Lee Hancock

The 17-year-old with fingernails painted a shade of dried blood, a black skull T-shirt and a school ID hanging from a lanyard that read “Zombie Zombie Zombie” might not have been my pick for the Mayborn Young Spurs poster child. Yet there he stood on the red carpet of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, Exhibit A for my notion that something important might happen if successful writers evangelized about their craft to teenagers and invited them to write literary nonfiction.

Biographer James McGrath Morris was speaking that March morning to high school kids from across Texas about the joys of writing literary biography. As students filed out of Morris’ first session, chattering and clowning, the young zombie hovered at the foot of the auditorium stage. Morris turned to him, and the kid blurted, “Thank you, sir!” Then he stuck out his hand as if hoping to learn a secret handshake.

“I’ve been writing for a few years now,” the zombie declared. “I’m thinking about starting on my autobiography.” Morris looked him in the eye and murmured encouragement. He urged the kid to write for the biography contest that the lecture had kicked off, my pet project with the unwieldy title – The Mayborn Young Spurs Excellence and Opportunity Initiative.  Morris added that he hoped to see him in July, among contest winners at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference in Grapevine, Texas. The kid looked like he might levitate as he rejoined his high-school herd.

I felt like I’d witnessed a direct, hand-to-hand transmission of the writing life. I knew what it felt like to be recognized by a writer. I, too, had gotten the gift of recognition when I was young, feckless and prone to blurting to anyone who looked like an author that I, too, yearned to write.

True, the zombie kid was only one of several thousand high school students listening that morning in the Bush library auditorium and via live video uplink. In each of Morris’ three lectures, I’d seen students sleeping and doodling and looking glassy-eyed. Yet more than a few were on the edge of their chairs, energized by Morris’ declaration that writing could transform them into detectives and explorers, magicians and time travelers.

Some grinned as Morris explained that he began his quest when he was scarcely older than them. It took him 30 years to evolve from journalist to high school teacher to published author. Yet his literary life required no vow of tedium, no cloistered existence shackled to stacks of boring books. In the five years he spent capturing the life of the world’s first media mogul, Joseph Pulitzer, he was among the first to hear century-old voices on newly discovered recordings. He also tracked down a forgotten manuscript, then flew to Paris to sweet-talk its octogenarian keeper into letting him to make a copy. “We as nonfiction writers are giving meaning and substance to events,” he told the students. “There’s a magic that occurs when you publish something that’s real.”

A meticulously made-up girl joined Morris onstage as if answering an altar call. She confessed she’d never written anything serious. After hearing the bearded biographer wax on about necessary nuances and delightful absurdities of his craft, she wanted to find a worthy subject and write something important.

So did I. I walked into that imposing, white-marble building that morning uncertain that we had a prayer of reaching those teenagers. Within the first hour, I was a Morris acolyte. I filled pages of my journal with his ideas about bringing people and eras alive on the page.  Behind me, a retired professor of plant science scribbled notes, saying Morris had inspired him, too, and helped him focus his writing project. I felt a giddy mix of pride and wonder. Who knows? I kept thinking. No telling where all this might end up.

 “This,” I whispered to Mayborn Conference impresario George Getschow, “is the best money I’ve ever spent.”

 

 

My impulse to write a large check and launch that Young Spurs writing program was parked by my 14-year-old daughter Erin’s love of words.

Erin has fed on them since age 2. She listened to her dad read aloud from the time she could talk. They’ve chewed through six readings of the entire Chronicles of Narnia and the whole Harry Potter series, with Erin directing and critiquing as her father voiced characters. As soon as she could read to herself, Erin turned omnivore. She devours classics, girl-with-sword sagas, Greek and Celtic mythology, serialized fiction and fantasies with equal relish. Recently, she bit into Shelby Foote’s opus on the Civil War. Reading sealed the bond between Erin and her best friend Sophie. Both girls play with writing and storytelling at an age when many kids turn away, turned off by the strictures of too many middle-school English classes.

I decided to bring Erin and Sophie to the 2010 Mayborn Conference after a chance conversation about something I’d posted in a nook where Erin often reads and I write. On a day-glo yellow post-it note, I copied two snippets of writer Bob Shacochis’ speech at the 2007 conference: “Writing is an act of community,” and “What is the social responsibility of choosing to write?”  One spring afternoon, Erin stared at the post-it and asked about the quotes. We had a rambling discussion about writing and writers. That, in turn, led to a whimsical thought: Why not introduce Erin and Sophie to a community of writers?  They might get excited about reading and writing in a whole new way.

