Notes From Texas: On Writing in the Lone Star State

14. Confessions of a Texas Publisher/Writer

F R A N C E S B R A N N E N V I C K F R A N V I C K is the retired director and co-founder of the University of North Texas Press and founder and president of E-Heart Press, Inc. She holds BA and MA degrees in English from the University of Texas at Austin and Stephen F. Austin State University, respectively, and a Doctor of Humane Letters (honoris causa) from the University of North Texas. As a press director, she has published more than 200 books, with topics ranging from folklore, history, literary criticism, science, biography, poetry, novels, short stories, and creative nonfiction. Vick has served as president of the Texas Institute of Letters and vice president of the Texas State Historical 233 Julie Metteaur Vick Association. She is a Fellow of the Texas Folklore Society, member of the Philosophical Society of Texas, and Life Member of the Texas State Historical Association and the East Texas Historical Association. CO NFESSIO NS O F A TEX AS PUB LISHER / WR ITER I K N O W T H I S W I L L come as a shock to those of you who have heard me speak with my East Texas twang, but I am terribly provincial. It is embarrassing to be so provincial, but there it is. Furthermore, I come by it naturally, even genetically, perhaps, from deep in my family DNA. My brother and I have often discussed the year we spent during World War II in Laguna Beach, California, while our father was stationed at El Toro Marine Base. Having spent all our lives in East Texas, we thought we were in the most glamorous place in the world. And we may have been. After all, Mother sold Bing Crosby some shoelaces at the local store where she was working. Our mother loved California and the artist colony she found herself in, but when our father left the marines he headed back to Texas, bringing the rest of us with him, of course. He had been gone more than long enough to suit him. My brother laments the fortune we missed by not selling East Texas land and buying land around Laguna Beach and thus becoming part of the boom in southern California after NO T E S F R O M TE X A S 234 the war. I have always doubted that myself. For one thing I doubt that the $10 to $25 an acre to be gotten for East Texas farm land at that time would have bought much around Laguna Beach. For another, fortunes do not seem to come easily to this family. But back to this DNA business. My father’s people swam the Sabine ten years before the Civil War and Mother’s family came in 1824 and helped start the Fredonian Rebellion, being people who were ahead of their time since the real revolution was some ten years off. So of course I am so Texan that it is ridiculous, thus making me provincial in many ways. How can it but help affect my interest in Texas writing? I love this state. I love the people. I love the writers and the publishers. I love its history and its characters. I love the state even when I hate what is happening here on occasion. I even love the crazy climate. This past week it went in a three-day span from spring with temperatures in the 80s to winter and freezing with snow flying, then to a lovely fall day. Somehow we missed a summer day, unless you want to count that 80degree day as early summer—very early summer, before the 100 degree plus hits. Next to lamenting losing football games, Texans love to complain about and make observations about the weather. Deep down in that DNA there is always a Texan. So how does this affect me? It doesn’t prevent me from exploring new places intellectually and even literally, but I do seem to inspect and even compare what I find to that Texan DNA. As an East Texan there may be southern roots in there, but there is also something that always pulls me west to the wide-open spaces of West Texas and beyond, so that southernness is very much tempered by the pull of the West, perhaps inspired by that golden year in...