grandfather and that her cousins had
two other pieces of his furniture. These
proved to be a walnut youth bed whose
sides were intertwined grape vines
carved out of two solid walnut planks
and a secretary-bookcase topped by
carved figures of Adam and Eve
between two coiled rattlesnakes.
My research showed that the maker
was not a professional cabinetmaker
but a farmer, born in Germany and
trained there as a woodcarver, who
made these pieces for his family in the
1870s. They have been lovingly cared
for by his descendants since then.
A farm wife in Central Texas
showed me a beautiful Biedermeier
desk made by her grandmother’s uncle,
who was a professional cabinetmaker,
which was stored in a tenant house.
The tenant had placed a wood stove
about a foot in front of it, but he
assured us that when he fired up the
stove he leaned a sheet of asbestos
against the desk to protect it from the
heat. I have persuaded the owner to
move the desk to a safer location.
A lady in Hallettsville wrote to say
that I had called her 35 years ago about
a china cabinet that her great-grandfa-
ther had made, and she had been too
busy getting her cotton crop in to
return my call, but if I was still interest-
ed she still had the cabinet. I went to
see it, and it is a gem.
The research is the fun part; the
writing is the hard part. When I am
writing I like to work in the early morn-
ing hours. I am usually in my study by
5 a.m. with a cup of coffee beside me. I
work steadily in my bathrobe for two
hours, then get dressed, have breakfast,
go for a morning walk with my wife
and then come back and write until
noon.
I seldom work in the afternoon and
never in the evening. About 20 percent
of my writing time is writing and the
rest is re-writing. I try to get the burden
of the narrative laid out in a first draft
and then go back over it five or six
times before I am satisfied.
The English language can be
extremely precise, and I spend a great
deal of re-writing time trying to coax it
into saying exactly what I mean. Mark
Twain said that the difference between
the wrong word and the right word is
the difference between the lightning
bug and the lightning, and I try for the
lightning.
I work with two dictionaries, a
Webster’s Second International that
belonged to my father and is so old that
the color plates include the flags of
countries that ceased to exist 70 years
ago and a new multi-volume Oxford
English Dictionary, and I keep Roget’s
Thesaurus by my desk.
I try to write short sentences, to use
the active voice and to avoid the jargon
and extended metaphors that charac-
terize too much academic writing.
Fortunately, my wife is a professional
copy editor, and she reads everything I
write and keeps me straight on matters
of spelling, style and grammar. Neither
one of us trusts spell-check for an
instant.
The manuscript for the new furni-
ture book has to be at the University of
Texas Press by the end of this year, and
there is still a great deal to do. David is
working with a professional photogra-
pher to make publishable photographs
of the furniture we have chosen for the
book and is writing technical descrip-
tions of those pieces.
I am working on a chapter summa-
rizing what we have learned about
Texas furniture since 1975 and am
researching the lives of the dozen or so
new cabinetmakers we have learned
about during the past year.
If all goes smoothly, our new book
will be out by 2012. Since both David
and I will be in our early 70s by then, I
suspect it will be our last book on Texas
furniture.
But it will be our best one.
About Avram’s illustration, Taylor tells the
story: “When Avram first got the call from
Writer’s Guide to Fiction asking him to do
a cover illustration of a writer’s desk, he called
me and asked if he could come over and make
some sketches of my desk while I was working.
I said, ‘Sure,’ so he came over one Saturday
morning and made three or four sketches of me
at work. He later told me that when he sent
them to the Writer’s Guide, the art director
liked them but told him, ‘No real writer’s desk
could possibly be that messy. Clean it up!’
So the painting is a sanitized version of the
sketches.”
Dona Ward Blevins
Auto • Home • Life • Annuities
1201 N 5th St • Alpine
432.837.2225
903-A W. San Antonio St • Marfa
432.729.4510
www.farmersagent.com/dblevins
Cenizo
Third Quarter 2009
9