And welcome to The Bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today my guest is TD Motley, author of Planting and Painting the Landscape.

TD thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me back.

I should say welcome back.

Yes.

Appreciate your second appearance with your second book, which is a sequel.

Yes.

Can you just start by introducing the book too?

Yes.

The planting and and painting.

The landscape has many of the same characters as the art of farming in new.

There are some changes that come about.

The Sam's daughter lives, has grown up and finished her graduate work.

There's a some romantic experiences in her young life.

Annie, the sidekick, spends a lot more time at the farm.

She's basically stopped a lot of her touring for her.

She's a food writer, and so she so she and Sam are continuing to maintain this stewardship sanctuary that they're running near the little town of Alesia, founded by folks who had really classical aspirations and Athenian aspirations, I should say.

And again, like the art of farming, I did all of the illustrations, the painting, just as the art of farming is mine.

And if I could, I'd like to tell you a little bit about.

I was going to ask it, so go ahead.

The cover of the painting is titled Union Pacific Firefly Party.

And so here you see these fireflies coming up out of the old cornfield and going into the abandoned caboose.

This is kind of a almost a Disney like character.

This little caboose that you want to adopt, maybe.

And they're going into the broken windows and flying up into the that it's the same.

It's the same landscape, same sunset on the wraparound cover.

And the for me it's a great cycle of art experiences in that I actually did this painting long ago for a good patron of mine in Dallas, Vicky Foster, who commissioned me to do a lot of large paintings for her company.

And I asked her one day I said, why don't you commissioned me to do something for you?

And she said, well, you mean.

I said, well, you know, like something from your childhood to something that you enjoyed and commissioned to do something for you.

And she said, well, when you say that, it makes me think of when we were kids, my dad bought me and my brother each a Lionel train set, a little Lionel train set, and she said, mine had the cutest little caboose.

I had the Union Pacific.

And she said, and I think she still had the little caboose.

And so this is what I painted for her.

And so we when I called the publisher, I said, I know the cover that I want to use, and if we do, I definitely want to tell everybody who has that in their collection.

And so we mentioned Vicky and the at the beginning of the of the book, and she was thrilled and and I'm thrilled.

And it's a. I've talked to bid before about you know, my when we talked about the art of farming that through my long professional career of teaching art and art history at the same college, I also had in parallel with the paintings that I was doing.

I was always in showing my paintings.

I wrote art reviews and critiques and museum catalogs, and that all nonfiction.

And so in retirement, to be able to, I'll put it this way, writing fiction is as close to making a painting in that the paintings with a painting of a dialog and the painting talks to you.

And the painting says, well, last time you're in this area, you did this.

What about doing this?

Right?

And the so the so the there is a dialog that occurs and the and the beautiful thing at the end when you finish a series or you finish a painting that you've been at for a while, there, there is this, this sense of something exists there.

I don't want to say it's godlike, maybe with a little G. So something something has become manifest that was not there before.

Writing fiction is as close to that kind of sensation as as anything that I've done.

I'm not saying that it didn't enjoy.

I did, in fact, I just did another review of a great Swedish painter for Arch Peele.

And and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

And, you know, it was like a thousand word review of this artist's work, and but it was not fictional.

It's a different muscle that you're.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it is a and.

What I've been really paying attention to since the last time we talked, I've really paid attention to some of the devices that some of my favorite fictional writers use.

I'll share one with you real quickly that I've the past year and a half or so, I've read all of an Hillerman books.

Her father, Tony Hillerman, who invented, you know, all of the Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, the Navajo police stories, and a device that I learned from her that I just hadn't really thought about is now this is getting on to this, about creativity within, making up this stuff.

She will have her protagonist on their way to solve a problem or to do a mission.

Like, you know, there's a there's a hole in Hoover Dam that's developed, and you happen to have the only Gorilla Glue or cement that's going to.

So you're on your way to take care of that, and you have a flat tire, and and you're standing there, what am I going to do with this flat tire?

