(uplifting guitar music) - Hello and welcome to The Bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today, my guest is Steve Davis, editor of "Viva Texas Rivers!

Adventures, Misadventures, and Glimpses of Nirvana Along Our Storied Waterways."

Steve, thank you so much for being here.

- Oh, I'm glad to be here Christine.

Thanks for having me.

- I'm so excited to talk about this book because this is kind of a perfect A&M Press book.

- I agree.

- It's got literature, it's got nature, it's got rivers, it's got history, it's just kind of everything we do and everything we love here at the Press.

- Oh, well thank you for saying that.

You know, and it's funny because I feel the same way about this.

There's so many reasons to love what A&M Press does, and I've seen A&M for a long time as a real leader in Texas literature and history and writing about nature and the environment.

And this was a chance to kind of tie it all together.

And it really brings in different strands, including the Wonderful Rivers book series that Andy Sansom and the Meadows Center have done for years.

They published like probably more than 30 books with A&M Press, and some of those works feed into this book as well.

Wes Ferguson on the Sabine, that great book "Running the River: Secrets of the Sabine," and Margie Crisp's book on the Colorado River, Wayne McAlister on the Guadalupe, those were just things that helped really kind of seed and feed this book as we were working on it.

- Well wonderful.

I was gonna ask, where did the idea start?

Where did that germinate from?

- Well, for me it's, I'll just take a little personal detour here because I'm a child of the suburbs.

I grew up in suburbs of Dallas and Houston and really was pretty much, did not have a connection to nature.

In Dallas, you know, the Trinity River.

I just knew it on news reports as places where fish kills were reported or a dead body would turn up.

And in Houston, you know, honestly, I feared the bayous there because we figured they were like toxic waste sites, and you know, marauding, and possibly mutant, alligators roaming.

And so I went to college at Texas State in San Marcos, which I heard was a beautiful place.

And when I got there I saw people jumping in this river and I thought to myself, "What the hell is wrong with these people?

Why are they jumping in a river?"

And of course gradually, living in the hill country and going to school, got turned on to Texas rivers through these beautiful easy to love hill country streams that run clear and cool and, you know, shaded by cypress trees just idyllic.

And then, you know, gradually saw that the San Marcos River's threatened, like many of our waterways are.

And got to see that great writers in Texas had been writing about Texas rivers, beginning with John Graves who wrote the classic "Goodbye to a River" published in 1960.

And since then, as I mentioned, through Andy Sansom's series with the Meadows Center and other writings here and there, there really just became kind of more and more writing devoted to Texas rivers.

And so at the place I work, the Wittliff Collections at Texas State, where we collect the leading writers of Texas and the Southwest and we do exhibitions and so forth.

I did an exhibit on Texas rivers a few years back, and it was hugely popular.

People came from all over to come see it, and that was really kind of the idea for this book.

And you described me as the editor.

Really, I'm the co-editor, and I have to mention my friend and co-editor Sam Pfiester, who is a real river rattus Americanas.

Sam was a Vietnam vet, grew up in Fort Stockton.

And as a boy, he and his brother would go down to the big bend and they built homemade rafts to raft down the Rio Grande there through pretty treacherous terrain.

But he has canoed more than a hundred rivers around the world, including almost every major river in the United States.

You know, he's like fished for Siberian trout in Mongolia.

He's paddled through piranha in the Amazon.

And he's just, you know, been everywhere.

So Sam is a, in addition to being a real literary person, is a real expert on rivers, so he was great to work with to do this book.

- Well I'm glad you brought him up because I was gonna bring him up because at the introduction for the book, it starts with you and him following in John Graves's, I guess not footsteps, but canoe trails.

- [Steve] Paddle trails, yes.

- And going down the Brazos in a similar path that he went in "Goodbye to a River."

- [Steve] Yeah.

- How did that, how was that experience?

- It was, you know, I felt very thankful I was with Sam Pfiester because I'm the kind of person who, whenever I would get in a canoe, it would just tump over immediately.

And so sit-on-top kayaks, sit-on-top kayaks were really my speed.

But with Sam in the back and me in the front, I felt very comfortable there.

And we went with another 2 other writers who were in the book, I probably shouldn't mention their names because they did have one of the misadventures.

They did manage to tump over and lose many of their belongings in the Brazos on that trip.

But, you know, for me, I don't, I feel like I don't get out in nature enough.

And when I do, it's like a hit and run trip to a state park often, or something like that, or a day trip.

