Back of the Book

photograph by Fredrik Nilsen

"100 North Nevill Street"
by Zoe Leonard
installation view, detail

Zoe Leonard, a New York City-based photographer and sculptor, is turning Marfa inside out and upside down as part of a Chinati Foundation special exhibition.

The work is a large-scale camera obscura installation. A camera obscura is an optical device, predating photography, that uses an aperture and a darkened chamber to convert natural light into a two-dimensional image, which is typically projected onto a flat plane. In the case of “100 North Nevill Street” (the installation’s title is borrowed from the hosting Ice Plant gallery’s address), a 6-inch lens installed in one of the building’s walls casts an inverse image of the exterior landscape across the interior of the warehouse-like space. Because the image is a real-time projection of the external environment, ever-changing patterns of light and shadow, not to mention clouds and cars, keep the distorted image in constant motion.

“I hate to oversimplify what is a marvelous and complex artistic experience,” says Rob Weiner, associate director of the Chinati Foundation, “but you walk into the room, which has become a kind of camera, and you see an upside down image of the outside that fills the walls, floor and ceiling.

“Everybody has a completely different experience,” Weiner says. “You start looking at something that’s familiar in a very particular way. It makes it strange for a moment, even though it’s completely accurate. You’re looking at it in a different perspective. Like all art, it’s experience.”

Leonard’s West Texas presentation is the final installment of a worldwide series. In New York City, the artist received widespread acclaim for “945 Madison Avenue” at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Leonard had previously exhibited camera obscura installations in Venice, Italy (2012), London (“Observation Point,” 2012), and Germany (“Available Light,” 2011). The current Marfa installation is the only location projecting primarily natural scenery.

The Chinati Foundation has an evolving relationship with Leonard, who first visited Marfa with a friend several years ago. Since then, Leonard has returned to Chinati to exhibit her photography, and in 2010 performed a spoken word piece called “This Is Where I Was” based on more than 1,000 collected postcards of Niagara Falls.

The Ice Plant is located on East Oak Street between North Nevill and Salarosa streets in Marfa. “100 North Nevill Street” is free and open to the public from noon to 2 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday, until the end of the year.

The rules for the annual Texas Observer Short Story Contest contain a clause that reads “No restriction on genre;  entries with a Texas setting or theme are encouraged.” Writers have taken this encouragement to heart. The majority of stories entered in our first three years of contests have boasted Texas settings, and all three winners have been steeped in Texana: Brian Allen Carr’s cowboy myth “The Last Henley,” set in Corpus Christi; the rural Texas of Larina Lavergne’s “Water Birth”; and Ashley Hope Perez’s 2013 winner “3:17,” which takes place in the aftermath of the 1937 New London school explosion.

But each year’s contest has also drawn stories from all over the globe, many featuring exotic (to Texans) settings such as New Zealand, Turkey, Egypt and South Korea. This year we expect more of the same: an inpouring of words from all corners of the world, some offering insight into rarely seen locales, some shedding new light on familiar places, and all of them telling new stories in new ways, old stories in new ways, or new stories in old ways. Hell, even an old story told in an old way can offer a fresh perspective.

This year’s guest judge, Elizabeth McCracken, is no stranger to the short story form, having earlier this year published a story collection, Thunderstruck, to great acclaim. When she’s not writing her own work, she serves as the Fiction Chair at the University of Texas’ Michener Center for Writers, mentoring and teaching tomorrow’s acclaimed storytellers.

Asked what she looks for in a good story, McCracken borrows these words from William Boyd: “The great modern short stories possess a quality of mystery and beguiling resonance about them—a complexity of afterthought—that cannot be pinned down or analyzed.”

“That’s what I want in any short story,” McCracken says, “that complexity of afterthought. When I finish a short story I want to feel as though my brain has been struck like a gong.”

So if you’re cooking up (or sitting on) a story you think may be up that alley, give us a shot. As always, the winner of the Texas Observer Short Story Contest wins $1,000, and will have his or her story published in our annual Books Issue, due out in October. The winning piece will also be published online, as will four finalists. Additionally, 15-25 honorable mentions will be identified by name (which makes great fodder for submission letters).

Go ahead, writers. Strike our brains like a gong.

CLICK HERE for all the relevant information, and to SUBMIT.

