The next event for the Speakers & Issues Series at Midwestern State University will feature the editor of a new collections of essays about prolific author and Archer City native Larry McMurtry. George Getschow, editor of Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry, will discuss how the book came to be and how he convinced nationally acclaimed writers such as Pulitzer Prize winner Lawrence Wright, Texas author Stephen Harrigan, McMurtry’s writing partner Diana Ossana, novelists Paulette Jiles and Stephen Graham Jones, and others to be part of the collection.

Getschow will speak at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 24, at the Wichita Falls Museum of Art at MSU Texas. The book also contains essays by MSU Texas Associate Professor of English Greg Giddings and Kathy Floyd, marketing and public information assistant at MSU Texas. Giddings and Floyd will read their essays. Getschow will read his introduction to the book, which tells of McMurtry’s deep relationship with the land south of Archer City, where he grew up and how his ranching heritage played an important role in his writing process.

 

In all, 38 writers contributed to the collection, which offers a look at McMurtry through the eyes of writers he helped shape through his work over the course of his unparalleled literary life. William Broyles and Gregory Curtis tell of having McMurtry as a teacher at Rice University in the 1960s, when he was not much older than they were. Broyles went on to help found Texas Monthy magazine and write screenplays for China Beach and films such as Cast Away and Apollo 13. Curtis was a longtime editor at Texas Monthly.

Skip Hollandsworth tells of seeing McMurtry during the filming of The Last Picture Show in 1970, when he was in junior high in Wichita Falls, and becoming an “unabashed McMurtry fanboy.” Now an award-winning writer for Texas Monthly, Hollandsworth and Richard Linklater cowrote the 2012 movie Bernie, which was based on his 1998 Texas Monthly story “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas.”

Admission is free. Books will be for sale at the event.

Getschow is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for National Reporting and winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award for distinguished writing about the underprivileged. He was a Pulitzer Prize jurist in 2017 for General Nonfiction and for Feature Writing in 2013 and 2014. He has earned numerous other awards for his writing and was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2012 for “distinctive literary achievement.” Today, as director of the Archer City Writers Workshop, he helps organize and conduct annual writing workshops in Archer City for professional writers and college and high school students from across the country.

This event is sponsored by the Libra Foundation, the Wichita Falls Times Record News, KCCU-FM NPR Radio, KFDX-TV3, and the MSU Prothro-Yeager College of Humanities & Social Sciences. For more information, contact Associate Professor of English John Schulze at 940-397-6249.