And so to spend, you know, 2 nights and 3 days along this river and to camp along the river, Sam knows what he's doing.

You know, how to make the campfires, he cooked amazing food for us.

And it was just such a great experience to soak in.

And the next trip was gonna be to visit the snapping turtles in the Neches.

And that didn't work out, fortunately, but I was happy just to do the John Graves stretch of the Brazos.

And even, you know, when you do that today, it's called the John Graves Scenic Waterway.

And for people who don't know who John Graves is, he grew up in Texas.

He hunted and fished along the River Bottomlands.

He was a World War II Marine.

He lost an eye on the Island of Saipan.

And after the war, he went off to become a writer, which is what people in Texas did.

If you had any artistic inclinations, you left the state.

And he, you know, became a world traveler and never was quite successful and never quite wrote that book he wanted to write, the great novel.

But when his dad became ill, John came back to Texas, he was about 40 years older, so, and he found out that they were going to dam up the Brazos River that he had grown up loving.

And they were gonna put 5 new dams up and basically turn into a chain of impounded lakes.

And that inspired him to go do this 3 week canoe journey down the Brazos and to write about this book that was gonna, or this river that was gonna vanish.

"Goodbye to a River," which became his great book, a great classic of Texas literature, so.

And when John did it, you know, very few people were on the river.

But even today, when this is called the John Graves Scenic Waterway, when we paddled, we only saw a couple of other people.

And that's one of the things that some of the writers here have pointed out is that the rivers really are the lifeblood of the natural world in Texas.

And it's relatively easy to go find a river, or go find a place where water is, and get really just immersed in that world, instantly, almost.

- [Christine] Because it doesn't take long.

I mean, - Right.

- You can go from being in a very urban setting to all of a sudden it's like you're isolated on this river.

It's amazing how quickly that can happen on our rivers.

- Yes.

And you know, and if you go out like hiking somewhere like in Big Bend in the mountains, it takes a little while for that to rub in.

But when you're at the river and that water's flowing by, and you hear the birds in the trees, the wind rustling through the tree.

It does.

It happens really quickly.

And it's a beautiful experience, really.

- Well I hope you inspire more people to get on that river and take that trip.

I think the, as you've mentioned, this is a collection of a lot of different writers.

We cover all corners of the state, all kinds of rivers.

Putting that together, I imagine on the one sense wouldn't be that hard because, as you say, John Graves inspired a lot of writers to kind of do the same thing to write about their rivers.

But then on the other hand, there's a lot of wonderful stories.

And how do you, how do you pair that down, and how do you, working with a co-editor, how did you all decide what to put in the book, and where to put i, and how to edit it and all that?

- Oh, yeah, that's a good question.

And honestly, when we started this book, we weren't quite sure there would be enough writing about enough rivers to really make it.

It was an idea to do the book.

And you know, rivers like the Rio Grande, I mean there is an entire book on the Rio Grande and there should be.

So much writing on that river.

But some of the other rivers, like the Colorado River or the Guadalupe River, even, or the Canadian River that runs through the panhandle or the Sabine River, you know, things like that.

It's really hard.

We weren't sure we were going to be able to find enough good writing about all these different places.

And again, you know, finding out somebody like Wes Ferguson had written about the Sabine was just a wonderful thing to be able to use.

That's actually the first prose piece in this book is Wes's journey along that river.

And I love kind of how he begins.

I'll just mention, he says something like, you know, "Somebody shot at us our first day on the Sabine.

Of course they did, it's the Sabine."

And Wes's story is so typical because like many of us, and certainly me, he grew up just kind of taking for granted the environment around him and ignorant of the rivers around him.

And he went off to college, he grew up in Kilgore, and when he came back from college, he just crossed over the same bridge over the Sabine.

He crossed over thousand times before, and for whatever reason, he decided to stop.

And he got out, and he looked at the water, and he saw little twig go around the bend, and he thought for the first time, "I wonder where that twig goes?

I wonder what happened if I did that?"

And really got to know this thing that was there all along, you know, his whole life growing up.

So, but in terms of answering your actual question, working with Sam and selecting things.

It was a lot of research.

We dug things out.

I could never really find a great single essay on the San Antonio River that talks about its transformation from the River Walk area into how it's been rehabilitated and restored now.

When it flows out of downtown, it's really a natural stream again and it's become this huge, wonderful, treasured community jewel in San Antonio.

But there was no one piece I could find.

I asked people to write, and people did write, about other rivers that had not been covered, and did so beautifully.