Cristina Henríquez

Cristina Henríquez will read from The Book of Unknown Americans on June 18 at BookPeople in Austin; June 19 at Brazos Bookstore in Houston; and June 20 at the Dallas Museum of Art.

In a 2009 TED talk titled “The Danger of a Single Story,” Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie noted that “the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” In Texas, at least, Mexican immigration has largely defined the Latino narrative, but Cristina Henríquez’s big-hearted second novel challenges this “single story” by exploring a wide range of Latino experiences.

Henríquez is specially qualified to weigh in on the particular dilemmas of migration, cultural identity and displacement. Born and raised in Delaware and now living in Chicago, she’s resided in Florida, Virginia, Indiana and Iowa. She spent summers in Panama, where her father was born, and lived in Texas long enough to be chosen as the state’s sole essayist for the 2008 anthology State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. Despite her stateside bona fides, the “Americans” of her novel’s title refers to both U.S. residents and individuals from the many countries of the Américas.

The Book of Unknown Americans opens with the Rivera family’s arrival to a modest Delaware apartment building after days of travel from their hometown in central Mexico. Desperate to help their beautiful teenaged daughter, Maribel, recover from a near-fatal head injury, Arturo and Alma Rivera have come to the U.S. so that Maribel can receive special education services not available in Mexico. Why Delaware, not Texas or California? A mushroom farm in nearby Pennsylvania is the one business that will sponsor Arturo’s work visa. (Like most of the immigrants featured in the novel, the Riveras have come to the U.S. legally.)

Alma Rivera narrates roughly half of the novel, quietly assessing the precariousness of her family’s new life and communicating the particular flavor of her own homesickness, taking us back to the happy life the Riveras once enjoyed, before Maribel’s accident, in their hometown of Pátzcuaro. Language barriers make phone calls to Maribel’s school an ordeal, the taste of foods from home deepens Alma’s sadness, and the hard letters of English seem like miniature walls dividing words and worlds.

Among the neighbors who help the Riveras adjust to life in Delaware are the Toros, a Panamanian-American family who live across the hall. Fifteen-year-old Mayor Toro is the novel’s secondary narrator, offering an insider’s view of the dynamics between the building’s residents and spot-on depictions of what it’s like to be the clumsy younger brother of a soccer star in a family where being “Latino and male and not a cripple” means he is expected to excel at the game.

Upon the Riveras’ arrival in Delaware, Maribel puts her clothes on backwards, forgets simple conversations held moments earlier, and struggles to wash her own hair. With time, however, her condition begins to improve. The teachers at her special school help, but readers may be inclined to give Mayor Toro more of the credit. Unlike Maribel’s parents, Mayor does not compare her to a “before” version of herself. To him, Maribel is simply Maribel: beautiful, fascinating, and—astonishingly—interested in him. The scenes between Mayor and Maribel are among the loveliest in the novel, with Henríquez perfectly coupling the awkwardness of their exchanges with their urgent quest for mutual understanding, that most basic and elusive of human sustenance. Ultimately, Mayor’s misguided efforts to cultivate their romance open the way to unwitting tragedy for both families.

If The Book of Unknown Americans has a flaw, it is that Henríquez, in her effort to overturn the “single story” of U.S. Latinos, sometimes verges on didacticism. When a character comments, “It’s like how everyone thinks I like tacos. We don’t even eat tacos in Panamá,” another Panamanian chimes in: “That’s right. We eat chicken and rice.”

“If people want to tell me to go home,” another character says, “I just turn to them and smile politely and say, ‘I’m already there.’”

There is a studied diversity to the handful of interspersed monologues from other Latino residents in the apartment building; characters including a busybody, a dancer, a photographer, a line cook with an anger-management problem and a poetry-quoting Vietnam vet hail from Mexico, Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Paraguay and Puerto Rico. Nevertheless, their passages become monochromatic and rarely strike notes not already sounded more clearly in the Rivera/Toro narrative. Though a number of tertiary characters have monologues, Maribel does not. Her exclusion from the “unknown” Americans who get to speak their piece is hard to accept, mostly because it would have been a pleasure to see what Henríquez could do with Maribel’s point of view.

