and a now-forgotten writer, H. C. Witwer, who wrote, primarily, boxing novels with humor and a turn of phrase which any fifteen- or sixteen-year-old would appreciate . I also read the popular writers of the time: J.P. Marquand, Lloyd Douglas, and others of their contemporaries. I was introduced to Mark Twain and Matthew Arnold by my sophomore English teacher, Miss Merle Blankenship, and to a wider reading of American and British literature by Miss Amy Cornish. This was the extent of my reading in English along NO T E S F R O M TE X A S 64 with books on African adventures of Frank “Bring ’em Back Alive” Buck, a Texan, and Clyde Beatty. And so, I read whatever fell into my hands as well as the assigned material, Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, for one, and as many detective novels as I could get my hands on; in this regard, I was fortunate that my hometown, Mercedes, down in the Valley, was equipped with a well-stocked library. At one point, in the lower grades, I was appointed librarian when someone donated a four-tiered bookcase full of books to the school. Prior to this, at age five or six, I taught myself to read Spanish by learning the alphabet; it wasn’t difficult. I was a sickly child, and my father would bring me books in Spanish: comic books as well as books on history with a focus on the Mexican Revolution of 1910. I also read The Brownsville Herald and the Spanish-language daily, La Prensa, published in San Antonio and shipped by rail all over the state; the newspaper was of a conservative bent, and although my father disagreed with it, he read it assiduously, and later, I delivered it in and around the neighborhood. Ours was a quiet household, and although I missed school for days and weeks due to rheumatic fever and other ailments, childhood asthma, for one, I kept up my schooling because my mother, a former schoolteacher, saw to it that I didn’t lag behind. This was so to such an extent that I skipped a couple of grades in elementary school and...