But for the San Antonio River, I finally found this piece about 10 years old in American Forestry Magazine, which just was basically "San Antonio, a city guided by its river" and it was beautiful.

So finding that was really nice.

These are really, I should say, many of the leading writers in Texas who have contributed to this.

And several of them wrote essays, specifically for this book, about the rivers that speak to them.

And among them are people like Joe Holley who just won a Pulitzer Prize, who's always been fascinated by the Canadian River that runs through the panhandle.

And he went up and researched it and wrote this piece.

There's Bill Sibley, William Jack Sibley, from South Texas, who wrote a wonderful essay about the Nueces River.

Bill Minutaglio, a literary compadre of mine.

I've co-authored a book or two with.

An early book he wrote, he actually made money off of, and he used that money, and bought a piece of land along the Landa River.

And Bill's story is also very typical because when he first moved to the Landa, he did what a lot of us kind of city type of people looking for a weekend escape did, which was, "How do we make this river like a recreational paradise for us?"

And he gradually realized over the course of his time there that he was there to be a steward for the river, not the other way around.

The essay he wrote is just an incredible avocation of that and his adventures with that river.

And Sam is really, honestly, Sam Pfiester is the easiest person to work with because he's so tough-minded and he's so positive-minded and has great literary sensibilities.

I mean he would, we argue sometimes, but we always end up at a good place together, you know, they're very productive conversations I would say.

And you know, we have a lot of similar tastes in the kinds of writings, and I should say there's nonfiction pieces in there we talked about, and there's also, to me, like one of the great discoveries was the poetry.

At first we thought we would include selections from fiction, but that just didn't really work because fiction is always about the characters and the conflict.

And we really wanted pieces that got to the spirit of the place of those particular streams.

And poems do that so beautifully.

And so many great poets in Texas have really done wonderful jobs capturing the rivers that they love.

And among those poets is Carmen Tafolla who kicks off this book with her kind of rousing poem, "This River Here," which is a civic treasure in San Antonio.

It's actually inscribed on the walls downtown.

- [Christine] I was gonna bring that up.

- Okay.

- First of all because that's, it's a beautiful poem and it's fantastic.

But you, there's also a series of videos that you guys produced of the author's reading portions of their work.

And while it's powerful to read on the page, to watch Carmen- - Yeah.

- Recite that poem, on the banks of that river, it gives me goosebumps just thinking about it now because it's so powerful.

- Yeah.

No that's an incredible video, and as I mentioned, at the Wittliff Collections, you know, where I work as a curator, we do exhibitions and we did do a big exhibit which was going down pretty soon, about a week from the taping of this.

But it's been up for almost a year now.

And one of the things that we did is we asked many of the authors to contribute videos of themselves reading from their piece or talking about their river.

And you know, many of them just had somebody use a smartphone and film them.

But Carmen had a real produced piece, which is extraordinary.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

I would encourage everyone to find that video.

- Carmen Tafolla, yeah.

- Because it's, it's so powerful and so wonderful.

- Yeah, it's on YouTube.

And actually we have a whole playlist on YouTube, and there are about maybe 20 or so videos in all, 20, 25.

- I watched a couple of them to get ready for this.

- Yeah.

- But I'm glad you mentioned because this isn't just literary stories.

This is poetry, this is a little, sometimes historical, you know, accounts from like conquistadors and people coming in, earliest visitors to, non-native visitors to Texas.

It runs a wide variety of types of stories in here, which enriches it I think.

- Yeah.

And I have to say, it was Sam Pfiester's idea to include the earliest historical snippets.

These are like little paragraphs like, and things like John James Audubon who was canoeing at Buffalo Bayou in 1837 on his way to meet Sam Houston.

And Sam said, "You know, we should find things like that where you see what Audubon saw in Buffalo Bayou in 1837.

And then from there you go to Attica Locke, a great novelist, writing about Houston today and see her take on Buffalo Bayou from, you know, 2016 or whatever."

And it's a really neat dynamic.

And at first I was a little resistant because that meant more work, but it turned out well and I'm glad we did it.

Yeah.

- We have to also talk about this amazing cover art by Clemente Guzman, which is, I believe, commissioned for the book, correct?

Can you talk about it?

Because it's such a rich, detailed image.

- Yeah.

Yeah, Clemente Guzman is a Texas treasure.

And again, he's really, I mentioned Andy Sansom a couple times who is a great contributor to Texas A&M Press, has done so many wonderful books.

