(gentle music) - Hello and welcome to the Bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today my guest is Loren Steffy, author of The Big Empty.

Loren, welcome.

- Thank you.

- Welcome back.

Repeat guest I should say.

- Thank you, always great to be here.

- I'm always happy to have you.

We always have a good conversation and we have something a little new today, 'cause while you've been on several times before and you've written a number of books, and I don't even know how many articles, this is a work of fiction.

- This is my first novel.

So yes, it's a departure from my, my usual fair.

- Why did you decide to switch over and try your hand at fiction?

- You know I actually started this book back in the kind of late nineties, and I kept putting it in the drawer because, you know, I was really a non-fiction writer and that was kind of what I was known for and what I wanted to focus on.

And, but every so often I would pull it out and take a look at it and do a little more work on it.

And, you know I kept thinking, a lot of times when you read something that you've let sit for a while you think, oh this is garbage.

I should, I should not waste my time on it.

But I actually kept getting drawn back into it and I was pretty happy with the way, the way it was coming together.

And so it just sort of reached a point where I decided, you know, it's time to, to make this happen.

And of course with the pandemic, we had a lot of time on our hands, so, you know it was, I actually let my editor read it and she very much encouraged me and my wife would point out that she had been telling me for years to publish it.

And so the time was right.

- Was it hard to switch out of non-fiction into fiction or did you find that kind of flowed easily?

- It, it was just a very different experience.

So I found that it was, it was obviously writing, but it was a very different kind of writing.

And, you know what happens in fiction or what I found happens in fiction is the characters kind of take on a life of their own.

And so in nonfiction, you know how the story ends and you know the elements that you need to, to make people understand what you're trying to say.

Whereas my experience with fiction was, I thought I knew where things were going, but then I would find that the characters would, would not, like you find yourself saying oh no, they wouldn't do that, or this person wouldn't do this, or why, you know, and then when you ask yourself why you start digging deeper into, you know the reason that this happened or that happened.

So really the characters sort of lead you through the story in a lot of ways.

- I would imagine writing so much nonfiction about real people and why they did what they did would inform, well this type of person wouldn't do this.

You know, as you're trying to make them do something, you could probably draw on all that real world experience of knowing businessmen and ranchers and things like that in your, in your regular job.

- It definitely started that way.

You know you sort of start from this point of, well I understand the issues here, I understand the people, or maybe I don't understand, I don't know that I, I truly understood, but you certainly understand it well if you can put yourself in that position.

You know, what would it be like to be working on this big ranch in a small town in West Texas and that kind of thing.

And then you sort of go from there.

And like I said the characters kind of lead you surprisingly quickly.

Once you start getting to know their personality and stuff the story kind of, the original scene that I started, that I got the whole idea for this book for, it's not even in the book anymore because it was so completely out of character for everyone in it that I had to throw it away.

But, you know, it it was sort of this idea of starting with these scenes and characters interacting and then just kind of building from there.

- Well, before we get too deep into it, can you tell us what the book is about?

- So the book is, it's named after that part of West Texas, which is often called the Big Empty.

It's kind of, you know, far West Texas.

It's a very small town that has been traditionally a ranching town.

The town is surrounded by one of the grand Texas ranches of lore if you will.

And it's a fictional ranch, so it's not, not real.

But the town's dying like many West Texas towns are.

And so the locals are trying to figure out how to keep, how to keep things going, how to keep things alive, how to revive the economy.

And they, they basically offer a lot of tax breaks and whatnot to bring a large semiconductor company to town, which at first they're very excited about the prospect and then they have to start dealing with the idea of now you're gonna have all these people moving in who don't understand our way of life, who don't necessarily appreciate why we do the things that we do.

And it kind of gets to that idea of the sense of place and less about us versus them than more you, you know, there's a reason that you, you are very protective of water in West Texas for example.

And if you come from California or wherever, you may not appreciate that, right?

And this is something we see playing out all across Texas now, kind of in real time in a way that I had not envisioned when I started writing the book so.

- Yeah, I was gonna ask that.

