Konnecting Kosmic Karachters
At Study Butte, with its merest suggestion of human enterprise – motel, gas station, café, all pretty much the same building – we turned west on a much smaller road. The terrain got angry, or maybe just tortured, and I began to wonder if even my four-wheel drive would be drive enough.
There was dust piled along the side of the road, with a strong wind blowing through the canyons that didn’t want to leave it there.
“Terlingua,” Jud said.
For those chili cook-offs the first Saturday in November, I’d read, 20,000 or more gathered around this non-town of a town, sleeping at night mostly in their cars or on the ground beside their Harleys. The place was Key West without any water, with each rusty old Airstream doing its best to look permanent with a fence or a lean-to – all things, by the look of them, constructed from leftovers to support the intrepid pursuit of beer.
We pulled off the curvy road at one especially sand-blown patch, drawn in by the sight of seven would-be cowpokes with salt-and-pepper ponytails sipping from mugs around a stone pit. The fire had burnt down on the way to out, but the day was turning hot anyway. Flannel jackets and overshirts had been shed by the cowboys, lying in heaps like modern art all over the dry ground.
“You’re kinda late for coffee,” offered the solid blonde woman who came out of the bright pink trailer. “But you’re kinda early for barbecue.” She made as to slap her forehead as the three of us stood facing each other. “My, where have all my manners gone? I’m Kathy the Kosmic Kowgirl.”
From Marfa Shadows, A Chef Brett Mystery by John DeMers
My mother was an interior decorator, when she felt like it. She had an eye for space, color, and good design. The best advice she ever gave me in terms of my own interiors was if you stick with what you really like, it will all go together. How interesting that her good advice holds true for publishing as well.
I have often said that publishing creates connection. Sometimes those connections are obvious and intentional, and other times they are joyfully serendipitous.
The excerpt above is from a gourmet noir mystery Bright Sky is publishing in the Spring of 2010. John has written several dozen non-fiction books, plays and musicals and is well-known as a food critic around town. This is his fiction debut, and it connects everything he knows about great food with everything he has ever vicariously experienced as he read the novels of his mystery writer hero, Robert Parker. And it adds that certain Lone Star junusekwa. I can't wait for it to be a book.
John's manuscript introduced me to Kathy the Kosmic Kowgirl. Never having been to Terlingua--my cheeks redden as I write-- I thought he had made her up. And I thought she was a really good character.
Enter Mike Marvins. In the fall, we are publishing a gorgeous collection of his Big Bend photographs in a book called Texas' Big Bend: A Photographic Adventure from the Pecos to the Rio Grande. It's the first book to include every part of that mythic region.
Mike and I start talking about Marfa and Marathon and Alpine and eventually we get toTerlingua. Then he starts talking about Kathy the Kosmic Kowgirl. How does he know about her, I think. John made her up. Well, eventually both authors set me straight, Mike sent me the rosy image above, and I realized that old saws become old saws by being true: truth is stranger than fiction.
While my radar is tuned to look for connection, I hadn't thought about the armchair of our mystery novel coordinating so well with the chaise longue of our photographic essay. But, just like mama always said, by acquiring what we like, it just goes together. It's the new Art Library style, and I'm sure it will be vaunted by all the shelter mags next season.
I think I'll cover everything in a smashing pink silk and get an ottoman with fine passamenterie to complete the vignette. Trays chick, as we say in Texas.
To conform within rational limits to a given style is no more servile than to pay one's taxes or to write according to the rule of grammar.
~Elsie de Wolfe