Clemente is really a Andy Sansom connection that we have.

But several years ago, Clemente was a staff artist for Texas Parks and Wildlife for just about 30 years and done all kinds of things like the license plates that you see that are on Texas parks or Texas rivers or natural parts of Texas.

He's done covers and, I think it was in 2015, he did a cover for "Rivers of Song," the special issue.

And I saw that cover and I just, my job dropped.

It was so gorgeous.

And I knew I wanted to do a book like this at some point.

And I thought to myself, "If we ever get to do this book, that's the person to illustrate it."

And Clemente, you know, this cover wraps around to the back.

It's a full painting.

That painting is actually owned by the Meadows Center at Texas State, which is the headwaters of the San Marcos River.

You can take glass bottom boat rights there.

It's a beautiful paradise.

And Clemente's painting, he just really captured the magic and the joy of Texas waterways.

You see, this is actually Andy Sansom paddling the canoe.

The model for the dog was my dog, Ralphred, a shout out to him.

You see people getting married at Mission Espada.

On the back there's snorkelers, there's a guy, a kid on a rope swing here, there's somebody in an inter tube on the back, a baptism, you know, early Native American users of the rivers, a fly fishermen is modeled on Sam Pfiester.

And there's just so much joy in this painting that comes through.

And this was the official selection for the Texas Book Festival in 2021 - Yes.

- when this book was coming out, which was so nice to see.

And the young girl who's reading this book along the cypress tree, her book is titled "This River Here," which is a tribute to Carmen Tafolla.

- I can't say enough about the art.

I did buy the poster from the book festival, and it's been hanging in my office for months now.

But when I was reading the book to get ready for the show, I was noticing details that I hadn't caught despite looking at it every day for months and months.

It's just one of those, one of those images that you'll catch something new every time.

And I love art like that.

That's just fabulous.

- And let me say, you know, living in San Marcos, or working in San Marcos, I go to San Marcos River whenever I can.

And when you're there with friends and you're like looking out and you see a dog swimming through the water or somebody kayaking through the, you know, tubers coming through the shoot and families having a picnic and their kids running out and playing in the shallow part and birds flying overhead and all the trees, you just look around and you say, "I feel like I'm in a Clemente Guzman painting."

I mean that's really the spirit that he captures with this.

- [Christine] Absolutely.

- Yeah.

- Absolutely.

Well, while we're talking about art, I also wanna mention there's some beautiful maps in here because the book is divided up kind of by region, and to orient the reader, we have beautiful fold-out watercolor maps to let us know what rivers we're gonna talk about.

- Yes, exactly.

And that again was a Sam Pfiester idea to have great maps for this book.

And we were very lucky to work with Molly O'Halloran, who I believe has done other works with Texas A&M University Press.

Done maps for other rivers books, and she does, she's a watercolor artist and a cartographer at the same time.

And yeah, they're gorgeous maps.

So, yeah.

- What I liked about reading this book is that a lot of these stories that these authors are writing about are intensely personal to them, but then somehow there also can be intensely personal to the reader because, especially if you have a connection to a river, if you're reading about that person's experience, suddenly you're back there.

I'm remembering canoeing down the Guadalupe with my brothers when I'm reading about somebody else, you know.

It's a connection we have to our state, to each other, which I think is wonderful.

- That's such a great observation, Christine.

And that really gets to the heart of what we try to do at the Wittliff Collections, What I'm trying to do with this book and other books I've done, and it really comes from the great Texas writer, J. Frank Dobie, who said years and years ago, people living in Texas and the southwest will lead fuller and richer lives if they become aware of what's around them, basically.

And for me, again, you know, growing up kind of ignorant of what was around me and gradually discovering it, books like this, Dobie's books, and other books, are a real treasure because you know, I still remember when I realized that, you know, because I was a snooty English major where the only good writing comes from, you know, Europe or wherever, writers, the South American writers, or whatever.

And then to discover that there are like really, really talented, world-class writers, in this place, who write about places that we have a personal connection to, just blows your mind when you discover that.

And from there, I mean, that set me off on my whole career basically as a curator at the Wittliff and the kind of work that I like to do.

But you're right, I know for me, I have had a chance to explore many of these rivers, and Sam Pfiester, as well.

So we could really, when you could read different pieces, and there were many that got left on the cutting room floor that were good, but not quite exactly what we wanted here.