I mean you, some, a lot of these themes in the book, the kind of tech companies moving in, the old West versus new West, all of this stuff certainly was around when you've started writing, but it's become more and more of an issue as time has gone on.

Did you predict all of that?

- I, I wish I could tell you that I did, but actually I thought that the people, you know my biggest fear was that people would read the book and say that's ridiculous.

Nobody would build a chip plant in the middle of nowhere.

You know, and I try to explain why that happens in the book.

There's a reason for it.

It's not just a random thing.

But what we have seen certainly in recent years is more and more small towns are dealing with these very issues of large tech manufacturers coming to town.

For me at the time, I started with the idea, it was kind of this odd juxtaposition.

I was, I was covering technology for Bloomberg and I found myself out at the Matador Ranch in West Texas.

And you know, technically I was on assignment to write a tech story.

I was interviewing somebody who happened to be there and that's why I was there.

But the juxtaposition of, of working for, you know, Bloomberg was essentially a technology company as well as a news organization, but working for a company like that and covering a beat that I was covering and then finding myself, you know, thrust into this, this world of ranching.

And, and it really kind of got me thinking about those two worlds and what happened if they came together.

- It's interesting, it seems like that Texans and Texas has repeated this cycle over and over.

We had the like actual old West, the wild West or we had kind of open plains and then the new technology was like fencing it in and then now we're, and then the railroads coming through and now it's the tech coming through and then we move forward.

Now it's like Amazon and things like that.

So like these conflicts are not new conflicts, but they're new in our time, in our place.

- One of the characters in the book actually makes the point, and this is true, it's not something I made up, but, you know, cowboying and ranching as we tend to, to think about it in the mythological sense, really didn't exist for a very long period of time.

It was, you know, maybe a decade or two and, and really it's been in decline ever since.

But it, it lives on because it holds such a, a place in our hearts and really you know our national psyche.

It's so much a part of our national identity.

But yeah, it's always confronted these outside influences that have made it sort of obsolete in a sense.

And, and you see that today.

I mean a lot of ranches today, large ranches in particular are struggling.

They're being sold off, you know, beef prices and you know, the economy and everything is kind of working against them and, you know you're seeing more and more recreational ranching and then things like that.

And so the whole nature of the the grand Texas Ranch is really undergoing yet another shift as we saw, as you mentioned with the fifties, you know, many of them switched to oil production and things like that.

And so yes this is just the, the latest transition.

- You mentioned a sense of place and I did wanna talk about that because clearly you must have spent some time in West Texas the way it's described in the book.

I've, I've spent some time in Western Texas and Eastern New Mexico and it felt very real and true to me the way you describe it in the book.

- That was something I really, you know, I believe very strongly, I love books that have a sense of place.

I love songs that have a sense of place.

In fact, there's a, a James McMurtry song called Levelland, which is about Levelland, Texas.

And it was something I kind of kept coming back to as I was writing the book because that song very much has a feel of what life is like in a small West Texas town.

And there were several others, there's some Robert Earl Keen songs and stuff that I, that I, you know, kept kind of thinking captured a lot of the essence of what I was going for.

But yeah, very much, you know, the sense of place.

And what I also wanted to do was introduce people who might not be familiar with to that part of the country, to what it's like, and, and you know sort of the, the overwhelming openness of it all, the vastness of it all.

If you haven't been in West Texas or that area it's, it's kind of hard to comprehend almost.

- Right, and I, what I enjoyed is you have these newcomers coming in who aren't used to it and they don't maybe appreciate at first, but then there's those locals who they love it.

And I, I feel that way about that land.

I love it because I played out there as a little kid, so I have that attachment that people just see scrub and mesquite and they go ugh, what is this?

But it's, there's a beauty to it too.

- You know I always find it interesting when people are dismissive of a place.

Oh, there's nothing there, there's no reason.

Somebody's there, somebody's there for a reason, somebody grew up there.

And to somebody that's home and home always has a strong connection.

And you know, I was born in a very small town in Pennsylvania, not in Texas, but it, we always resented it when people, you know at one point Woolworths put up a distribution center in town.

