Mary Helen Specht

  • - I’d Give You a True Word : How Michael Ventura Speaks to My Texas

    Leaving Abilene for college after a Christmas vacation 15 years ago, I noticed somebody had blacked out the letter “P” from one of the [...] Full Story

  • The Disappearance of Gertrude Beasley

    In 1987, my mother received a letter from Larry McMurtry inquiring about an obscure Texas author named Edna Gertrude Beasley, and another family obsession [...] Full Story

  • Prairie Renaissance

    After so many years away from Abilene, I had almost begun to believe that the stories I told about my hometown were the only [...] Full Story

  • Jeweled Betrayals

    It’s counterintuitive but true: In today’s economy, short-story collections sell far fewer copies than novels. Perhaps this partly explains the emergence of publishing’s newest [...] Full Story

  • Border Teens

    The larger publishing industry is crumbling, but “young adult” fiction appears to be holding steady, even growing. As someone who as a child read [...] Full Story