We were looking for a very high level of literary quality, but also pieces that focused, they really, I mean, I'm gonna say it again, that focused on the rivers as rivers rather than just detailing the human history along the banks of the rivers, right?

And so, when you know river a little bit and you see somebody else's writing about, and you see they just really capture it in a certain way, and like, and also just enhanced your own understanding of it.

Those are the pieces we were looking for.

Yeah.

- And you've, I mean, piece after piece did that.

So that's, I think that's fabulous.

So you, as I mentioned, you've broken this book up kind of by region, which I think, you know, helps you get through it thematically.

But as you're reading through it, I found it interesting that I don't think it was intended, but sometimes the pieces work thematically because a river means something different in east Texas and central Texas than it does in far west Texas.

So, the way these writers experience their rivers certainly is informed by where they are and how scarce a river might be.

- Yes.

Yeah.

And again, this was conversation with Sam, you know, about how to divide the state, but we began in east Texas, and I will say, the part of the state I'm least familiar with is East Texas and the East Texas rivers.

I had vaguely heard of the Neches River before doing this book.

I had no idea what an incredible river the Neches is, which Thad Sitton describes in here.

It's really, has some of the, had some of the tallest trees, you know, east in the eastern part of, east of California basically.

Some of the last old growth remaining hardwoods left in the American south.

And it's undammed, essentially, except for I guess one place.

And the amount of water that comes through there is incredible.

But it's, and that just floods so much that there's really no settlement along its banks.

So it's just this incredibly amazing last vestige of a southern river left in the United States that's basically untouched more, you know, by our standards, untouched.

And so the natural world that exists there is just off the charts amazing.

That's the place where the last verified signs of ivory billed woodpeckers were there.

And just to get to know the Neches River through people like Thad Sitton, who also is published with A&M Press, and also Francis Edward Abernathy, the legendary folklorist of Texas, who describes the river trip he took in 1947.

You know, he ended up camping on an island, getting lost because there's so many braids and ending up on this tiny little island about the size of this table right here that was covered in snakes.

They'd like shew the snakes off to have a place to sit.

And you know, just when you experience rivers through the eyes of people like that who know them so well and write so well, it's just such a joy.

- Well, unfortunately, we are running a little short on time Whenever you're here, I feel like we could just talk forever because you always have wonderful things to say and come with wonderful books.

So, in our last few minutes, I wanna ask you, what do you want the takeaway to be for the people listening or watching today?

- Well, I hope that you get a chance to get this book, but more importantly, that you get a chance to do what Andy Sansom recommends, which is to get out to a river, and to take somebody younger with you to a river, preferably a child.

And don't make them wait until they're off to college somewhere to discover that Texas rivers are really cool, you know, teach them as a child.

And to use rivers responsibly and to really be aware of how threatened a lot of these rivers are.

Almost every river in the state is threatened honestly, to varying degrees.

We, you know, we are protecting many of them the best we can, but just water policy in Texas being what it is, as Andy Sansom points out in the afterward, if every water right previously granted in the state of Texas was actually fully utilized, every river would be dry right now.

And so the thing is these aren't just pretty picturesque places.

This is really the lifeblood, the basis of the life that we have here.

And so they're really critically important at the same time.

So yeah, I just hope really that we bring more attention and awareness and respect and reverence, really, for Texas rivers.

- Well, I think if you read any part of this book, I don't think how you could walk away without feeling that.

Wanting to, A, visit a river because some, plenty of these rivers I've never been to before, but reading about them, - [Steve] Did you have a favorite?

Or one that you want to go see after reading this?

- I wanna go more to the east Texas area, like you mentioned, that's an area that's a little bit of a blind spot for me and I just haven't visited there enough, so.

I don't know if I'm brave enough to go down the Sabine or the Neches, but I should at least put- - Take Wes Ferguson with.

- Yeah!

Exactly, I'd need him as a guide.

But at least put eyes on it, to sit next to it, to watch it flow for a little while.

I think that would, go fishing in it, you know, just spend some time on some of these rivers is so important.

And in general, but as a Texan, we should.

We are proud of our state, but we should be protecting it as well.

- Yeah.

We should be very proud of our rivers.

Exactly.

- Yes.

Absolutely.

Well, thank you so much for coming.

I really enjoy talking with you.

- Same here, Christine, as always.

- Thank you.

- Thanks.

- That is all the time we have for today.

Again, the book is "Viva Texas Rivers!"

co-edited by Steve Davis.

That's all the time we have, and I'll see you again soon.

(happy guitar music)