And we had all these people from New York coming down and sort of looking down their nose at the, at the small town, you know.

Well, as you know, my dad was a MacArthur fellow.

He came from that small town and there were lots of, lots of people that worked hard and smart people and they built good lives there.

And so, you know, people exist in a place for a reason and they live their lives the way they do for a reason.

And that was one of the things I wanted to capture is you can't just be dismissive of that.

You have to try to understand it.

And I'm not sure that any of the characters in the book did a great job of understanding each other.

Certainly not at the beginning, but I think they got closer to that, hopefully by the end.

- I think, to compliment you I think they absolutely did.

I think they felt real, but I think it was, it was helpful for us to see that conflict play out and, and as the book goes on we kind of understand more their individual perspectives and why they clash.

Not just that this guy's from the city and this guy's from the ranch and you know, the internal stuff really, really plays out well.

- Yeah, I really tried to, to draw that out and not make it stereotypical.

And actually the character of Blaine Witherspoon, who's the plant manager, he started out being very sort of one dimensional, almost a caricature, because I needed him to play a certain role.

And it was something that everybody who read the book, especially people who lived in the city were like come on, this is the only guy we can identify with.

Can't you, can't you do something more with him?

You know, make him a little more human.

And that really kind of got me thinking about well what would his motivations be?

Why would he even take this job if it, if it's so terrible and he doesn't wanna be there?

And so then that kind of started building out the character and his family and you know, and everything else.

So I really did try.

Again people, people react to things that they encounter in life, to the places they live, and that sort of thing.

And just because somebody's moving into an area, yeah they have their own motivations too.

And I really tried to unpack that.

- Sure.

We are all a collection of what we've done and where we've been before.

And you see that in Blaine especially because he's bringing all of this outside perspective that doesn't quite gel with where he's coming.

- Yeah, and a lot of baggage.

He's got a lot of baggage.

- Absolutely.

Well I wanna talk about the characters too because I, I feel like, you know, they say to write what you know, and I'm not gonna assume where you got your inspiration, but these characters do feel like people I've met, maybe you've met in your, your long career of writing.

Like they, they seem real to me as, as a Texan, and as an outsider too.

- Well I tried really hard to make them that way.

They're not based on any, any one individual, but again the characters sort of once you start putting them in, in a place and you start working on them, they kind of take over and they tell you, you know, they want you to discover who they are almost.

I felt like in many cases.

You know I had the character of Dr. Lambo, who's, who's the town physician, but she's also not from there.

But she served a really important role in the book because I needed somebody who was an outsider, but who also understood the town and how it worked and why things were done the way they were.

And, and so when I started writing her character, I wanted her to be different, but also to fit in.

And, and that just led to all sorts of interesting places.

And a lot of her backstory just kind of started coming together.

You know why would somebody who wasn't from there wind up, who wants to be a small town doctor in the middle of nowhere, you know?

Well she had her reasons and, and there's probably more to her story, which maybe for the next one.

- I'm glad you brought her up because I think she's kind of the counterpoint to Blaine.

Somebody who came in, but then maybe not immediately, but did appreciate the beauty, did appreciate these people and their way of life and assimilated a little easier, a little better than he does.

- Well it's interesting because there's the one point where she's recounting how she first met the Malloy family, which is the other, the other main family in the book.

And it's because the son Colt had had this terrible injury.

He was helping with the roundup on the ranch, and she saw this, you know his leg was broken in multiple places.

She immediately assumed child abuse because, you know, it had to be, and you know, of course that wasn't it at all.

And everybody you know, in town thought well this is ridiculous.

You know, people get injured on the ranch all the time right?

But it sort of of taught her that like she needed as a doctor, she needed to stop and understand the medical conditions she was likely to see.

And, and it was something that I remember reading years ago about a small town physician talking about this.

Like you know, there are different kinds of injuries in rural areas than there are in the city in a lot of cases.

And you have to understand why that happens.

And it kind of gets back to that whole idea of knowing the place and the sense of place and why things happen the way they do.

