Norman German, author of "A Savage Wisdom"

“A Savage Wisdom” is inspired by the life, crimes and legends of Annie Beatrice McQuiston, aka Toni Jo Henry, the only woman executed in Louisiana’s electric chair. ShelfLife@Texas asked author and University of Texas at Austin graduate alumnus (English ’79) Norman German about his new book.

How did you first become familiar with McQuiston’s story?
Toni Jo’s story has intrigued me since childhood, when I would read about her in special features in the Lake Charles American Press, which tantalized readers with reproductions of her leggy portrait as a coddled death-row inmate.

What compelled you to write her story?
Annie Beatrice McQuiston, mis-carved as “Anna” on her tombstone, adopted the name “Toni Jo” as a prostitute and became Toni Jo Henry upon marrying Claude “Cowboy” Henry, himself a murderer on the lam when he met Toni Jo. This dual identity gave me the idea of treating the novel as a way to explore identity formation.

However, the real-life woman was not a sympathetic character, being a drug addict and prostitute by age 15, so I reconceived her life and wrote the novel to answer the question, “What would make an innocent woman transform into a cold-blooded murderer?” The novel, then, became a study in deception, with a fictional character who has multiple identities deceiving Toni Jo into a form of high-class prostitution. She then seeks revenge. (Actually, the opportunity almost literally falls in her lap.)

I thought it was striking, too, that Toni Jo committed the murder on Valentine’s Day, probably without even realizing what day it was.

Most compelling to me, though, was the rumor that the sheriff had an affair with and a child by Toni Jo while she was awaiting execution. The fictional possibilities were enormous, and many readers have said that the novel’s real gut-punch comes after Toni Jo is no longer alive.

What were your overall impressions of the character?
The historical Toni Jo Henry seemed to have been an uneasy mix of compassion and anger. She grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, the daughter of a hard-drinking, abusive Irishman. Her mother died of tuberculosis, compelling her to work in a macaroni factory until she was fired when the TB risk was discovered. She left home at 13, became addicted to cocaine, and resorted to prostitution to make her way in the world.

In 1939 in a brothel she called home, Annie, now going by “Toni Jo,” fell for Claude “Cowboy” Henry, an ex-prize fighter. On November 25, 1939, shortly after he isolated her in a hotel room and forced her to go “cold turkey,” they secured a marriage license in Lake Charles and married in Sulphur.

While Toni Jo’s life is compelling as a “human interest” story, I didn’t see much potential in building a novel around such a character. After Truman Capote launched the new genre of “faction” with “In Cold Blood,” turning fact into fiction has almost become a cottage industry in the publishing world, so I can’t take much credit for being original in my “imaginative reconstruction,” as I like to call it. My trick was simply to reverse many of the events in Toni Jo’s life. To cite just one example, in real life she was a hitchhiker who killed the man who picked her up. My version is a little different than that.

What is it about her crimes that led her to become the first and only woman to die in Louisiana’s electric chair?
By contemporary standards, her crime was not especially heinous, but it was “cold-blooded,” and the man she killed was merely being kind to her and a male friend she was with. In my opinion, Toni Jo’s thinking was clouded by desperation. She hatched a plan to rob an Arkansas bank for money to shorten her husband’s sentence by legal appeal or perhaps bribery. On Highway 90 just east of Orange, Texas, outside the Night Owl bar, Houston tire salesman Joseph Calloway picked up Toni Jo and Army deserter Horace Finnon Burks. Wanting his Ford V8 as their getaway car, they forced him at gunpoint to a field south of Lake Charles and led him to a rice-stalk stack, where Toni Jo plugged him once in the forehead with a .32.

At home in Houston that frosty Valentine’s night were Calloway’s wife and nine-year-old daughter. (This fact certainly didn’t help her cause in the courtroom.) Although her conviction was appealed twice, the time between the murder and the execution was only two and a half years—swift justice indeed by modern standards, when appeals often drag out for a quarter of a century.

What is it that eventually led this “love-struck southern girl” to snap on a stranger?
As mentioned above, my opinion is that she was desperately, perhaps insanely, in love with Cowboy Henry and tried to do the only thing she knew to “spring him.” In her favor, I suppose, is the fact that because of a tormented conscience, she did turn herself in and confess as the lone trigger-woman in an attempt to save the life of her accomplice, who was nevertheless executed four months after Toni Jo.

