Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry

by George Getschow (Editor)

Overview

A collection of essays that offers an intimate view of Larry McMurtry, America’s preeminent western novelist, through the eyes of a pantheon of writers he helped shape through his work over the course of his unparalleled literary life.

When he died in 2021, Larry McMurtry was one of America’s most revered writers. The author of treasured novels such as Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show, and coauthor of the screenplays for Brokeback Mountain and Streets of Laredo, McMurtry created unforgettable characters and landscapes largely drawn from his life growing up on the family’s hardscrabble ranch outside his hometown of Archer City, Texas. Pastures of the Empty Page brings together fellow writers to honor the man and his impact on American letters.

Paulette Jiles, Stephen Harrigan, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, and Lawrence Wright take up McMurtry’s piercing and poetic vision—an elegiac literature of place that demolished old myths of cowboy culture and created new ones. Screenwriting partner Diana Ossana reflects on their thirty-year book and screenwriting partnership; other contributors explore McMurtry’s reading habits and his passion for bookselling. And brother Charlie McMurtry shares memories of their childhood on the ranch. In contrast to his curmudgeonly persona, Larry McMurtry emerges as a trustworthy friend and supportive mentor. McMurtry was famously self-deprecating, but as his admirers attest, this self-described “minor regional writer” was an artist for the ages.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781477327876
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	09/05/2023
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	1,085,665
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

George Getschow is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for National Reporting and winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award for distinguished writing about the underprivileged. He has earned numerous other awards for his writing and was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2012 for “distinctive literary achievement.” Today, as director of the Archer City Writers Workshop, he helps organize and conduct annual writing workshops in Archer City for professional writers and college and high school students from across the country.

Table of Contents

• George Getschow, Acknowledgments
• Stephen Graham Jones, Foreword
• George Getschow, Introduction
• Native Ground
  • Charlie McMurtry, In Awesome Wonder
  • Paulette Jiles, The Boy with the Lamp
  • Skip Hollandsworth, The Larry McMurtry I Knew
  • Erik Calonius, The Master Geologist of Archer County
  • Joe W. Specht, Larry’s Oil-Patch Legacy
• Teacher and Apprentices
  • William Broyles, Leave His Saddle on the Wall
  • Gregory Curtis, McMurtry’s Mild Discouragement
  • Mike Evans, “Mike, It’s Larry. I’m in Trouble.”
• Myth Buster and Myth Maker
  • Geoff Dyer, Ranging across Texas
  • Doug J. Swanson, Gus, Call, Danny, and the Rangers
  • Oscar Cásares, Snakes in a River
  • Sarah Bird, Finding Home
• Reader and Bookman
  • Bill Marvel, Larry McMurtry, Reader
  • Greg Giddings, An Afternoon with Larry
  • Brandon Kennedy, On Book Scouting and Ghostwritten Erotica
  • Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Runaways
  • Kathryn Jones, Bonding over Books
• Collaborators and Confidants
  • Diana Ossana, Stirring the Memories
  • Michael Korda, The Moby-Dick of the Plains
  • Carol Flake Chapman, My Long Trail to Lonesome Dove
  • Susan Freudenheim, An Unlikely Bond
  • Sherry Kafka Wagner, Not So Silent Women
  • Beverly Lowry, Scenes from a Friendship
  • Katy Vine, Road Trip Tips from Larry McMurtry
• Critic and Champion
  • John Nova Lomax, To Hell with the Sunny Slopes
  • Jim Black, Writer, Pass By
  • Elizabeth Crook, Loving Gus
• Workshopper
  • Kathy Floyd, Somewhere, a Writer . . .
  • Eric Nishimoto, McMurtry’s Rebuff
  • Dianne Solis, At the Intersection of Aspiration and Asphyxiation
  • Cathy Booth Thomas, Reckoning at Idiot Ridge
  • Dave Tarrant, “Furthur”
• Legacy
  • Stephen Harrigan, Writing Plainly and Unforgettably
  • Alfredo Corchado, The Borderlands: A Home for Misfits Like Me and McMurtry’s Danny Deck
  • W. K. Stratton, All My Friends Are Going to Be Larry
  • Lawrence Wright, McMurtry Passes By

What People are Saying About This

Hampton Sides

No Texas man of letters loomed larger than Larry McMurtry. This wonderful encomium from friends and admirers gets at the peculiar magic behind McMurtry's long and incredibly eclectic career as a celebrated novelist, screenwriter, bibliophile, and student of the American West.

Luis Alberto Urrea

Pastures of the Empty Page is essential reading for both writers and readers. It should be on the bookshelf of everyone who values words, who appreciates insight and unexpected revelations, and who loves Larry McMurtry. As a bonus, it is brilliantly written.

Philipp Meyer

A brilliant and insightful collection of essays and personal recollections about one of America’s most important writers. Honest, funny, and compelling: this will go down as one of our great literary histories.