And a burly guy pulls up on a Harley looks really dangerous and all of this stuff.

And and then you're off on a separate adventure and it really, it really that one device helped me think about being more natural in some of the things that happened with Sam and Annie and their kids and their for each high school helpers at the farm where somebody is on their way to open the gate and something happens that.

So it's not necessarily that the thing that happens is digressive.

It may, in fact relate to maybe there was a good reason to be late getting to the gate.

Those are just some of the things I know a lot of those kinds of things about painting, Christine, but writing fiction, I'm still on a learning curve, which I'm enjoying.

I want to ask, too.

You know, the first book, as you say, was your first foray.

Was it enjoyable to step back into that world when you started on the second one?

Was was it calling to you that you needed?

Absolutely, absolutely.

I have there are three books that I want to write that I've been talking with Lauren, the publisher, about all this time, that I wanted to write it and get started on it.

When he said, he said, that's those sound great, but you've got to do a sequel.

People are going to want a sequel.

So I found that I was actually researching some other things, and here's what's happened.

My The muse, all of my decades of making paintings.

The muse wakes me at 3 or 4 in the morning, and I don't turn her down.

I go to the studio and paint.

That's what's been happening with these fiction pieces that I will dream about Sam and Annie talking to each other.

I'll dream about one of the animals talking to Sam in the barn, and I wake up and I go, that's a nice that's a nice scene.

So I go to the studio and I write it.

Write it down.

So there's a. Yeah.

So I've had great joy in writing both of these.

The sequel, the, the, the Phil Oakley and I have become good friends and we're because we're usually at book stuff signings together and that and he's such a generous guy and has been really helpful to me and likes what I'm writing.

And so he's very complimentary in that and the.

So, there's it's going to be a trilogy.

It will it will be a trilogy.

But I do have some my I have some great friends at the Ayman Carter Museum in Fort Worth.

There, with their archive and the archival library is just an incredible place to.

And they're very accommodating to me.

So much of this was not only research there, but written there.

And it's kind of like my own little scriptorium, you know?

And so I have I'll give you a, a preview of the trilogy wonder.

One of the things I'm interested in is that I've been researching my my dad ran away from the farm in Hill County, was in the Navy, got out, came back and went to work in the shipyards in Beaumont.

And so that that's where I was born and through about the fourth grade was schooled there.

And so those are my fishing along the coast.

And I love I love being at sea level or below sea level.

It feels really natural to me.

And so my I'm intrigued with, you know, I've written a lot about mid-century modern Texas artists and about 19th century Texas artists.

And a thing that I'm working on is that.

Those landscape paintings that were made by the dark and different 19th century painters, a lot of those landscapes of prickly pear cactus and bluebonnets and sand dunes, and a lot of the coastal paintings for the post-World War Two painters who admired those guys, the Texas landscape had become quite vertical with mechanical stuff.

So all derricks, refineries that were when I was a kid, because my dad was a field supervisor for a while for Magnolia Refinery.

And as a little kid, whenever I would go with him and his pickup out to the site, I remember I loved the comics, of course, and Flash Gordon was one of my favorites.

As we would drive into the refinery with all of the the big containers and all of the conduits and all of that running in between, it looked like a Flash Gordon setting.

I mean, they look in my child's mind was this is this is super outer space stuff, right?

And so a lot of the painters that in a number of them that I've, that I've got to know before they passed on grammar, this one who painted refineries at night with 30ft flames on the burn off of the towers of all the artificial lights out in the in the night sky.

And so what I'm what I'm playing with for, it's either going to be originally thought of it as another book, but I think it's going to fit really nicely into the trilogy.

I want to write about.

A painter who is painting a setting that was painted by somebody in the 19th century, and it's now this vertical landscape of otherworldly stuff.

One of the themes in this book I want to talk about that I don't maybe you didn't think would be so timely.