Can you describe how your approach may differ when researching and writing about true crimes?
Because this is my only “true crime” book, which in fact is about 90 percent fiction, I can’t say that my approach was much different from the research conducted for my other novels. In order to steep myself in the time period, I first read dozens of newspaper articles on the murder, capture, trial, and execution. To create the dense, “textured” world of a novel, I immersed myself in magazines and popular histories from World War I to 1963 (the novel concludes on the same day as John F. Kennedy’s assassination).

From antique stores, I bought ten copies of magazines from the period, including Life, Look, Collier’s, and Saturday Evening Post. I read every article and studied every ad in order to realistically recreate the clothing, slang, and pop-culture icons of the era.

Finally, to see how established authors approached fictionalizing the lives of murderers, I reread “In Cold Blood” and for the first time read Norman Mailer’s “The Executioner’s Song,” about Gary Gilmore, the man who insisted he be executed by firing squad in Utah rather than languish in prison.

Where did you spend time in Louisiana & Texas to prepare?
There are three main settings for the book: southeast Texas, Lake Charles, and New Orleans. I’ve spent considerable time in all three locations, but oddly the most influential “location” was the actual gravesite of Toni Jo Henry.

For years, I had heard the rumor that Toni Jo’s grave was not marked by a headstone for fear of vandalism, so I went on my scavenger hunt in the Orange Grove-Graceland Cemetery on Broad Street, thinking to walk in concentric squares until I found her tombstone or proved the rumor valid.

I had two surprises. The first was coming upon the headstone within five minutes. The other was discovering that the name of Louisiana’s most notorious murderess had been misspelled. Annie Beatrice McQuiston, carved as “Anna,” adopted the name “Toni Jo” as a prostitute and became Toni Jo Henry upon marrying Claude “Cowboy” Henry.

Seeing the tombstone had a galvanizing effect on me by making the woman behind the name come to life as a real person. The tombstone, in fact, serves as the ghosted background to the novel’s front and back covers.

What do you want readers to take away from this book?
Of course I want readers to have a riveting reading experience. (One woman found herself hating the content but incapable of putting the book down until it was finished, even cooking the family’s supper with the novel in hand.)

Also, the novel dramatizes the fact that anyone at any time can simply CHOOSE to redefine themselves and become a better person. “A Savage Wisdom” is not only a case study in deception; it is a testament to the fact that anyone can radically transform themselves—instantly and by an act of will. Thus, one character at the end of the novel rejects Toni Jo Henry’s savage wisdom, replacing it with a “wary goodness.”

About the Author: Norman German is a professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University, fiction editor for Louisiana Literature, and winner of the Deep South Writers’ Contest for “No Other World.” “A Savage Wisdom” is his third novel.

Roger Reeves, left, and Malachi Black, Lilly Fellows

For the second year running, a student in the Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) in Writing program of the Michener Center for Writers has received a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, among the most distinguished awards for aspiring poets who have yet to publish a book.  The fellowships are given by the Poetry Foundation, one of the largest literary foundations in the world and publisher of Poetry magazine.

Roger Reeves was one of the five Lilly fellows chosen in 2008 from a field of some 860 applicants nationwide.  His classmate Malachi Black was one of five selected in 2009.  Fellows receive a $15,000 stipend for the award year and publication in Poetry magazine, the country’s oldest and most venerated poetry journal, established by Harriet Monroe in 1912.

Reeves and Black serve as poetry editors for the university’s literary magazine, Bat City Review and are both in their final year of the MFA program at The University of Texas at Austin.

Reeves, who grew up in Mount Holly, New Jersey, attended Princeton University and completed his Bachelor of Arts in English, magna cum laude, at Morehouse College in 2003. He received an master’s in English with a certificate in Women’s Studies from Texas A&M University. A former Cave Canem fellow, Reeves has published work in American Literary Review, Sou’Wester, and Indiana Review and was included in the 2009 Best New Poets anthology.

Black, who also grew up in New Jersey, earned his Bachelor of Arts in literature from New York University in 2004 and is literary editor for the New York Quarterly. His poems have appeared in AGNI Online, Iowa Review, the Southwest Review, and Pleiades and were chosen for the 2008 Best New Poets.