Henríquez is at her best when she trusts her own narrative powers, as when she portrays a wife’s grief as she browses through her deceased husband’s belongings, sucking on the bristles of his toothbrush and plucking his used toothpicks from the trash. Then she finds his hat: “I put it over my face like a mask, feeling the sweatband, soft as felt, against my cheeks. I took a deep breath. And there he was. The smell of him. I closed my eyes and felt myself sway. There he was.”

Passages like this reward a bit of patience, and The Book of Unknown Americans is a welcome contribution to a broadening literary conversation about Latino experience—a contribution that features immigrants from all across the Américas, and all walks of life. As Henríquez shows, theirs is a story composed of many stories.

We don’t cover an awful lot of Young Adult literature here at the Observer, premature fogeys that (some of us) are, but when we do, we tend to turn to Houston writer/schoolteacher Jennifer Mathieu. Jennifer covered last fall’s Austin Teen Book Festival for us, and then reviewed Austin author P.J. Hoover’s novel Solstice for our 2013 Books Issue. (She also wrote about the aftermath of Hurricane Ike for the magazine back in 2009).

Now Mathieu has her own first YA book hitting shelves. It’s called The Truth About Alice, and Mathieu will debut it at 7 p.m. tomorrow night, Friday, May 30, at Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston.

She’ll also be on a panel of four YA authors at Austin’s BookPeople next month on Friday, June 27.

Go meet Alice, say hi to Jennifer, and tell her the Observer sent ya.

www.cynthiabond.com

Cynthia Bond

Cynthia Bond will talk about and sign copies of her debut novel, Ruby, at Blue Willow Books in Houston on Wednesday, May 7, at 7 p.m.

Cynthia Bond’s debut novel leaves the reader dirty, her words clinging to your eyes, your hands and your heart as if you have just stood naked, battered and raw in a dust storm of them.

Set in the small East Texas town of Liberty, Ruby is the tale of the titular Ruby Bell and the man who loves her, Ephram Jennings. Ephram and Ruby meet as children in 1940, when Ruby comes to Liberty to visit family, and though decades pass before they see each other again, Ephram cannot and does not forget Ruby. In 1963 she returns and moves into the woods that border the town, becoming feral and seemingly insane, a figure of scorn in the local community. Bond describes this version of Ruby on the book’s opening page: “She wore gray like rain clouds and wandered the red roads in bared feet. Calluses thick as boot leather. Hair caked with mud. Blackened nails as if she had scratched the slate of night.”

Ruby, like Ephram, has suffered all her life from what Bond, herself an East Texas native, refers to repeatedly as “The Lonely,” as if the emotion were alive and taking up space in the world. One gets the feeling that The Lonely is a common companion for Southern African-Americans born and raised in the era of Jim Crow. When Ruby is a child, her mother is raped by a white man the same night her aunt is murdered by a posse of 11 white deputies, all members of the Ku Klux Klan, the aunt’s sin being that a white man had left his wife for her. After her mother runs away, 6-year-old Ruby is sold into sexual slavery. As a teen she flees to New York to find her mother, but when the bottom falls out she returns to Liberty, where her demons—haints, a dybbuk, ghosts of murdered children—are waiting for her.

Ephram’s own past is plenty rocky. His mother is declared insane and disappears forever into an asylum, his father is lynched when Ephram is 13, and his Bible-thumping older sister Celia has raised (and coddled and oppressed) him ever since. By 1974, the novel’s present setting, Ephram’s body is broken, his bones so brittle he must use a cane.

Ruby is a complicated portrait of a seemingly simple place. Bond tells the story of Ruby and Ephram’s lives and their relationship with unflinching honesty and a surreal, haunting quality, especially when she describes Ruby living alone in the woods with only nature and her demons keeping her company: “She felt the small ghosts who were still hidden in her body. The ones she had yet to give birth to. They turned and shifted within her.”

Through Bond’s lyrical prose, we see how intertwined the body and the mind are, and how easy is the slide between reality and nightmares.

Ruby also illustrates how the harshness of racism and the ever-present vestiges of slavery use, and use up, black bodies, especially black women’s bodies, and yet Bond shows that those same bodies hold within them the ability to protect, to connect and to survive.

Ruby’s is a story about angel cake and the importance of food; about sexual violence so omnipresent it becomes just another moment to be suffered through; about the mix, and its consequences, of Christian religion and old-world Voodoo that floats through many black Southern towns; about the sounds of life both harsh and melodic, from the screams Ruby unleashes each night to the duet of snapped green beans hitting a bowl while Andy Williams croons on the radio; and about the power of becoming and of knowing, and how both processes are always in motion.