Such interactions led me to a writing career.  The earliest was a high school field trip to Memphis to hear staffers from The Commercial Appeal talk about the craft – and kick – of daily journalism. Having grown up with the paper, I was enthralled to see people with names I considered famous recounting their starts and stories. I told my teacher I would be the first investigative reporter for Oxford High School’s Charger Gazette. After weeks of combing dusty records in the local courthouse’s records vault, I emerged with an expose on how out-of-state companies were exploring opening our county to lignite coal extraction – and possibly strip mines.

In my 20s, I began meeting writers. The encounters were initiations into a raucous, irreverent, self-invite tribe – a tribe unlike the effete, invitation-only club I’d been led to expect by grammar-fixated schoolteachers and stuffy English profs.

Friends in my hometown of Oxford, Miss., introduced me to Willie Morris, the writer and one-time Harper’s editor.  I was asked to one of his dinner gatherings, and it took me 15 nervous minutes just to talk myself into walking into the restaurant.  Willie saw me and waved me to a seat beside a visiting writer with a new memoir about her childhood among strong Southern women. She signed a copy of her book, inscribing best wishes for “a new young writer.” As the evening ended, Willie, adept in the rite of the run-on toast, asked his crew of authors and professors and characters to raise their glasses to a promising new voice of Oxford – me.

Another night, Willie and a visiting posse of Texas newspaper editors included me in a plot to shoot out the buzzing, mercury-vapor streetlight that disturbed the peace nightly at William Faulkner’s grave.  I dispatched that insult to literature with a borrowed squirrel rifle. Afterwards, Willie typed up and recited an epic account, loudly punctuated by Texas toasts. I figured I might finally earn my place as a “made” member of the tribe.

Decades later, that worn, typed page and the autographed volumes from those Oxford days are talismans on my bookshelves. Willie signed his coming-of-age memoir, North Toward Home, “with affection for one who has the talent.” He also sketched a sort of roadmap for me, marking three pages recounting his first foray into a home devoted to the literary life. Then 18, Willie gawked at the walls of an Austin apartment lined with serious books. He surprised even himself when asked what he might want to do. “I want to be a writer,” young Willie replied.

Asked what he might write, the University of Texas freshman turned red. He finally stuttered:  “I don’t know. … Just things.” 

That long-ago night opened a portal. In his memoir, Willie recounted feeling compelled to rush to the UT library because he grasped for the first time that great writing required great reading.  It sparked an obsession and set his life course.

I wanted such a rite of passage for Erin. I didn’t care if she wrote seriously or casually. I wanted her to recognize how her passion for reading could lead to possibilities and open doors. At worst, I figured that bringing her and Sophie to the 2010 Mayborn Conference would mean a lazy weekend of lounging around one of the luxe conference-hotel pools.

We never did end up in the pools.

The girls were hooked from the moment they heard the first keynote speaker – poet and memoir goddess Mary Karr. “You’re going into eighth grade, huh?” Karr asked them after her talk, as she autographed their copies of her coming-of-age-memoir, The Liar’s Club. “Eighth grade sucked. Worst year of my life.” All three giggled. Then all three turned to stare at me like teenagers busted by an eavesdropping parent.  “Uh, I probably wasn’t supposed to say that,” Karr blurted, setting off a trio of guffaws.

As the conference progressed, speakers drew back curtains and revealed new dimensions of the craft for Erin and Sophie. Sophie loved hearing an editor and author deconstruct the intricate dance steps required in writing and editing a great book. Suddenly, Sophie told me, writing a book seemed possible for her. Erin was thrilled when that author, Sam Gwynne, signed her copy of his historical narrative on the Comanche Indians, Empire of the Summer Moon. She beamed when Gwynne wrote that he looked forward to reading her history books. The girls poked one another as Hampton Sides spoke about rescuing history from academia and “learning to write from the guts up.” Erin made a beeline to the conference bookstore to buy Sides’ book about Kit Carson, Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West. Though she never worked up the nerve to ask Sides to sign it, she carried that book to school last fall until it was more dog-eared and battered than any of her textbooks.

As speaker after speaker talked about the importance of reading, Erin and Sophie kept grinning and nodding at each other. Hour after hour, they remained riveted as writers and photographers, agents and editors revealed what made for great writing, how true stories helped make sense of a bewildering world, why the best stories offer the kind of meaning that Mary Karr said people were spiritually starving to hear. Periodically, I’d ask the girls if they’d had enough. They wouldn’t budge.

