I was born and raised on a farm in the Cross Timbers of north Texas among elders who told stories, and boys as rough and tumble as any out of Tom Sawyer. It was a life close to the soil that instilled in me a love of fields and forest and streams and sky, along with the desire to recreate them through the magic of words.
My education began in a one-room schoolhouse with a wood heater and a water supply carried in from a spring in the woods. The normal course of daily life was exciting enough, but nothing wrenching occurred until I went through combat service in the Air Corps during World War II. Returning whole from that, I went far away from my native region to study at Columbia University, where I eventually completed a BA, an MA and a PhD. I then had a long career of teaching English at the University of Arizona and other institutions as far away as the University of Nice and Korea University, always writing as time went by, fiction and literary criticism for the most part. A few years ago I retired from teaching and after a time in Arizona moved back to Texas, still engaged in writing, mainly fiction now, which from long-established practice and an undiminished passion for the word I expect to continue until I lose the capacity to feel.
I have been married for many years to LaVerne Harrell Clark: novelist, folklorist and photographer.
A few remarks on the long-evolving course of my fiction may prove useful to those who wish to look into it. When I began, the substance of my early days that I meant to fashion into The Dove Tree seemed, after the war's great cleavage, to belong to the remote past. Out of this leap in time there grew a sense of narration and style that true fiction must always lie as if at a mythical distance: molded in an atmosphere of mystery and wonder like that of an ancient tale. I remain devoted to this ideal of story-telling. Is This Naomi? And Other Stories, The Fifth Wind and A Charge Of Angels all attempt to elevate to this mythic sphere the spirit of a place and its people: a fictional Cross Timbers centered on the imaginary town of Milcourt. They conjoin as best they can the mythical and mystical dimensions that I sense behind human life and the earth on which it is lived. So in its own way does A Bright Tragic Thing, with a new ingredient of national history to intensify the story: the torment and tragedy of a mass hanging in Civil War days.
The Life and Opinions of Marcus Aurelius Wherefore takes a new direction entirely. Going back in form to the eighteenth century and earlier, this novel interweaves multiple stories and comic digressions to produce a broad and withering satire on our society over the past forty years. LONE JOURNEY AND OTHER QUESTING STORIES is a collection twenty years in the making: stories of searchers along the verge between myth and reality, drawing pain and sustenance from both. In BITTERSWEET CHRISTMAS a family celebrates Christmas with joy even though confronted by the suddenly revived effects of a fifty-year-old tragedy.
More recently I have finished and seen published two other
works of fiction. THE PLAINS BEYOND (2006) is a novel set in the 1860s about a cowboy who ventures into the great unknown of the Texas Plains to rescue his wife from Indian captivity.
PILGRIM'S PROGRESS REDUX AND OTHER STORIES (2007)
carries my endeavors at short fiction into the widest territory yet, such as adventures in the stone age and the effects of profound grief. The title piece is a short novel reshaping Bunyan's classic religious epic according to contemporary concerns.
