Fiction, Poetry, & Other Pursuits
Books
Nopalito, Texas: Stories
In this stunning debut story collection, everyone’s got the blues but nobody is willing to sing it. Evelyn Smith, Candace Lambert, and Dorene Wahrmund chafe against rigid small-town expectations. Others in hardscrabble Nopalito find themselves fenced in–an aging gay liquor store owner estranged among his neighbors, a mother and son bound by mutual resentment, two neighboring farm boys attracted to each other. Their stories are driven by desperation, rarely spoken, that troubles the community’s inhabitants as it nudges them toward connection, toward moments of hope. Meischen draws these characters with a tenderness that belies the hardness of their lives.
“David Meischen renders entire lives with extraordinary depth, breadth, and care. Like Alice Munro and Andrea Barrett, Meischen conveys the significance of the present moment by laying bare what has come before. Nopalito, Texas: Stories is a book to savor, and this is a writer to cherish.”
~ Bret Anthony Johnston, author of We Burn Daylight
Caliche Road Poems
Forty-some miles inland of Corpus Christi Bay, air on the farm is saturated with Gulf humidity. The feeling is tropical. The look is arid—brush country stippled with prickly pear and yucca, cenizo and agarita, huisache and mesquite. Agua Dulce Creek marks the farm’s southern border, and like all creeks in South Texas, it is a dry creek—no water except when it rains, and rain is intermittent at best. When I got grown, I used to joke that only stubborn folk such as my German forebears would have arrived in such a landscape and said, “Hmmm. Let’s have a farm here.”
“David Meischen conjures the hackberries and mesquite, the cotton harvests and ‘rainless earth’ of his rural Texas homeplace with meticulous reserve, clarity, and crisp music. A work of abiding love and questing memory, this new volume provides the stirring pleasures of a family album while nimbly skirting sentimentality and reflexive nostalgia in favor of well-earned insight, jubilant celebration (mornings aglow like ‘carnival glass’), and able compassion. The highest compliment that I can pay Meischen is that his German-American family chronicle brings to mind James Agee’s indelible and legendary ‘Knoxville: Summer of 1915.’ Caliche Road Poems is a vibrant contribution to the literature of Texas.”
~ Cyrus Cassells, Texas Poet Laureate, 2021,
author of Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?
Anyone’s Son
Winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry, Texas Institute of Letters
From the rural South Texas of the nineteen fifties to a desert mesa in New Mexico many years later, Anyone’s Son illuminates the moments of a life animated by the author’s yearning, at its root sexual, for the company of another man. In five sections, each one corresponding to a stage in the life delineated here, the author offers scenes from his childhood on a small farm, as well as moments of conflicted adolescence. He explores unmitigated sexual pleasure, sometimes fraught with anguish and shame. He remembers scenes from marriage and fatherhood, from the wreckage and rebuilding that came at midlife. And finally, glimpses from a second marriage, this time unconflicted, to a man, to the right man. At its heart, Anyone’s Son poses an implicit question: What is identity?
David Meischen has achieved something remarkable with Anyone’s Son, a collection of poems that unfolds as a chronicle of a certain American experience rarely explored in such depth or with such grace of language. In his hands, we become satellite. We witness a history built on fact and bone. We observe memories as they are melted down to myth. We hear the music of the decades pulsing over lyrics that encompass boyhood names for light and livestock, what-if moments of lust and death, and all the things we carry into adulthood, those nightmares and dreams hidden just inside our skin. Time isn’t linear in these pages. We fly back and forth between childhood and fatherhood. We alternate between explosion of memory and fury of fantasy. We hover over portraits drawn and redrawn, shaded by the many ways love manifests over the landscape of what seemingly overnight becomes our lives. In a hard and beautiful telling of his past, this poet has recorded something special for the future. Anyone’s Son is a grand book.
~ Bryan Borland, author of DIG
Storylandia
Nopalito, Texas—1965, 1985, 2005. An aging liquor store proprietor faces the confines of small-town life 5,000 miles from the one place that offered happiness. A young man evades attraction to his charismatic but erratic cousin. An elderly widower is beset by visits from the dead in the aftermath of a near-fatal heart attack. Albert Decker, Dusty Renner, Berndt Hoffman—each one faces a wordless question: how to live with an impossibility that cannot be changed.
Dialing the radio, I picked up pedal steel guitar, the ache of it thrumming with my hangover. It was like slipping into another skin. I wanted cold beer in long neck bottles dripping with condensation. I wanted a smoky dance floor, sweat at my armpits, and pool cues clicking.
Dusty Renner, in “Möbius Strip”