VOLUMES

were new, capturing the nuanced spirit of the place and its people hidden beneath the thick surface of its Wild West mythologies.

For many readers, McMurtry also proffered from-the-hip lessons on the craft of writing and looking—paying attention, like Sonny—and many crossing paths with him personally, professionally, or imaginatively were profoundly influenced in their lives and work.

Over 35 of those writers’ voices are gathered in a forthcoming collection of reflections on McMurtry’s life called Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry, due out from University of Texas Press this September. The collection is edited by veteran journalist and professor at University of North Texas’ Mayborn School of Journalism, George Getschow, who was also a friend of McMurtry.

“When Larry died in 2021, there was no funeral. No memorial service,” says Getschow. “No opportunity to commemorate and celebrate the epic life of Texas’ literary titan.” So Getschow called upon a dozen mainly Texan writers to pen essays on the mark McMurtry left. Those essays were then read at the Royal Theater in Archer City, the theater upon which The Last Picture Show was modeled, to a crowd of hundreds. That day of eulogizing McMurtry became the basis for the published collection, which includes the likes of longtime Texas Monthly writer Skip Hollandsworth, Dallas Morning News reporter Dianne Solis, writer and book collector Brandon Kennedy, Texan historian Stephen Harrigan, British novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer, and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Lawrence Wright, among many others, including a cadre of beloved women confidants and collaborators, most notably his writing partner Diana Ossana, with whom McMurtry shared the Oscar for best adapted screenplay for Brokeback Mountain in 2006.

Broken into eight sections that consider the many modes of McMurtry’s influence—from keeper of Texan history, to his obsession with book collecting and the friends it gathered, to his acerbic but resonant role in the student writers workshop Getschow initiated in Archer City in 2005— Pastures of the Empty Page is arranged in a way that meticulously tracks McMurtry’s life. That life straddled two epochs: the dying of the old West and the birth of suburbia, and so Getschow has selected writers that consider first McMurtry’s roots on a multigenerational North Texas ranch called Idiot Ridge, where he swore off his ancestral past as a cowboy and chose his future as a writer; through his nomadic status as a novelist, father, professor, book dealer, essayist, critic, and screenwriter; to the last years of his life, when he began selling off his outsized book collection—some half a million books—from his multi-sited used bookstore, Booked Up, in Archer City.

Though McMurtry’s disposition was notoriously gruff, many of the writers in the collection attest to his generous encouragement of their work, always championing stories that had conviction and urgency. The greatest encouragement he gave to many writers, though, was the simple subject of so many of his books: the people and places of Texas. In Pastures of the Empty Page, Getschow defines how each writer, by various avenues, was dealt an education in storytelling by McMurtry, the sensitive but formidable master of chronicling this region’s built and behavioral vernaculars.

As tribute to that inheritance, the contributors to Pastures of the Empty Page are dedicating royalties from the sale of the book to a nonprofit foundation called the Archer City Writers Workshop: A Living Legacy to Larry McMurtry, an annual convening of writers looking to McMurtry’s work for inspiration and instruction.

“Our hope,” says Getschow, “is that proceeds from the sale of the collection will help create and support a monument to Larry’s storytelling legacy—a permanent writing center in Archer City to serve countless students and professional writers who have flocked to Larry’s hometown over the last two decades hoping to channel Larry as their muse.” P