Established in 1989 by the Indianapolis philanthropist Ruth Lilly, the fellowship program is open to all U.S. poets between 21 and 31 years of age.  In 2005, Michener Center poet Michael McGriff was the first UT graduate student to be honored with a Lilly Fellowship.

Reeves says the Lilly support this past year afforded him the opportunity to experiment with longer writing projects and to travel for research. “It’s also helped settle my nerves, in terms of feeling like I was a fraud,” he laughs.

“It’s an incredibly humbling recognition,” says Black of the fellowship.

This week, “The Handbook of Family Communication,” edited by Anita Vangelisti, the Jesse H. Jones Centennial Professor in Communication, will receive the distinguished book award from Family Communication Division of the National Communication Association (NCA) at its annual conference in Chicago.

“In the Handbook of Family Communication,” researchers examine communication across the life of families, including marital communication. Scholars from different educational specialties, including communication, psychology and sociology, explore topics such as the influence of characteristics of family relationships on specific communication processes.

“Receiving the Distinguished Book Award from the Family Communication Division is an incredible honor,” says Vangelisti. “’The Handbook of Family Communication’ is an edited volume, so the award is a wonderful way to recognize the work of all of the authors who contributed to the project.”

Vangelisti recently discussed the influences that led her to study communication and emotion in personal relationships, especially among family members.

“While I was an undergraduate student at the University of Washington, I taught personal development courses at a local fashion college,” says Vangelisti. “What I found in teaching these classes was that the material on social skills had the most impact on students and, many times, when I discussed social skills and social interaction in class, students would tell stories about their families. It was clear that the students’ family relationships were very important to them; that’s one of the main reasons I became interested in studying family communication.”

Based on her years of research, Vangelisti has some tips for better communication among family members.

“First, pay attention to family communication – watch how you communicate yourself and how other members of your family communicate. Respond to family members—including children—in ways that show respect and caring. Think about what is important to you and to your family: what qualities you want in your family relationships, what activities you want to engage in, and what memories you want to create and then work—together, if possible,—to make those important things happen.

“Studying family relationships and family communication has made me more aware of why I see the world the way I do,” says Vangelisti. “It has helped me change some patterns of behavior and—perhaps more importantly—has helped me create an environment for my own children that I hope will help them become happy, healthy adults.”

Vangelisti currently teaches the Family Communication and Communication and Personal Relationships courses in the College of Communication. Past books that she has edited include “Explaining Family Interactions” (1995) and “Feeling Hurt in Close Relationships” (Cambridge 2009).

Highlighting Oshinsky’s historical account of the polio epidemic in America, Gates addressed the need for improvements in global health care and medical technologies. Watch the video segment.

Learn more about Oshinsky’s book in the feature “More Than a March of Dimes.”

More than 200 writers will showcase their books, including a host of authors from our university. Some of the presenters include:

Author: Jeffrey Abramson, professor of law and government
Book: “Minerva’s Owl: The Tradition of Western Political Thought”
When: Saturday, Oct. 31
Where: Texas State Capitol: Capitol Extension Room E2.028

Author: Oscar Casares, assistant professor of English
Book: “Amigoland”
When: Saturday, Oct. 31
Where: Texas State Capitol: Capitol Extension Room E2.016

Author: Jacqueline Jones, the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas and Mastin Gentry White Professor in Southern History
Book: “Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War”
When: Saturday, Oct. 31
Where: Texas State Capitol Extension Room E2.028

Author: Kate Brooks, director of Liberal Arts Career Services
Book: “You Majored in What?: Mapping Your Path from Chaos to Career”
When: Sunday, Nov. 1
Where: Lifestyle Tent (10th and Congress)

Author: Lucas A. Powe, Jr., professor of law and government
Book: “The Supreme Court and the American Elite”
When: Sunday, Nov. 1
Where: Texas State Capitol: Capitol Extension Room E2.016

Author: Elizabeth Engelhardt, associate professor of American Studies
Book: “Republic of Barbecue: Stories Beyond the Brisket”
When: Sunday, Nov. 1
Where: Cooking Tent

Author: Mark Weston, UT Law alumnus (moderated by ShelfLife@Texas contributor Laura Castro)
Book: “Prophets & Princes: Saudi Arabia from Muhammad to the Present”
When: Sunday, Nov. 1
Where: Texas State Capitol: Capitol Extension Room E2.014

The Texas Book Festival was founded in 1995 by former first lady Laura Bush to promote reading and honor Texas authors. Sessions are free and open to the public. Proceeds from books purchased at the festival benefit the state’s public libraries.

