The Muse in the Bottle: Fact or Fiction?

Posted on January 5, 2010 by Lucy Chambers

 

The writer's life is an endlessly glamorized affair that is riddled with assumptions of one sort or another. Writers are [choose one of the following] dark, tortured, drunks, inspired, touched by angels, different, geniuses, crazy...you name it.

Spending as much time as I do around writers, I find them to be a charming, sensitive bunch, more driven than most to share their stories, a vulnerability that more cynical types might construe as one (or all) of the above conditions. But beyond that, there are really no one-size-fits-all characteristics of a writer. 

Take the idea that all fiction writers are drunks. I know plenty who are sober as church mice. But there are even websites dedicated to promoting the stereotype of the muse in the bottle. Recently, I ran across this quote by Roald Dahl:

 

It happens to be a fact that nearly every fiction writer in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. he does it to give himself faith, hope and courage.  A person is a fool to become a writer.  His only compensation is absolute freedom.
 

I started wondering if that were true. An expert poll was in order

I called John DeMers, my favorite one-man expert poll.  John can opine on many topics, ranging from ballet to barbecue, and he's written at least thirty-eight non-fiction books.  This spring, he makes his fiction debut with Marfa Shadows, a gourmet noir mystery set under the mythic West Texas  lights.   

So John, I say, You're a fiction writer now. What do you think about what Roald says? Does fiction drive writers to drink? Is there anything to this stereotype?

John says, " Well, I never had a chance to drink whiskey with old Roald, or for that matter raise so much as a Shiner Bock or even a girly glass of chardonnay with him. Yet the fellow has a point, which in true storyteller fashion he saves for the big ending. Absolute freedom! Is there anything more glorious - or more frightening? Other than the ones who simply ARE drunks, it's that vision of absolute freedom that drives writers to drink whiskey. The "tyranny of the blank page," some call it. But it's more like the tyranny of the blank life - the fact that we have nothing and are nothing until we make something up. Come to think of it, I'm getting really thirsty now."

A toast to you, John. May you reach the literary heights of Raymond Chandler--without the dive into the bottle.  There are so many more interesting aspects to the writer's life.

Like writing.

 

Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine.
~Samuel Johnson


 

 

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Bowing at the Altar of Barbecue

Posted on February 1, 2009 by Lucy Chambers

What is it about barbecue? Why is it such a religion? Why is it that Bright Sky can publish all kinds of books about subjects from museums to musicians to mucho mas, and our all-time-bestselling book is a barbecue cookbook?

It took publishing one more barbecue book to find out.  As it turns out, barbecue in Texas is the ultimate soul food. We’ve all heard people in the Carolinas crowing about that pale sour stuff they call Carolina barbecue, and my sister who is a former Kentucky Wildcat will make noise about barbecue in the bluegrass sometimes, but I never thought much about it.  Never entered a cook-off; never got into fisticuffs with anybody about my dinner.  I’d just head down to Goode Company and enjoy.  Every once in a while, as I added extra pickles to my chopped beef sandwich, I’d see a poster: You might give some serious thought about thanking your lucky stars you’re in Texas.  I’d get misty in a yearnful way for a state of mind I didn’t yet have a passport to reach. I did buy that bumper sticker for a friend from Tennessee who was a recalcitrant Texan for a long time, and I do have several pairs of cowboy boots, but until this author set me straight, I never really got the barbecue thang.

That was then.  Now there is this book called Follow the Smoke.  The author, John DeMers, will tell you that before this book, he was a food guy, not a barbecue guy.  This is his thirty-seventh published book—I’d go out on a limb and say I wish we had published them all, but not having had a chance to read all thirty-seven, maybe I shouldn’t.  John is a food-everything: food-critic, food-writer, food-radio guy, food-connoisseur , food-fixer, food-lover, maybe even a food-fighter somewhere  in his past.  He knows about food. 

Transplanted to Texas from New Orleans, he did not take the everything is better in fill-in-the-blank attitude that some who join us take. John decided he really liked Texas.  It embraced him and gave him a good home and lots of, well, food. Great food.  Food with history, food with character and food with soul.  When he wanted to write a book that showed the character of Texas, he thought about it for a minute (less than a minute, as he says), and he realized that book would be about barbecue.

John got in his car and set out across miles and miles of Texas to eat barbecue.  But what is most interesting is that he was not drawn to burn all this gas because of the food, he was drawn by the stories.  Texas, he says, has four faces of barbecue.  And as he drove 14,785 miles and ate in 114 great barbecue joints—sometimes eight meals a day—he discovered amazing stories behind every brisket, rib and sausage that he encountered.  And being a thinker, as well as an eater, he pulled all these stories together in a real philosophy of Texas barbecue that does as good a job of explaining the demographics and population history of the Lone Star state as anything Steve Klineberg has ever opined in the hallowed halls of Rice University.

So, even though I don’t have a ranch, and I can only eat barbecue for lunch when Tums are handy, after reading Follow the Smoke, and hearing John explain barbecue in these humanistic terms, I feel more Texan than ever. Although I wasn’t born here, I got here as fast as I could, and, somewhere in my cluttered life I do have one of those aforementioned posters now; but  understanding barbecue helps me to be just a little more Texan.  Not in need- more-sunscreen-on-the-back-of-my-neck way, but in a really nice Houston, It’s Worth It way, a way that, like Follow the Smoke, recognizes that we have a great state made up of a great diversity of people, many of whom can cook up a whale of a meal.

And that is indeed something to be thankful for.
 

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