Months later, Erin was still repeating her favorite Mayborn bits, and Sophie’s mom reported that she was equally ebullient. Both delighted in reading and re-reading David Gann’s New Yorker piece about the quest of a giant-squid hunter. They’d been drawn to it because they were captivated by his back story on getting that story. “Often what you don’t imagine is how it’s supposed to be,” he advised, “and that’s the truth.”

The deep, internal explorations of Sports Illustrated writer Gary Smith awed them. “The way he gets into other people’s heads and takes you there,” Erin told me, “he takes you into your own head, too.”  I was grateful that the girls absorbed a lesson from Smith that I’m afraid is often lost on seasoned journalists: His admonition that the most important truths are embedded in ambiguities and uncertainties, paradox and shadow.

When we reminisce about the conference, Erin and I marvel that the last writer she and Sophie met was the man whose quotes got them there. As we were leaving, we ran into Bob Shacochis. His sidewalk conversation with the girls, drawing each of them out about their Mayborn experiences, felt like a benediction. With gentle goading and kidding, he put Erin and Sophie at ease, yet made them rise to the occasion. Once in the backseat of my Subaru with their stacks of new books, the girls broke into a butt dance. They chanted for miles: “We’re members of the tribe!”

Since Shacochis, the Mayborn tribe’s shoeless iconoclast and senior rabble-rouser, got the last word, it was no surprise that Erin’s conference experience proved subversive.  She began swiping books from my nonfiction reading pile. Halfway through one, she crowed that her imperious eighth grade English teacher was wrong in saying that no good writer should ever use the second-person pronoun “you.”

Yet, I felt oddly unsettled after the conference. I told Getschow that bringing the girls underscored rather than answered Shacochis’ question about writing and social responsibility. “My kids had a great time,” I remember saying as I thanked him for blessing the girls’ presence. “What about other kids? If this is a really a tribe, how are we going to keep it going if we don’t get more kids involved?”

I piled up checks from several journalism prizes, threw in my annual bonus and offered $5,000 to help Getschow and the Mayborn make that happen. Jim Moroney, publisher of The Dallas Morning News, my employer, wrote a personal check for $5,000 more and then added $10,000 from the newspaper. That pot of money is funding the first year of scholarships for a national writing contest.  Up to 10 student writers with the winning literary biographies and their teachers will receive scholarships and accommodations for the 2011 conference.

Getschow recruited serious partners to help promote the Young Spurs Biography Contest across Texas and the nation. Shirley Hammond, education director of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, helped launch the Young Spurs initiative by hosting and video streaming Morris’ talk on the art and craft of biography.  After watching Morris speak, Hammond predicted that the program will hook kids and help teachers emphasize critical thinking, historical analysis and creative expression. “I just think it’s going to keep growing,” she told me.

The Dallas-based nonprofit Big Thought, nationally known for innovative, creative learning initiatives, also signed on and began spreading the word around Dallas and the country.  

Getschow says what we’re attempting is audacious – ensuring new generations of great storytellers and serious readers of literary nonfiction. “It’s the most important undertaking we’ve done since we launched the Mayborn Conference,” he’s repeatedly told me. “We can’t let this fail.”

I’m anxious to see what comes of Young Spurs – how many entries it will attract and who will win seats at the daylong conference workshop led by James McGrath Morris. I hope that teachers who attend the conference with the winning kids will take back ideas to get other students engaged in serious writing. If we succeed, the narrative storytelling devices, techniques and lessons of the Mayborn could go viral and enliven subjects like history and science with the power and excitement of great storytelling.

 I committed to supporting the scholarships for the next five years. and am encouraging others to contribute.  In doing that, in giving back, I’ve come to feel that I’ve finally, fully earned my place in the writing tribe.

Come July, Sophie and Erin will be with me at the 2011 conference, reuniting with “their tribe.” They’re also bringing along new members – Sophie’s older sister and another of their best friends.

And who knows? Maybe my girls will meet a kid with alarmingly black fingernails and a conference nametag hanging from a lanyard that reads “Zombie Zombie Zombie.” In joining the Mayborn tribe, I believe they’ll get confirmation of what James McGrath Morris said at the Bush library: Storytelling is at the heart of what makes us human, and writers stand on the shoulders of all who wrote before them.

If we do this right, someone like the zombie kid in black or even a kid like mine could one day find themselves performing their own ritual: passing on the secret handshake and inducting the next generation into the writing life.