Visit this site for a full list of festival authors.

McGarity is the Joe R. & Teresa Lozano Long Endowed Chair in Administrative Law, and Wagner, is the Joe A. Worsham Centennial Professor in Law at The University of Texas at Austin. Their book was published by Harvard University Press.

The awards are the highest honor of literary achievement given to published authors at The University of Texas at Austin. They are sponsored by the University Co-operative Society.

Michael Granof, chairperson of the Co-operative Society, hosted the event and announced the winners. Victoria Rodriguez, vice provost and dean of Graduate Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, presented the awards.

Four faculty members received $3,000 prizes for their books. They were:

• Jacqueline Jones, the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas and Mastin Gentry White Professor in Southern History, “Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War” (A. A. Knopf, 2008).

• Peter MacNeilage, professor of psychology, “The Origin of Speech” (Oxford University Press, 2008).

• Tracie Matysik, associate professor of history, “Reforming the Moral Subject: Ethics and Sexuality in Central Europe, 1890-1930” (Cornell University Press, 2009).

• Karen Rascati, the Stewart Turley/Eckerd Corporation Centennial Endowed Professor in Pharmacy, “Essentials of Pharmacoeconomics” (Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, 2008).

The University Co-op is a not-for-profit corporation owned by the students, faculty and staff of The University of Texas at Austin. Since the year 2000, the University Co-op has given more than $28 million in gifts and rebates.

Craig Watkins, associate professor of Radio-Television-Film, answers this question and takes us into the world of new media in his latest project, “The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future” (Beacon 2009). “The Young and the Digital” explores highs and lows of digital media and how it affects lives of today’s youth from tweens, to teens, to 20-somethings.

He examines how the use of social networks, online gaming, and time spent online in general are influencing the way we view evolution of the digital scene and social media platforms.

“Social media has emerged as the dominant media in our lives because it offers something that television cannot offer: the constant opportunity to connect and share our lives with close friends and acquaintances,” Watkins said.

ShelfLife@Texas recently sat down to interview Watkins on his new book and his experience with digital media.

Q: How has media affected your life on a personal level?
A: Digital media has made it much easier for me to keep up with the news and information sources that I prefer. I have to admit that I stopped reading newspapers on a regular basis many years ago, but that does not mean that I have abandoned the news. As a result of the Internet, the reverse has happened. I’m able to follow news in a much more flexible yet detailed way and learn about a wide array of topics or the things that I really care about which include health, technology, politics, and the business and culture of sports.

Q: You have an 8-year-old daughter, what role does new media play in her life?
A: Like most kids her age she is quite comfortable with new media including mobile phones, mobile phone apps, video games, and computers. My daughter usually takes the lead in downloading new apps for my phone and eagerly explores all of its capabilities. She has introduced me to new features on my phone that have actually been useful for me. Research over the years shows that young children, unlike their adult counterparts, are not intimidated by technological innovation. In fact, they seem to be really drawn to new technologies and have typically emerged as the “tech gurus” in their own homes.

Q: What, if anything, do you think we can learn from today’s youth and their knowledge of digital media?
A: Young people’s enthusiastic embrace of technology is about being able to communicate more efficiently with a wide array of friends, colleagues and acquaintances.

Q: What was the most surprising outcome that you found through your research?
A: That the more things change the more they really do seem to stay the same. Here’s what I mean: there is no question that young people’s non-stop use of technology–mobile phones, social media–represents a major shift in behavior. That is, how they use technology at home, in the classroom, and even when they are with each other. It represents new ways of being “social” in the world today. Some, of course, question if young people are social. But the idea of what it means to be social is constantly evolving in the face of technological innovations. This, I discovered, is really a constant theme in modern American life.

Watkins teaches in the Department of Radio-TV-Film and at the Center for African and African American Studies. He is also involved in the MacArthur Foundation Project.

His other books include “Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture and the Struggle for the soul of a Movement” (Beacon Press 2005) and “Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema” (University of Chicago Press 1998).

“The Young and the Digital” was released in October. You can view a trailer by Watkins at YouTube or read more at www.theyounganddigital.com.

Huskey, who teaches in the Law School’s National Security Clinic and is a fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, will also talk about the future of Guantanamo; and the current federal policy on preventive detention.