- I'm glad you brought up the son, 'cause I did wanna talk about the young men in the book.

The children of both of our kind of main characters feature prominently.

And they're very different as well because the, you know, a country boy gets raised different than a city boy.

- That was actually something that I had thought about for a long time and long before I started writing the book.

But you know, I grew up here in College Station, and you know the kids who rode my bus, who came from the country, they were always, I think they were adults at like age 12.

I mean they just immediately knew how things worked and what to do and they had expressions about life and stuff.

And the rest of us we were just kids, right?

But they really seemed to already be adults.

They dressed like adults, they talked like adults.

And it is you know, there's a line actually in a song and I forget who does it now, maybe a Lyle Lovett.

It says when you grow up in the country, you grow up mighty fast and, and it wasn't Lyle Lovett, maybe Steve Fromholz.

Anyway, one of the great Texas troubadours wrote a song and he said you know when you grow up in the country, you grow up mighty fast.

And, and it's really true.

And that was, that was something I wanted to kind of bring out here.

And to me it was like as much as there was this contrast between the adults, I found the contrast between the kids to just be a lot of fun to write.

- Oh, I, it was fun to read too, because I was putting myself in that place of which kid would I be?

And, and it's so much more stark and clear, but also kids kind of wanna gravitate to each other, especially when they're the only kids in a room if they're like at a family thing or the barbecue that they're at.

Like the kids want to go together, but these two kids aren't at all like each other.

So there's that, there's that push and pull there.

- And yet as you say they still kind of find themselves, you know winding up together and then yes, and then have a bit of an adventure.

- Things happen that I don't want to spoil.

So you mentioned you started this book a long time ago, but it also doesn't take place contemporarily, it takes place in the late nineties, I think '99.

- Yeah, and that was actually something my editor, who had been my editor, she was actually the editor who sent me to the Matador Ranch back at Bloomberg.

But, but one of the things she kept pressing me on was, you know what, what time period is this?

What time period is it?

And I'm like well, you know probably late nineties, early 200s.

And what I was concerned about was the, the chip technology right?

The 300 millimeter wafer technology.

And so like, you know, that was kind of at a very specific point in time, but then she kind of said something that really made me sort of rethink it.

She's like but if it's, if it's 1999, remember what an optimistic time that was.

Like we were on the cusp of this new millennium and technology was gonna save us.

It was gonna be the answer to everything.

And it was before there was social media and all this, you know we have a much more negative view of technology now than we did in 1999.

And the minute she said that I was like, oh yes that's, that's an idea I want to capture.

And I actually went back through the manuscript and inserted various, you know, paragraphs and stuff where they talk about this sense of optimism.

That we're on the, on the you know, the cusp of this new technological revolution that's gonna make life wonderful and easy and grand and, and you know, and of course it didn't quite work out that way.

- I think that's a perfect place to set this story 'cause you're right, the millennium had such a symbolic power to us before it happened and Y2K was a concern but it was like, we're gonna, we're gonna fix it and we're gonna do it, we're gonna solve it and then we're gonna, easy sailing.

- And again the whole point here is that the chip company coming to town was supposed to be this great hope for the town.

And so it just kind of dovetailed with that that you know, yes of course it's technology because we all believe technology is, is is our best hope for the future.

- We talked about the conflict a little bit and the kind of new old West and one of those conflicts that it boils down to, boy I didn't mean to make a pun, is the water.

And can you talk about how the water affects, how they view water in their kind of different ways?

- Yeah, I mean I think this is something that, that all Texans have become much more aware of in recent years.

You know, we've been in a pretty severe drought for the last few years.

And you know but one of the things that I noticed when you talk to people in West Texas who are of a certain age, who are old enough to remember, they talk about the fifties, they talk about the drought in the fifties, which was you know one of the most severe on record and how it affected their lives.

You know there's, there's a line in the book where, where Trace Malloy is talking about how his mom didn't wash clothes at one point so the cattle had water.

Well that was something that somebody actually told me.

