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being an author

Readers of the novels of my series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle, sometimes think they recognize people they know, places they’ve been to, or events they have witnessed. They ask me, “Is that So-and-So?” Or they declare, “That must be Such-and-Such a store in Such-and-Such a town.” Or they say, “I’m wondering if there was someone who stimulated your thinking about This-and-That.” Or they question, “Does that culture really allow pre-marital sex in the parents’ home—like you say in your book?”

I must remind these readers, “It’s just a story.” I originally set out to write an updated history of Amarillo and the Texas Panhandle, with pages and pages of footnotes to document the objective facts of my objective history.

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Oct 13
Oct 13 Valley of the Fallen

The background of my latest romance novel, Colleen and the Statue, is the on-going controversy over what to do with Confederate statues scattered ubiquitously across the states of the Old South, including Texas. For example, is the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee in a park a symbol of States’ Rights and the Southern Way of Life, or rather is it a symbol of slavery and white supremacy? If the former, it should stay; if the latter, it has to go somewhere else—perhaps to a museum.

It is instructive to compare this American controversy with a similar, recent controversy in Spain over what to do with the to-be-exhumed body of Gen. Francisco Franco. Was he a hero, who saved Spain from Communism and restored the Catholic Church to its proper place or rather was he a brutal dictator, who fought only to acquire power and money? How you answer that question about Franco will determine what you do with his body.

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Sep 19
Sep 19 “YOU CAN’T REWRITE HISTORY!”

I recently had a phone conversation with a good friend—a lady in her mid-70s—who lives in Fairfax County, Virginia. She’s perhaps typical of older white Southerners, whose grandfathers served under Gen. Robert E. Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia. My friend said that although she deplored the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, which resulted from the “Unite the Right” rally of August 11-12, 2017, she agreed with the rally organizers that the City Council’s order to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville’s Lee Park was a mistake. “You can’t rewrite history!” my friend emphatically insisted over and over again, during our long discussion about removal of this and other Confederate statues—including that of a Confederate soldier in Ellwood Park, Amarillo, Texas, where I grew up.

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Sep 1
Sep 1 "Build That Wall!" - What Do You Think When You Hear That Phrase?

I think about that border over there, first of all, because I’m Irish on my mother’s side and Scotch-Irish on my father’s side. That is, my mother’s Catholic McDade family came from what is now the Irish Republic; and my father’s Protestant Nicholl family came from what is now Northern Ireland. And secondly, I think about it because Volume 5 of my Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle series—a romance novel entitled, Colleen and the Statue—has as its main female character an Irish teenager who has immigrated to Texas, in great part, as a political refugee, leaving her homeland to get away from “ethno-nationalist” violence.

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Jul 23
Jul 23 Back to What? (If you want to send somebody “back,” you need to ask, “Back to what?”)

being an author

If you want to send somebody “back,” you need to ask, “Back to what?” The next volume of my series, Once Upon a Time in the Texas Panhandle, is entitled, Colleen and the Statue. In the first chapter, teenaged Colleen is about to leave Ireland. In the second chapter, she is in Mackenzie, Texas—my invented town. It’s the 1950s, and she’s a young and single Irish Catholic—a religious and ethnic minority. She often hears Protestant “Anglos” whispering, “Why doesn’t she go back? We should send her back. We don’t need her kind here.”

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Jul 9
Jul 9 Then vs. Now

In recent times, starting in the mid-1920s and the 1930s, white supremacist groups, such as the modern KKK, have claimed the statues as their own—as heroic defenders of the white race. The original meaning has been co-opted, so that now—today—in the first decades of the Twenty-First Century, long after the last Confederate veteran has died, and after almost all the children of Confederate soldiers have passed away, the racists, the white supremacists, Aryan Nation members, neo-Nazis, neo-KKK members, and the like, have made the statues of the Confederate soldier into symbols of the so-called “movement” to defend and preserve the white race.

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Jul 2
Jul 2 Accounted For (Lost, then Found, then Forgotten)

Seventy-five years ago—on January 25, 1944—Army Air Forces 2nd Lt. Toney W. Gochnauer of Amarillo, Texas, disappeared. At the time twenty-four-years-old, he was co-pilot of a B24J Liberator bomber, which had departed from Kunming, China on a supply mission over the Himalayas to Chabau, India. The aircraft, with its crew of eight and four passengers, failed to arrive. On January 26, 1946, the lieutenant was declared, “Dead while Missing.” On May 13, 2019, his remains, which were found in wreckage near a rural village in eastern India, were identified, and he was declared, “Accounted For.”

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Jun 25
Jun 25 Apologize & Recognizing the Wrong

It is inconceivable to me that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott would do what California Gov. Gavin Newsom just did: issue by executive order an official apology on behalf of the citizens of California for a history of “violence, maltreatment and neglect” against Native Americans. (Los Angeles Times, June 19, 2019.) It is also inconceivable to me that the Amarillo Globe-News would do what the Los Angeles Times just did: publish an editorial challenging the City Council to likewise issue an apology for its complicity in the genocide to which Gov. Newsom refers in the text of his apology. (Los Angeles Times, June 21, 2019.)

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Jun 2
Jun 2 A Pilot of the Flying Tigers - Character Development for Nadya

The first chapter of my latest novel, Nadya: The Restoration of a Flying Tiger, is autobiographical. The little boy, “Jimmy Dade,” is me. The man, “Howie Hill,” is one of the Smyer brothers—embarrassingly I don’t remember his first name … maybe “Paul.” I remember so well the day I met him. It was the first time I realized what war does to a warrior. Like Chennault, he was a hero, but no book has been written about him, and he hasn’t even merited a footnote. As far as I know, no one in Amarillo remembers him or knows anything about him. His mother, his father and his brothers are long deceased. The Air Force undoubtedly didn’t know that he had died and so it furnished no marker for his grave, wherever it might be. Again embarrassingly, I forgot to put “Flying Tiger Smyer” in my novel’s Acknowledgements, even though he was the reason I wrote the book.

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Apr 4
Apr 4 "Duty" Above "Ethics"

“[Good-bye] to officers who put ‘duty’ above ‘ethics,’ and to the troops who regularly complained that the Army’s Rules of Engagement were too strict—as if more brutality, bombing and firepower (with less concern for civilians) would have brought victory instead of stalemate.”

Words of Major Danny Sjursen, West Point graduate, who retired in 2018, after 18 years in the Army and 11 deployments, often to war zones. Words very unusual for a multi-medalist soldier who was teaching history at West Point. He had become a disillusioned pacifist after what he saw in his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan—and he gave up his once-promising career, in order to speak out.

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Mar 7
Mar 7 The Hardest Topic to Write About (Racism)

My novels all necessarily involve racism as an underlying theme. They take place in Texas—which is part of the South—during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, when white folks like me were being forced by the Civil Rights Movement to confront racism head-on, instead of pretending that segregation, discrimination and racial animus either did not exist, or were no big deal.

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Feb 19
Feb 19 My Mother and The Great Depression

My mother’s stories about the Depression and Dust Bowl era were endless. They struggled to have enough to eat, never bought new clothes, never went anywhere, taped around windows and doors to keep out the dust from the dust storms that turned day into night. She said good-bye to many of her friends and their families, when they gave up and joined the endless procession of Okies going out West. Somehow, her family managed to survive and stay. But there was always fear: the dreaded thought that their time might too come, when they would have to leave and go to California.

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Feb 4
Feb 4 Why I Write Historical Fiction