“Justice at Guantanamo” (Lyons Press, June 2009) is a memoir, chronicling Huskey’s personal journey from her native Alaska, to a civil war in Africa, to bartending and modeling in New York City, and ultimately to the law where she found her calling, defending human rights, after practicing for several years at a law firm in Washington, D.C.

Huskey, a 1997 graduate of the Law School who established the National Security Clinic in 2007, began representing Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detainees in 2002 as one of a few lawyers willing to challenge the government soon after 9/11. And as she told an audience at the School of Law yesterday, Huskey spent years battling the government before even getting a chance to meet her detainee clients, whose case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

BookPeople is on the corner of West 6th Street and N. Lamar.

Martínez, an assistant professor in the Department of History, will present a talk on the process of writing and publishing his new book at The University of Texas History of Science Colloquium from noon to 2 p.m., Friday, Oct. 16, in GAR 1.102.

Whereas various historians have studied the origins of Einstein’s theory in relation to optics, electricity, and magnetism, none had analyzed its roots in the context of kinematics- the science of motion. Martínez explains that the book is the product of 15 years of research. “By contrast to works that are thick on conjectures, I worked to assemble the most extensive collection of documentary sources and to compose a ‘mosaic’ account of Einstein’s path to relativity.”

The cover of the book uses artwork designed by the author. “Basically, in Bern on 1905, early on a May morning, Einstein woke up with a breakthrough idea: events that are simultaneous to one observer might not be simultaneous to another,” Martínez says. “He analyzed this notion by asking himself, how would we know whether lightning bolts strike distant places at the same time? This question led him to the relativity of time.” Accordingly, the cover of Martínez’s book illustrates that imaginary view: it shows an early morning view of the Swiss capital, Bern, with two lightning bolts striking at once.

Laughs and enjoyment seem to be two key aspects of writing novels for Sarah Bird and they were plentiful on Thursday night (10/8/09) as Bird was welcomed as the next Dobie Paisano Fellow during an event in her honor on The University of Texas at Austin campus.  Bird will hold the Ralph A. Johnston fellowship for established writers during her time on the Paisano ranch.

Bird enchanted the audience with witty tales of her younger self (who would be insanely jealous of her new fellowship), excerpts from her writing (including channeling her “Zen Mama” to deal with a teenage child) and stories from the front lines of Houston high society.

A columnist for Texas Monthly and the author of seven novels, Bird’s writing career has won her many awards and accolades.  These include the Elle Magazine Reader’s Prize, Amazon’s Fiction and Literature Editors and the American Library Association’s Booklist Editors Best Book of the Year and the Texas Institute of Letters’s Award for Best Work of Fiction (twice) among others.

Becoming an author was not Bird’s dream as a little girl.  As the child of a military family, much of her youth was spent oversees with little exposure to writers.  She says,

“The idea of being a writer never crossed my mind until I discovered a form so, hmmm, let’s say, ‘approachable,’ that it occurred to me that human beings might be producing it rather than the gods who wrote the books I loved.  This form was the photo-romance.  I discovered the photo-romance when I was an au pair in France.  Ostensibly, I was in France learning French.  Actually, I was fleeing a very bad love affair.  In any case, I was a 20-year-old nitwit and the only person whose French was worse than mine was the three-month-old bebe I was taking care.  So I started buying photo-romances as a shy person’s way of learning the colloquial language.

When I returned home, I sought out a comparable market in the United States and discovered true confession magazines.. ..These publications allowed me to learn how to tell a story in a voice that was not my own, to sink deeply into a character and her world, but, most importantly, since these ‘confessions’ were all anonymous, they allowed me to simply learn how to fill up pages with no thought whatsoever that they would ever be associated with me.”

As she has clearly learned how to do more than “fill up pages,” Bird still expressed “utter delight and astonishment” upon learning that she was chosen for the fellowship.  The last time she applied for a fellowship more than 25 years ago, (the Paisano fellowship, as a matter of fact) she was turned down.  She says it took this long to get up the nerve to apply again.  That might also have to do with the fact that her friend Terry Galloway, who did win the fellowship that year, tried to make her feel better by extolling the more rustic virtues of the ranch – including rattlesnakes and scorpions.

Bird, who will live on the ranch with her “Texas boy” husband, is undaunted by the critters and is looking forward to the proximity to nature as she works on a rewrite of her next novel for her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.