JUDY ALTER

Judy Alter is the author of nearly sixty books, fiction and nonfiction for both adults and young readers. Her latest books for children are John Barclay Armstrong: Texas Ranger, Martin DeLeon: Tejano Empresario, and Souvenirs from Space. Her latest adult title is the collection of short stories, Sue Ellen Learns to Dance. She is a recipient of the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Western Writers of America, Inc, and her books have won awards from The Texas Institute of Letters, WWA, and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. Judy holds a PhD. in English from Texas Christian University. She has been the director of TCU Press since 1987.

NOTES FROM AN OUTSIDER

I have long envied native Texans. Elmer Kelton, Joyce Roach, Bob Flynn, Fran Vick, and others speak a language I can only imitate. Joyce Roach once said something to me about the perspective I, as an outsider, bring to Texas fiction. I am astonished to think that after forty years in the state, I'm still a Johnny-come-lately, an interloper, even a damn yankee. But whether or not you were born in Texas is important to a lot of people. Most of us remember the group that set up booths in malls during the seventies to seek out those born in Texas. If you could qualify, you received a membership and a certificate—Born in Texas. I think I bought memberships for my four children and hungered for one for myself.

I was born in Chicago, where my father was a physician and college president. He was a very British man who grew roses in his free time. When we talk in western fiction about the relationship between a man and his land, I don't think roses are what we have in mind. If my father ever rode a horse, I don't know about it. And when Texans of my generation were riding horses, I was riding a bike. I rode a horse as a child once, in a stable in Chicago, and hated it. I've not been on a horse again to this day, though I've written a lot about young girls and grown women and their relationships to horses.

Growing up, I thought Texas was a foreign country. When my brother was stationed at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station, my parents came to Texas to see him. They came back with descriptions of what sounded almost like semitropical land—not at all what any of us expected of Texas. Then when I was in graduate school, the man I would marry went to West Texas—Turkey, to be specific—to a funeral and came back describing a vast, barren brown land. More my expectation of Texas!

On our first trip to Texas together—for him to investigate a surgical residency and me to find out about the English doctoral program at TCU—we drove across Oklahoma in April. The fields were lush and green, and I remember particularly the plum thickets were in full bloom. But Joel kept saying, "Just wait till we get to Texas, Judith, it will all change." I began to wonder if a great curtain would drop at the Red River and we would instantly cross from green to brown. Of course, we came to North Central Texas, which is usually beautiful in April, as it was that year. I was surprised though that it reached the eighties during the day! So hot, I thought. (Little did I know!)

Long before I moved to Texas, I knew I wanted to write. I remember summers when I rode my bike to the public library each morning, brought home two or three books, spent the day on the front porch reading them, and went back the next day for a new supply. It did not make me popular with the neighborhood kids, but I think those library summers shaped me as a storyteller and writer. I wrote my first short stories at about the age of ten. They were about a nineteenth-century spinster named Miss Shufflebaum and her cocker spaniel, Taffy (that's because I desperately wanted a cocker spaniel). In high school I sent a short story to Seventeen, then the bible of high school girls. It came back immediately of course, but I tried. When I went to college, I majored in English because I liked to read—I had no thought of a career because I was going to get married and some man would take care of me. (Oh, was I ever the typical child of the fifties!)

So I knew I wanted to write—but I didn't know what to write. I used to sit at my desk and think I'd write if I knew what to write. Once a calligrapher friend and I collaborated on a Texas ABC book—there are lots of them today but there weren't back in the early 1980s. It was twenty-six pages of brief introductions to important points in Texas history, one for each letter of the alphabet—A is for Alamo, B for bluebonnet, and so on. (I had to stretch for Y and came up with "Y'all come back" for Texas hospitality.) When someone suggested I do similar books for other states and start with my home state, I thought only briefly about Illinois and realized there wasn't a whole alphabet of history there. Illinois, I'll have you know, is not a lackluster state. We gave the country Lincoln, after all, and even if you still call it the War of Northern Aggression, you have to admit his greatness. And Chicago—that city has a great sprawling history, highlighted by Mrs. O'Leary and her cow. But somehow it pales in the face of Texas history.

Over the years I've tried to write about Chicago. Once I wrote a young-adult mystery based on an actual stalker who threatened the all-female household of a high school friend of mine to the point that my parents forbade me to stay overnight there. I tried to catch the ambience of being in high school on Chicago's South Side in the 1950s, but I couldn't find a home for the manuscript. And I labored long over a novel about the Chicago World Exposition of 1893 and Mrs. Potter Palmer, who was president of the Board of Lady Managers and was the first woman to combine the concepts of wealth and philanthropy. I loved writing it, loved the research—I grew up in the neighborhood of the exposition—but every agent that read it said it read like a young-adult to them. To this day I'm not sure if it really does or if I was just pigeon-holed in their minds. But we all have unpublished manuscripts, and that's one of mine.

No, it was Texas that gave me the stories I wanted to write about. When we first moved here, Joel was in that residency, and I was in graduate school on a fellowship; we were dirt poor. We did what was free, and we frequently went to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, which then had its original name of The Amon Carter Museum of Western Art. We were both captivated by the...