The Odyssey is is kind of a common thread in this book, and I'm sure when you were writing it, it wasn't maybe as prescient, but, you know, that was one of the biggest movie here that yes, that was I didn't see that coming.

I didn't know that was coming.

But, you know, in the Art of farming, I end it with the, you know, the the salmon and Annie, Odysseus and Penelope are the kind of mirror figures in a way.

And like, somebody might model Romeo and Juliet or a contemporary story.

I've been fascinated with Odysseus all my life.

And the the family, the germ, the Telemachus and all of it that I, gosh, the dog that waits for him forever.

You know, I've researched what type of dog it probably was, all of that stuff.

And so years ago, myself and four other faculty members at our college got together and we presented a proposal to the that that we create a cluster of classes that we would call the classical cluster.

And our history had to be one of those course.

And then I was already team teaching with it.

We had money back then.

The college had a lot of money, so we had team teachers of like, I taught with the literature professor and he and I would do like in one semester we would do, you know, Gilgamesh through hamlet.

And then the next semester I would do prehistoric through the Renaissance, you know, with art.

And so I have I had a wonderful sabbatical one year to Greece.

I sought out Odysseus.

So I've been a little bit obsessed with Odysseus and for some time, and my wife and I went to that new all.

There was a musical play that we saw recently at Stage West in Fort Worth, where it's all, it's, it's it's Penelope telling her story.

And so the.

The in the, in the epilog.

Okay.

So the, the, the Odyssey would basically break into like five days of Homer telling you this.

And then at the end of each of the four, when he's finished in the evening, each one of those four parts of the of the story hands with a king and queen going home to go to bed.

There's even.

And then, of course, you know the climax of the of the Odyssey when he does get back and the little the little trick question that Penelope has for him is about this bed that he made for her out of this one olive tree.

It's so it's just the ultimate romance story.

Right?

And so the, the this.

So Sam and Annie have for years at bedtime read to each other different parts of the story and sometimes saying it in unison.

And it's a very it's one of it's a very sweet ending that there because there's one of the things that happens in, in the sequel is that you get a bit of backstory about what happened with these two, because they were college sweethearts.

And so you get a bit of that.

And you see, when they first meet, you see Sam's total hope that this girl will fall in love with him and how that comes about.

And Vietnam happens.

And so they, like, happened to many couples during that long period of the Vietnam War.

They are not able to fulfill their relationship.

For a long time.

And so so you get you get a view of, of when they first cared about each other and then how the situation with Vietnam.

So Vietnam comes up a couple of times in the, in the sequel.

And as does.

911 and the and I don't want to give too much away, but the one of the serious dilemmas that happens for Sam is that when he retires and goes back to to the farm, he starts painting these nostalgic landscapes.

And and there is there's a kind of romanticism about them as paired to classicism and a group of very close friends.

Artist friends challenge him on his turning to illustration, as they put it, because he had finally achieved a good degree of success of large abstract paintings that were in big museum shows and the galleries and the, and this group of friends almost treat him like a traitor.

Why are you turning on as if it were a religion or something?

And, you know, he's confused by that because he's like, well, my gosh, for decades I taught people how to draw, and I enjoyed it all that time.

And so he goes through a, there's a there's a period where everything gets resolved in his own mind.

But that's a very uncomfortable dilemma for him for a while of of how, you know, how could you not understand that?

I loved illustration as much as I love making abstract imagery, I want to touch on what?

Something you just said.

The teaching.

That's another kind of I feel like theme in this book is, is the mentorship of young people both in in drawing and illustration, but also maybe just in life and in farming and raising chickens, especially the mentorship really shown in this in this book.

Thank you.

Yes.

And it's there.

And the, the that there is a I have.

His daughter Liz is talking to him about one of the students, one of the the main helper in in the sequel.

This for each gal.

Robin is her name.

And one evening after dinner, because lives has come back from she's.

She's at home with Annie and Sam for a while.

They've had dinner and after dinner, and Robin was there with them to call her.

