I went to the library today and I got a couple of books that were on my to-read list. One was by Larry McMurtry, noted author a quite a few books about the Wild West and cowboys and such, called “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen.” It’s a book of his recollections of his growing up in the context of storytelling; where he grew up, everyone was working, and there was very little time to sit around and tell stories. Part of his point (I’m on page 70 at the moment) is that storytelling loses a lot in a society where everyone is either too busy to listen or have nowhere to go to laze around and listen.

When I started the book, I was put off a bit. Here was this white dude, speaking of a country long gone, of a people who inevitably vote Republican and proudly don’t go more than 20 miles from where they’re born. The kind of people for whom work is a currency, and social issues boil down to “I have it bad, and no one else should really have it better than me.”

Anyway, what drew me in was our community. He spoke about the stories of his childhood, and I saw a ton of parallels. He was made to do the manual work of a rural life, but everyone sensed that he just wasn’t good at it. He got ahold of some books and was sold; these Anglophile writers wowed him with their language and their storytelling. He saw how he could apply those lessons to the stories he wanted to tell.

The difference, which became glaring to me, is that he wanted to immerse himself in that Anglophile world. The world of European writers, who he was introduced to and were soon lifted up as examples and roadmaps to follow. I’m a bit different, and I hope others are, too. The key is a saying that I’ve heard over and over – “if you know better, do better.”

I cannot imagine a list of inspirations that doesn’t include James Baldwin or Audre Lorde. Pablo Neruda and Amy Tan. Alexander Chee and Ta-Nehisi. And I mourn the people who look to Europe for these classic writers but don’t see the talent under their regional noses because “woke” or “diversity writer”. What treasures he missed!

The book was published in 1999, and now I have to wonder if he didn’t read the older writers because he didn’t know about them, or they weren’t “as good” as the people he names as influences. And that’s the rub with being a non-white person consuming media; you are surrounded by such great talents, see them every day, seek them out, read them, wonder at the sentence structure and ways to turn a phrase…and find out that there are people who are so hung up on the European artists that were allowed to publish and be lionized those many years ago.

But at the end of the day, the urge to read, to consume, to be influenced by all that the world has to offer is its own reward. I grew up in a different Wild West, but while I can struggle with questions of representation and who gets to be the big name and who can’t, I can connect with him on essential questions of environment and telling stories. You know, human traits and qualities that can shine in my writing just as they do with his.