Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry

A collection of essays that offers an intimate view of Larry McMurtry, America’s preeminent western novelist, through the eyes of a pantheon of writers he helped shape through his work over the course of his unparalleled literary life. When he died in 2021, Larry McMurtry was one of America’s most revered writers. The author of treasured novels such as Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show, and coauthor of the screenplays for Brokeback Mountain and Streets of Laredo, McMurtry created unforgettable characters and landscapes largely drawn from his life growing up on the family’s hardscrabble ranch outside his hometown of Archer City, Texas. Pastures of the Empty Page brings together fellow writers to honor the man and his impact on American letters. Paulette Jiles, Stephen Harrigan, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, and Lawrence Wright take up McMurtry’s piercing and poetic vision-an elegiac literature of place that demolished old myths of cowboy culture and created new ones. Screenwriting partner Diana Ossana reflects on their thirty-year book and screenwriting partnership; other contributors explore McMurtry’s reading habits and his passion for bookselling. And brother Charlie McMurtry shares memories of their childhood on the ranch. In contrast to his curmudgeonly persona, Larry McMurtry emerges as a trustworthy friend and supportive mentor. McMurtry was famously self-deprecating, but as his admirers attest, this self-described “minor regional writer” was an artist for the ages.

Table of Contents:
George Getschow, Acknowledgments Stephen Graham Jones, Foreword George Getschow, Introduction Native Ground Charlie McMurtry, In Awesome Wonder Paulette Jiles, The Boy with the Lamp Skip Hollandsworth, The Larry McMurtry I Knew Erik Calonius, The Master Geologist of Archer County Joe W. Specht, Larry’s Oil-Patch Legacy Teacher and Apprentices William Broyles, Leave His Saddle on the Wall Gregory Curtis, McMurtry’s Mild Discouragement Mike Evans, “Mike, It’s Larry. I’m in Trouble.” Myth Buster and Myth Maker Geoff Dyer, Ranging across Texas Doug J. Swanson, Gus, Call, Danny, and the Rangers Oscar CÁsares, Snakes in a River Sarah Bird, Finding Home Reader and Bookman Bill Marvel, Larry McMurtry, Reader Greg Giddings, An Afternoon with Larry Brandon Kennedy, On Book Scouting and Ghostwritten Erotica Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Runaways Kathryn Jones, Bonding over Books Collaborators and Confidants Diana Ossana, Stirring the Memories Michael Korda, The Moby-Dick of the Plains Carol Flake Chapman, My Long Trail to Lonesome Dove Susan Freudenheim, An Unlikely Bond Sherry Kafka Wagner, Not So Silent Women Beverly Lowry, Scenes from a Friendship Katy Vine, Road Trip Tips from Larry McMurtry Critic and Champion John Nova Lomax, To Hell with the Sunny Slopes Jim Black, Writer, Pass By Elizabeth Crook, Loving Gus Workshopper Kathy Floyd, Somewhere, a Writer . . . Eric Nishimoto, McMurtry’s Rebuff Dianne Solis, At the Intersection of Aspiration and Asphyxiation Cathy Booth Thomas, Reckoning at Idiot Ridge Dave Tarrant, “Furthur” Legacy Stephen Harrigan, Writing Plainly and Unforgettably Alfredo Corchado, The Borderlands: A Home for Misfits Like Me and McMurtry’s Danny Deck W. K. Stratton, All My Friends Are Going to Be Larry Lawrence Wright, McMurtry Passes By

About the Author :
George Getschow is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for National Reporting and winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award for distinguished writing about the underprivileged. He has earned numerous other awards for his writing and was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2012 for "distinctive literary achievement." Today, as director of the Archer City Writers Workshop, he helps organize and conduct annual writing workshops in Archer City for professional writers and college and high school students from across the country.

Review :
A conclave of writers gathers to consider the late Larry McMurtry (1936-2021). . . . Sprinkled with surprising revelations, this is a good collection for every McMurtry fan’s library. (Kirkus) The elegiac remembrances offer intimate glimpses into McMurtry’s life (collaborator Diana Ossana recalls the “emotional breakdown” he suffered after a heart attack), with no shortage of surprises. . . . McMurtry’s fans will want to track this down. (Publishers Weekly) More than three dozen writers contemplate the legacy of Texas’s most beloved author. . . a moving tribute. - Andrew Graybill (Texas Monthly) McMurtry, who died in 2021, famously referred to himself as a 'minor regional writer.' In this Festschrift, a host of authors and close friends, including his longtime screenwriting partner Diana Ossana, argue the opposite in essays that celebrate the author’s talents, contributions to literature, and mentoring of other writers. (Alta) This book is part eulogy, part memoir, part literary criticism. All of it is absorbing . . . Among the pleasures of Pastures of the Empty Page are the short biographical sketches of the contributors dangled like literary gifts at the end of each piece. (Austin-American Statesman) The essays in Getschow's book consider McMurtry's position in the pantheon of great literature - along with a critical take on how he wrote about minority groups. (Axios Dallas) In Pastures of the Empty Page, Getschow defines how each writer, by various avenues, was dealt an education in storytelling by McMurtry, the sensitive but formidable master of chronicling this region’s built and behavioral vernaculars. (Patron Magazine) On the whole, the quality of the [contributed] pieces is gratifyingly high.  Some of the richest essays are evocative reminiscences by intimates, among them Ossana, Gregory Curtis, Mike Evans, and Beverly Lowry, all of whom served as sources for Daugherty. (The Times Literary Supplement) Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry (University of Texas Press) edited by George Getchow, contains essays from a who’s who list of Texas writers about Larry McMurtry’s influence on Texas culture and their lives. It includes an array of reflections on history and the writing process as well as anecdotes about McMurtry’s off-beat and innovative life. (Texas Observer) For any writer who writes because they are drawn by some semi-articulable sense of the craft’s Importance (that is to say, most writers) these essays will provide glimpses and quirks and no-bullshit motivations of a literary giant who, as the book hammers home more than any other point, changed the literary landscape and possibilities for Texas . . . The hardest part about reading Pastures of the Empty Page is never getting to read McMurtry in its pages. Instead, he is the subject of writers plenty capable of stirring something in a reader, so capable that someone reading this collection who has never actually read McMurtry must think that his writing is literal magic, able to do something even more powerful than any of these essays could. (D Magazine) Pastures of the Empty Page is a revealing and poignant tribute to Larry McMurtry. It is a collection of essays assembled and curated by George Getschow, one of the most Texan non-native Texans I have the pleasure to know. (Authorlink: Writers & Readers Magazine) This book articulates…[McMurtry’s] often maddening complexities, while encouraging sustained engagement with his interests and texts. (American Literary History)