Features
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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 stories there were to tell: my elem...Read More
Write of Passage
When I agreed to write two books using the quinceañera as the backdrop, the fact that I’d never had a quinceañera, had never been to one, or that I don’t ...Read More
Refuge From Responsibility
Paul Bruckwicki is standing on a hill between a grass-covered Army landfill and a creek called Harrison Bayou. Groundwater monitoring wells skirt the edge of th...Read More
Blood Sport
It’s early yet, but mighty East Texas hunters should get out their guns and oil them up, buy shells, proper clothing and a game bag, and pack a lunch. Squirre...Read More
Crimes In the Sand
Most of the 300 or so clustered gravesites in the Terlingua Ghost Town cemetery are mounds of white rock rising from auburn dirt. Crosses nailed together from w...Read More
The Ballad of Engine 3417
Dateline: Cleburne
It’s been 20 years since the Santa Fe Railroad abandoned my hometown, and I sometimes feel time-warped when I see the changes since its departure. My brain re...Read More
Desert Dusk
Dateline: El Paso
Christmas Past, El Paso: It was after dark, and cars with their headlights properly dimmed crept in long, solemn lines block after block. They were not mourners...Read More
Still Wild Water
We had been warned. The meandering run of the Neches River through the “Little Thicket,” as our guide dubbed it, would disorient even the most experienced p...Read More
City of Surfaces
Houston native Donald Barthelme never wrote about the breeze over Buffalo Bayou or the rise and fall of Texas oil fortunes. A star of postmodern American fictio...Read More