Editorial Reviews

07/10/2023

This revealing collection compiled by journalist Getschow (editor of The Best American Newspaper Narratives) brings together reflections on Lonesome Dove novelist Larry McMurtry from his friends, family, and fellow writers. A few essays offer literary analyses, such as retired McMurry University library director Joe W. Specht’s piece on McMurtry’s ambivalence toward the energy industry’s grip on Texas, embodied in the Last Picture Show and Texasville character Duane Moore, an oilman who strikes it big in the 1970s before falling oil prices bankrupt him. Most of the selections focus on the author’s personal life, however. In “The Larry McMurtry I Knew,” journalist Skip Hollandsworth remembers the novelist as a curmudgeonly interview subject but gregarious dinner host who would opine on “everything from eighteenth-century Russian poetry to the joys of Dr Pepper.” Mike Evans—a former creative writing student of McMurtry’s in the mid-1960s—recounts free-form classes when he would read aloud from his upcoming novel, The Last Picture Show, or, on one occasion, recite dirty limericks. The elegiac remembrances offer intimate glimpses into McMurtry’s life (collaborator Diana Ossana recalls the “emotional breakdown” he suffered after a heart attack), with no shortage of surprises (two contributors note his “extensive pornography collection”). McMurtry’s fans will want to track this down. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

For any writer who writes because they are drawn by some semi-articulable sense of the craft’s Importance (that is to say, most writers) these essays will provide glimpses and quirks and no-bullshit motivations of a literary giant who, as the book hammers home more than any other point, changed the literary landscape and possibilities for Texas . . . The hardest part about reading Pastures of the Empty Page is never getting to read McMurtry in its pages. Instead, he is the subject of writers plenty capable of stirring something in a reader, so capable that someone reading this collection who has never actually read McMurtry must think that his writing is literal magic, able to do something even more powerful than any of these essays could.

D Magazine

This book is part eulogy, part memoir, part literary criticism. All of it is absorbing . . . Among the pleasures of Pastures of the Empty Page are the short biographical sketches of the contributors dangled like literary gifts at the end of each piece.

Austin-American Statesman

More than three dozen writers contemplate the legacy of Texas’s most beloved author. . . a moving tribute.

Texas Monthly - Andrew Graybill

Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry (University of Texas Press) edited by George Getchow, contains essays from a who’s who list of Texas writers about Larry McMurtry’s influence on Texas culture and their lives. It includes an array of reflections on history and the writing process as well as anecdotes about McMurtry’s off-beat and innovative life.

Texas Observer

On the whole, the quality of the [contributed] pieces is gratifyingly high.  Some of the richest essays are evocative reminiscences by intimates, among them Ossana, Gregory Curtis, Mike Evans, and Beverly Lowry, all of whom served as sources for Daugherty.

The Times Literary Supplement

The essays in Getschow's book consider McMurtry's position in the pantheon of great literature — along with a critical take on how he wrote about minority groups.

Axios Dallas

Pastures of the Empty Page is a revealing and poignant tribute to Larry McMurtry. It is a collection of essays assembled and curated by George Getschow, one of the most Texan non-native Texans I have the pleasure to know.

Authorlink: Writers & Readers Magazine

McMurtry, who died in 2021, famously referred to himself as a 'minor regional writer.' In this Festschrift, a host of authors and close friends, including his longtime screenwriting partner Diana Ossana, argue the opposite in essays that celebrate the author’s talents, contributions to literature, and mentoring of other writers.

Alta

In Pastures of the Empty Page, Getschow defines how each writer, by various avenues, was dealt an education in storytelling by McMurtry, the sensitive but formidable master of chronicling this region’s built and behavioral vernaculars.

Patron Magazine

2023-06-15
A conclave of writers gathers to consider the late Larry McMurtry (1936-2021).

“He was the first novelist I read who took Texas seriously but not reverently, who made it possible for me to see my own state as fair game, as a legitimate literary place that I didn’t have to feel self-conscious in either writing from or about.” So writes Stephen Harrigan, novelist and historian, who is among the better known of the writers who reflect on and remember McMurtry’s life and work. A number of themes emerge. One is the lonely nature of small-town life in Texas, which afforded McMurtry material for his breakthrough novel, The Last Picture Show; another is the author’s essential place in the literature of his native state. Fond of wearing a sweatshirt bearing the motto “Minor Regional Novelist,” McMurtry was a scrappy and sometimes steely fellow in real life. Informed by a herpetologist, Harrigan remembers, that water moccasins don’t bunch up and attack unwary cowboys en masse, as they do in Lonesome Dove, McMurtry “just looked at my friend as if he were staring at a blank wall.” As Joe Specht writes, nor did McMurtry ever work on an oil drilling rig, which explains why he sometimes got the language of oilmen wrong. He may have been ornery and sometimes hermetic; however, as his longtime writing partner Diana Ossana notes, he was also loyal and kind. Above all, he was a reader, famed for turning his hometown of Archer City into a town of concatenated bookstores. Indeed, he did his seven-days-per-week of work of writing five pages—no more, no less—first thing in the morning so that he could get back to reading, and his advice to would-be novelists was always the same: “Read, read, read.” Other contributors include Sarah Bird, Geoff Dyer, and Alfredo Corchado, and the book features an introduction by the editor and a foreword by novelist Stephen Graham Jones.

Sprinkled with surprising revelations, this is a good collection for every McMurtry fan’s library.

Kirkus Reviews