Stayton Bonner

  • Writing the Wave

    Anthologies are usually released after the end of a writer’s creative heyday, but the project is complicated in the case of Austin’s Bud Shrake, [...] Full Story

  • Golden Days and Olden Ways

    There’s no Chisos Basin, no Santa Elena Canyon, no Mule Ears in Texas’ Big Thicket National Preserve. Unlike Big Bend National Park, the only [...] Full Story

  • Playing For Tips

    The last time I played Fort Worth, the bartender showed me a naked picture of himself. He stood in front of a run-down venue, [...] Full Story

  • The Serendipity Wrangler

    The Southwestern Writers Collection is located on the top floor of the Alkek Library on the Texas State University campus in San Marcos. White [...] Full Story

  • Bound and Determined

    Hidden deep behind the East Texas pine curtain, Beauty and the Book is almost certainly the world’s only beauty salon-bookshop, where visiting authors are [...] Full Story

  • Naked in Galveston

    Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition—the first written account of what is now Texas—has enough bloodletting, cannibalism and equine deaths [...] Full Story

  • Piney Wood Pulp

    Like most of Nacogdoches-based Joe R. Lansdale’s work, Vanilla Ride is set in East Texas. More Flannery O’Connor than Elmer Kelton, East Texas is [...] Full Story

  • Where the Wild Things Are

    The rubber Sasquatch head stared with glassy eyes from atop its pedestal. Beneath its gaze, Bigfoot Conference attendees milled about Tyler’s Caldwell Auditorium. Children [...] Full Story

  • Nuts

    Fourth in an occasional series on recession-era Texas. Locked chains snake through Plainview’s Peanut Corp. of America plant fence, clinking in the wind. Grain [...] Full Story

  • Dateline

    While I waited for the safety instructor, my eyes wandered to a laminated photograph on the wall. Among motivational posters of sunset kayakers and [...] Full Story