This is an evocative, affective and accomplished first novel. Cynthia Bond challenges the reader to watch even when we don’t want to see, and to keep reading even when it seems too much. By the end we are left with an understanding of what one character means when he says, “Hell, ain’t nothing strange when Colored go crazy. Strange is when we don’t.”

The diverse work of 12 artists who call Texas home went on display at the University of Texas-San Antonio’s Institute of Texan Cultures May 3, and will remain up through Oct. 26, constituting the final exhibit of the 5-year Texas Contemporary Artists Series. These artists’ works range from stone sculpture to painting to photography, and each installment of the series has helped to complete a picture of what contemporary art in Texas looks like.

Curator Arturo Infante Almeida has designed and organized the series for the past half-decade, selecting artists and working with them to mount individual solo exhibits. Now, as the series comes to a close, he says he’s excited to bring all the artists together for a group exhibition. “This is the way to tell their stories about where we live,” Almeida says. “They each will have their own space. When you come to see the exhibit you’re going to see a kind of scrapbook on one wall that will have photographs of [each] opening reception, and the original works that they had.”

Works on display at this final exhibit are all new, and come from both seasoned artists and newcomers to the gallery spotlight. “It was a great opportunity for me to showcase local and regional artists and emerging artists, and then introduce artists to a larger audience,” Almeida says.

Among the 12 featured artists are Lauren Browning, a former NASA geochemist who quit her job to pursue stone-sculpting full time; painter Pepe Serna, who’s best known for his acting career (including roles in Scarface and The Rookie); and Franco Mondini-Ruiz, a former lawyer who paints and maintains a San Antonio compound of cultural artifacts. There’s also Luisa Wheeler, who graduated from UTSA and pays homage to her Mexican heritage through photography; abstract painter Carmen Oliver, who was born in Mexico City but now calls Texas home; and San Antonio native Luis M. Garza, who captured a year of life in Texas and abroad with 365 photographs.

Each artist’s connection to Texas is different, and the diversity of their artistic representations of Texas culture was integral to Almeida’s selection process.

“Diversity is so important, because everybody has their own statements,” Almeida says. “I was very fortunate to meet all of them and to work with them, to kind of visit their world and see what they had to give. It’s very exciting and very beautiful at the same time to share that.”

The exhibit is free and open to the public. An opening reception where attendees can visit with the artists will be held on May 15.

Considering the conservative mania that has defined the Texas political landscape for the last two decades, it’s hard to believe there was ever a time when a Democrat—a female Democrat, no less—was governor of this bizarre state. For those not old enough to remember the great Ann Richards, even the possibility of her seems mythic—a bedtime story liberal parents tell their kids to give them some small shred of optimism in a seemingly hopeless world. Even in light of Wendy Davis’ current mini-insurgency, the idea of a progressive woman at the head of Texas state government feels like a fairy tale. Thank God then for All About Ann: Governor Richards of the Lone Star State, a new documentary about the whip-smart, acid-tongued former governor that premiered on HBO Monday night, and will screen again tonight, April 30, at 7 p.m. CST (and be available on HBOGo and OnDemand thereafter). The doc is here to remind us that it wasn’t all just a dream, that Ann Richards really happened, and that therefore, by inference at least, something decent could someday happen again in the halls of Texas Capitol.

Directed by Keith Patterson and Phillip Schopper (capably, but with little of the flair, fire or charisma of their subject), All About Ann is the story of an iconoclast and an anomaly, a woman who refused to accept the world she’d inherited or her place in it. When Richards first started creeping onto the Texas political stage in the early 1970s, the state was a divided and exclusive place where white men and good old boys ran everything and women, African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities were ignored and/or relegated to second-class status. Before Richards was elected state treasurer in 1982, no woman had held statewide office in Texas for more than 50 years. And there have been precious few woman elected to statewide office since she left the governor’s mansion in 1994. Which makes Richards’ career essentially an era unto itself.

