ustxtxb_obs_1982_04_09_50_00001-00000_000.pdf

Artist: Nancy Collins `Boll Weevil’ Phil and Foes, page 8 The AG Campaigners, page 4 THE TEXAS SEWER April 9, 1982 A Journal of Free Voices 750 By Kathryn Marshall Keene, New Hampshire I recently received a laconic note from the Texas Institute of Letters: “Come home. All is forgiven.” There was no mention of my sins, but I suspect they have to do with what might be called an un-Texan attitude. For I’m dug in, by choice, 80 miles north of Boston with no plan for heading south, not even after the April thaw. The reason: I write with less anxiety when a fat chunk of the map separates me from a letters that doesn’t really believe women in general, and women writers in particular, exist. Even Larry McMurtry, who in the October 23rd issue of the Texas Observer acknowledges that the Lone Star literary climate produces “early blight or extreme constipation” even honest McMurtry associates the “feminine” with that which is “obscure,” “indeterminate,” “elusive,” and “not completely knowable.” Obscure to wham? Not completely knowable to whom? It seems to me such loaded poetizing is symptomatic of willful blindness. McMurtry, in his Observer piece, at least pokes around in the work of women writers. He uses a famous Steinian remark about Oakland against the fiction of Katherine Anne Porter, assuring his reader that “There is no there there.” \(I closes with what he calls a “reverse thrust,” two paragraphs in praise of the poet Vassar Miller. That’s it. Well, the man tries. Rod Davis, a former editor of the Observer, does not. Last September I received a copy of an essay he’d just published in the Dallas Times Herald. At Continued on page 15