Mom's.

Okay if I stay for dinner?

She's gone on home.

And so, Liz, at the end of the meal, she walks over to Sam and puts down on the table a little portfolio and he says, what's this?

And she says, well, open it.

And he opens it up.

And and in it are drawings and a couple of watercolors and that are some landscapes.

And Robin has been paying attention to what Sam has been doing with the gal from the college that brings her drawing students out twice a year to do landscape drawings.

She's been paying attention to that, and she's been doing drawings on her own.

And Sam is like, well, why?

I'm always the last to find out about all this stuff.

What is what's with this?

And so, so the daughter tells him Robin was too embarrassed to show them to you because she thought maybe there wouldn't be good enough.

So he has a I forget exactly how I did the line, but his he has this thought that he is raising as many artists on the farm as he is raising livestock and plants.

Yeah.

And there's war.

There's another character that he kind of takes under his artistic wing, which I really.

Oh, yeah.

Brad the brat, he was, he was a thank you for watching him.

Love.

That was fun.

Yes.

Yes, I enjoyed that.

I want to make sure we mention the animals too, because the animals are certainly there back, back in.

And there are big characters in this book as well.

Yes.

The the the main adversary antagonist is still Solomon, the miniature donkey who he even in the in the opening of the sequel.

Saul thinks that he's gotten good at hiding from from Sam.

And so I have a couple of scenes where Sam's looking out toward.

And one of them, for example, he's looking out toward the pecan grove, and he thinks he gets a flicker of a, you know, he's like, what?

And he realizes it's Solomon's tail who's hiding around on the other side of this pecan tree for him.

And so frequently, you know, as as their friendship has grown frequently, Sam is in the position of thinking, what is he up to now?

What's what's he done?

You know, so.

And Homer the blind lamb, with some new therapy that has been developed with use of vitamin B12 and some other things, it turns out that he simply had a genetic thing with him.

I talked to some lamb rancher friends about all of this, and he's actually had much of his sight is restored, but he still the same little blind lamb that followed Sam around like a dog, right?

So they're still best buddies.

But in fact, the blind Homer has become the senior ram of the flock and has a very important role, you know, on the farm.

But he still has this, he still listens for Sam's voice and still, when they're together, will push his head up against Sam and make that connection.

He still wants that visceral connection to as well as that.

Yes.

Well, unfortunately, we are running short on time ago, and I feel like I could just talk to you for me to an hour or more.

Thank you so much for having me back.

Really.

So in our final two minutes.

What would you hope people take away from this book or both books?

I the the the main thing in both books is about the idea of this.

Partnership of Sam and Annie trying to create a sanctuary, not in any kind of religious way, but a safe place for people to come and participate in nature's bounty.

And the greatest lesson that Sam learns in the sequel, compared to the art of farming, is this is a this is a farmer, retired professor of art, who has traveled the world seeking sacred sites, staying at Delphi, Stonehenge, you name it.

He went there.

What begins to dawn on him is that his land in Barnes County is as old as the Fertile Crescent in Syria.

In Iraq.

He looks at that carefully and realizes that Barnes County and the Fertile Crescent are on the same latitude, and probably thought out at about the same time after the last ice age.

So he develops a sense of appreciation for the indigenous farmers that were on his land long before him, including back to Neolithic times, the clam middens and that sort of thing.

So he's the who did the song about standing the place that you are.

I forget it gets R.E.M.

thank you, R.E.M.. I love that song.

And and that's what happens to Sam.

He realizes the place that I'm standing on is just as important as the Fertile Crescent.

As as the Parthenon.

Whatever.

Well, that's that's a lovely.

I have to end it there, because that's that's lovely.

Thanks so much back.

Thank you for coming.

When you get the third one done, you've got an open, open invitation to come down I love it.

Thank you.

Christine.

That book again is Planting and Painting the Landscape by TD Motley.

Thank you so much for joining us and I will see you again soon.