Like this is, this is how bad it was that you actually had to make a choice between you keep the cows alive,, essentially your livelihood going, or do you get to, you know, do you get to bathe, do you get to wash your clothes and all these kinds of things.

And that's a sort of trade off that I think a lot of people don't understand.

And you know, I sort of take that to the extreme with the, you know, the people from California moving in and wanting, you know the the sort of decorative pond and the golf course and all that kind of stuff.

But you see that playing out.

I mean, right now across Texas, there are an awful lot of golf courses that are getting water at a time when we're under severe water restrictions, certainly in parts of the hill country.

You know, you gotta wonder like do we really, should we really be watering those golf courses with drinkable water right?

And so I think that the water issues that I touch on in the book are actually only becoming more and more relevant as we, as we move forward.

- I also think it was interesting that you chose to have a Californian because California is a state with water history, water issues, but not to the degree, you know, that difference of okay maybe you don't water your lawn versus you don't bathe and you don't wash your clothes.

I mean that it's very stark and very, I think unfortunately still timely.

- Well, and in the book the Witherspoons are basically, you know they're yuppies, right?

They're, they're, they're not used to making those kinds of sacrifices 'cause they haven't had to.

And, and so that was kind of, you know, the fact that they were from California and you know, really it had nothing to do with the whole sort of Texas, California thing other than the fact that most tech companies are based in California so it sort of made sense.

And I do point out that they lived elsewhere, right?

They lived in the East coast and stuff as well, but they didn't live anywhere like the town of Conquistador in the book so.

So that was kind of one of the things I was trying to draw out.

Again, that sense of, of not understanding why things are done the way they they are and being, you know, just sort of readily dismissive of it, you know, is not, not necessarily the best way to ingratiate yourself to the locals.

- No, but it's also a very American thing to do is we're gonna move in and do it things the way we wanna do it until we learn, oh maybe that it's not gonna work in this location and this climate and this area of the country.

- It certainly, you know, when you look at our, again our national identity, we sort of have a history of doing that right.

To our, in many cases to our own detriment, you know, and so that was another kind of theme I wanted to, to sort of get into was, you know we don't necessarily learn from this.

(laughter) - That's the human condition unfortunately.

Another conflict that we see among the new and the old is the power issue, the issue of actual like, not, not power, but electricity power, can you talk about that?

- So, you know one of the things I've written about a lot in my journalism career, certainly in the last 20 years has been the power grid in Texas.

And a lot of the issues with, with electric deregulation and stuff.

And before I scare everybody off, I don't go into deregulation in the book, but the issue of power and how do you get the power to this plant that it's going to need is, is you know a key issue in the book.

Special provisions have to be made, those provisions go awry.

But it's the same with the water.

Keep in mind you know, a lot of people don't think about the amount of water that semiconductor manufacturing requires, but it's, it's a lot.

And in fact, I've only had one person who read the book, who criticized me for saying you know, for you know pointing out that these plants need about a million gallons a day, and this person was like I've been on a regional water board, that's ridiculous.

Nobody would ever approve that.

And that may be true, but that's one of the licenses you have when you're writing fiction.

You can kind of stretch the envelope a bit.

But the point is that anytime you have development in these rural areas, especially in places like West Texas, you have to think about the impact of electricity, of water.

You know, how do you get that stuff there and what is it gonna mean for the environment and is it even possible?

- Right.

And you can't just be looking ahead at the imagined future benefits versus what it's gonna cost right now today.

- Right, right.

- So you, you mentioned this book took a long time to write.

Was, what was the hardest thing about, was it knowing when you were done?

- Oh you know I, I had a, I had a pretty good sense of where it was gonna end up and I really felt like it was pretty, pretty well done along about 2004 or so.

You know I was pretty happy with it, but then I just kept going back and, and tweaking it, and rewriting and there were parts that I wanted to kind of build out a little more and, and really that process continued up until fairly recently because there was the, there was the one scene where, again my editor was like well why would, why would Witherspoon do, you know, what he did sort of at the end of the book?

And there needs to be a turning point and, and what would drive him to do that?

And I gotta say that I was really rather pleased with myself with the answer that I came up with.

