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Riding the Wind and Other Tales by James Hoggard |
Even a place as big as Texas is ultimately made up of small things, such as a rugged mesquite's shade or a fruitless mulberry tree on a plain. When you begin to explore memories triggered by these bits of the Southwest, then you begin to find what makes Texas or any place real: stories—James Hoggard's stock in trade.
This collection of tales represents Hoggard's nearly thirty-year contribution to Texas literature. As with Larry McMurtry's In a Narrow Grave, Hoggard's ruminative and witty tales link issues of time, place, culture, and language.
"Riding the Wind" connects dangerous Texas weather and life on the inhospitable plains with the need to tell stories. "Sandstone and Ice: Memory and Sight" revives a childhood memory of a rattlesnake-ridden sandstone hill and a frozen pond:
I remember a sandstone hill where a number of us used to go. Rattlesnakes lived among its rocks, and at its curving base lazed a muddy, tremendously wide lagoon. We'd swim and romp in it, and set traps for muskrats and raccoons there, then after we dried off we could feel and even hear the residue of clay cracking on our skin as we walked out from under the shadows of big cottonwoods into hot naked sunlight. We went to the lagoon in winter, too, and sometimes the water froze completely across it. We would walk, carefully at first, then run and skid as far as we could across the ice; but one time it broke beneath me. I was barely halfway across. I took a long desperate step to get myself out of trouble, but uneasy sounds of fissure and slush followed my shifting weight. Again I slid-stepped quickly, but the ice gave completely away. I lost my breath. Cold water was biting my chest; I tried to thrash free and it slopped up around my chin.Hoggard uses the rattlesnake-and-frozen pond image as a metaphor for the narrative powers of memory:
In margins of books I cheered on, argued with and cussed out characters and authors, and sometimes I still do that, though perhaps those battles are more internalized now than they used to be, back when I'd sit in some room and daydream or read and draw or look through National Geographics and artbooks while my mother played Beethoven sonatas on our piano, or a teacher presented a lesson, or a coach explained a maneuver, or the clouds spun whimsical yarns across the sky.Many of the stories, such as "Back There, Passing Through," are poignant meditations on time and place set in familiar Texas towns.What I'm implying is that long before I got to the broken ice on the wide lagoon, well before I started hanging around Rattlesnake Hill, I was drifting through a world and letting it drift through me.
This collection is not limited to regional topics, however—as is evident in "Letter from Nineveh," a powerful account set in the Middle East, where Hoggard was a visiting scholar just before the start of the Gulf War.
Hoggard's unpretentious, self-deprecating, and funny narrative voice and his original and insightful observations on the human condition will delight any reader—from native Texans to those who have never set foot in the Lone Star State.
JAMES HOGGARD, a former NEA Fellow and two-term president of the Texas Institute of Letters, is the author of ten books and seven plays. He is a professor of English at Midwestern State University, Wichita Falls, Texas.
Number Nine: Tarleton State University
Southwestern Studies in the
Humanities
Riding the Wind and Other Tales
0-89096-781-4
$19.95
LC 97-14678. 5 1/2x 8 1/2. 176 pp.
Literary Nonfiction. Texana.
Publication Date: November 1997.
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