For one shining decade there in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Ann Richards dragged the state of Texas out of darkness into something approximating the 20th century. As state treasurer, she brought minorities and women onto her staff and opened up business possibilities for people who had the misfortune of not looking like the kind of people Texas had done business with or hired before. As governor, she quickly set about closing the influence gap between regular people and hired-gun lobbyists and promoting an ethos of inclusive government—a revolutionary idea in Texas back then (and, apparently, unfortunately, even now). She pushed for environmental accountability and better schools and drug treatment in prisons. She was a one-woman political movement, a force of nature bringing a taste of progressivism to a radically conservative state.

Richards’ time in the political sun, and the dream of political possibility and optimism that fueled it, were destroyed during her 1994 re-election campaign by the ultimate political cynic, Karl Rove, whose slanderous whisper campaign turned a popular sitting governor into an enemy of the state and basic human decency both. Such attacks would become the blueprint for George W. Bush’s march to the White House over the unfairly maligned reputations of John McCain, Al Gore and John Kerry. Still, the Richards legacy lives on—in expected places, like the campaign of Wendy Davis, who also made her name standing up for women against a paternalistic state government; and unexpected ones, like the meteoric rise and fall of Sarah Palin, who, despite her decidedly un-Richards-like political views, nevertheless came to national prominence in much the same way Richards had: by giving a star-making speech at a national convention that was equal parts biting and folksy.

What continues to fuel the Ann Richards legend eight years after she died of esophageal cancer is her charismatic stubbornness, her refusal to believe that the world she was born into was the world as it had to be. Watching All About Ann, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the defining trait of history’s most remarkable people is their belief that the world is there for the remaking, that there’s nothing that can’t be changed. Born a small-town girl in a man’s world, Ann Richards took the worst of what the white-male-conservative establishment threw at her (first exclusion, then dismissal, then vitriol, and finally slander) and kept knocking on the door until the door fell down. Despite the dire circumstances in which Texas finds itself today, we are living in a world that Ann Richards helped make, and if she were alive she’d doubtless be taking our heads off (with a joke and a smile) for allowing ourselves to despair over the current state of affairs. She was living proof that despair is a fool’s game, and that impossibility reigns only until the moment when someone comes along to turn it on its head. All About Ann is a reminder of that when we need it most.

On Thursday, April 24, a slew of Austin artists, writers and performers will take the stage at The North Door for a performance of the comedy show “Way Behind the Music” to benefit Lit Crawl Austin. The show, pioneered by San Francisco’s Litquake Festival in 2010, features a series of bizarre and presumably hilarious excerpts from the autobiographies of musicians including Justin Bieber, Flavor Flav, Jewel, Barry White, David Cassidy, Liberace, Miles Davis, George Jones, Vince Neil, and many others.

Austin’s “Way Behind the Music” cast includes author Owen Egerton, writer and performer Jodi Egerton, KGSR radio personality Andy Langer, performer Annie La Ganga, songwriter and actor Nakia, Austin American-Statesman culture writer Joe Gross, and musicians Jesse Dayton, Nick Tangborn, Kathy Valentine, Carolyn Wonderland, John Wesley Coleman, and Akina Adderley of Akina Adderley & the Vintage Playboys.

Austin Lit Crawl, which takes place October 25, is a collaborative effort on the part of the Texas Book Festival and the Litquake Foundation to take literature to the streets and put writers into conversation with readers and each other. Tickets for “Way Behind the Music” are $10. You can buy them here.

Elizabeth McCracken will be at Austin’s BookPeople at 7 p.m. tonight, Tuesday, April 22, to speak and sign copies of her new book, Thunderstruck & Other Stories. McCracken holds the James Michener Chair of Fiction at the University of Texas at Austin, and is the author of one previous collection of short stories (Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry), two novels (Niagara Falls All Over Again and The Giant’s House), and the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination.

McCracken’s new book contains nine stories that explore family, love, loneliness and loss. “Property,” which details a young man’s grief after his wife’s death, was selected for The Best American Short Stories of 2011 anthology. In the title story, a mother and father struggle to be good parents. And in “Peter Elroy: A Documentary by Ian Casey,” the subject of said documentary revisits the filmmaker’s house and comes to terms with his betrayal.

McCracken’s writing is often heralded as both magical and askew, and Kirkus Reviews has called Thunderstruck “a powerfully if quietly disturbing volume.” Thunderstruck also marks McCracken’s return to short fiction after 20 years, and demonstrates her power to, as Publishers Weekly puts it, “transform life’s dead ends into transformational visions.”