And had I tried to write that scene back in the, you know, late nineties or early 2000s, I wouldn't even have conceived that such a thing was possible.

But of course, sometimes real life is stranger than fiction and it provided, it provided the impetus for that whole, that whole part of the book so.

- So we've talked about how this isn't your first book.

Have you found that the reaction to the book from readers is, do you get a different sort of conversation or feedback from fiction readers versus your non-fiction readers?

- When you read a nonfiction book and somebody likes it, they'll say hey, I really loved your book.

This is what I liked about it.

And it's usually about like when I, my very first book was Drowning in Oil, which was about the BP Macondo disaster.

And people say wow, you know, that that first chapter you really put me in the scene.

I really felt like I was there.

What I find interesting when you're writing fiction is they talk more about the characters, and they'll be like you know, I was just actually talking to a colleague who says yeah, I just started your book.

I'm about 50 pages in.

And he immediately starts talking about what the characters have done at that point.

And, and it's so, it's sort of surreal to, to hear other people talking about the characters and their motivations and you know, what they think is gonna happen.

It's a very different, again it's a very different experience, just like the writing process.

Very different when you're dealing with fiction.

- Would you have advice for somebody who either is gonna write their first novel or maybe switch the kind of writing to, to try a different style?

- Well, I'm a big believer as a writer you're, you're constantly pushing yourself right?

You gotta constantly try new things.

And so, you know I would say if you're, if you're a nonfiction writer and you want to do fiction, just do it.

I mean, and I guess that's what it comes down to for all writing is just do it.

You know it's, that's the hardest thing I think is getting started and sticking with it, you know but, but what I found was once I started really getting, the book kind of hit a point of critical momentum where I just, I couldn't leave it alone.

I had to, I had to write more because I had to figure out what was gonna happen.

- Keep going, just keep going.

- Keep going, absolutely.

- So do you have, are you gonna write more fiction, is this gonna be a new thing for you?

- Well, I'm definitely, I definitely would like to write more fiction.

I've got a sequel that I'm sort of playing around with that I, I'm pretty happy with the overall concept, so we'll see how that comes together.

There's a lot of nonfiction projects out there too that I'm interested in.

So, you know it's nice to have a lot of things on my plate.

But, but yeah I think there's definitely gonna be a role for me writing fiction in the future.

- Excellent, we'll go ahead and pre-book you for the non-fiction and the fiction.

Come back and talk about hopefully more 'cause I, I usually do have to compliment you, I found myself really enjoying the characters and getting drawn in.

I had to know what was gonna happen and I would like to know what else could happen.

So, keep doing it.

So we are running a little short on time, we've got just a couple minutes left.

What would you hope the take away from, from the book for our audience?

- I think it would be, you know to kind of always question your assumptions right?

I mean that was sort of the whole exercise in me writing the book.

You know as a, as an individual, as somebody who, you know, spent most of his time in big cities and stuff, I could probably identify more with the Blaine Witherspoon character than I could with the Trace Malloy character.

So what I tried to do was flip that around and make myself really delve into Malloy's character, and try to understand his motivations and, and his reasons for being there and staying there and his love of, of the town and the region.

Because I think that's what it's really all about.

That's, that's what we all should be doing, right?

I mean it's easy to think you know all the answers, but you, you have to, it's kind of corny to say put yourself in somebody else's shoes.

But I think a big part of that is sort of trying to understand their point of view and, and really trying, again, to question your own assumptions.

- I think we could all stand to do that a little more, to try to understand other people's points of view and not be so tribal in our.

- And ultimately that's what writing is supposed to be all about, right?

You're supposed to be challenging yourself, constantly questioning your assumptions, pushing forward, trying to broaden your understanding.

I have a, I have a colleague, a friend who, who likes to say that the great thing about being a writer is you're paid to learn every day, and it's really true you know, but you have to embrace that process.

- Well, that's all the time we have.

Thank you so much for coming here, for writing this book.

I really enjoyed it.

- Well, thank you, I appreciate it.

- That is all the time we have for today.

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

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