'Roughnecks' 'Delta' Authors Headline Event

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Back in what he calls his Faulkner days, Thomas Cochran realized he didn’t know anything about mules so it didn’t make sense for him to write about mules like the great Southern writer he wanted to emulate.

That lesson — every writer has to discover what he knows and what he is interested in — may have been the most important for him as a writer and as a writing teacher, Cochran said recently. He and author Margaret Bolsterli will read from their work during “An Evening With Writers” at 7 p.m. Friday, April 13 in Giffels Auditorium in Old Main on the University of Arkansas campus. The event is sponsored by the Northwest Arkansas Writing Project directed by Samuel Totten, a UA professor of secondary education. Teacher-consultants who have participated in the writing project’s invitational session over the past 10 years will also read from their work as will Totten. He has written and edited numerous books, including several about genocide around the world.

A former sports writer and free-lance writer, Cochran now teaches sophomore and junior English and creative writing at Fayetteville High School. Bolsterli, a UA professor emerita of English, wrote Born in the Delta: Reflections on the Making of a Southern White Sensibility (University of Arkansas Press, 2000).

Ten years passed between the publication of Cochran’s first and second novels because life got in the way, he said. Roughnecks (Harcourt, Brace, 1997), a story about the lessons a boy learns on a football field in Oil Camp, La., will be followed this October by Running the Dogs (Farrar, Straus & Giraux, 2007), a tale of another Louisiana boy waiting for his lost beagles and his stranded father to return during a rare Christmas Eve ice storm.

“I don’t try to teach the process of writing because everybody does it differently,” Cochran said. “In my classes at Fayetteville High School, the first thing kids learn is they have to read a lot if they want to write.”

Cochran believes his need to write stems from his love of reading. A Louisiana native himself, Cochran’s name could probably be found written five or six times on the checkout cards of books, particularly those about sports, in the Claiborne Parish library he frequented as a child. His earliest memories include his mother reading a newspaper and he was constantly asking her to read to him — didn’t matter whether it was want ads, obituaries or news articles.

“I wanted to hear the words read out loud,” he said. “Now, with writing, I feel strangely guilty and incomplete if I’m not writing. I feel like I’m wasting time. I write compulsively. For a long time, I had a strict regimen where I wrote at a certain time for a certain length of time, but I don’t try to teach that. Everybody has to find their own process.”

The University of Arkansas Press described Bolsterli’s memoir as an important, very readable contribution to the growing body of personal testimony on the nature of the Southern experience. In it, she recounts her experiences as a lively, observant girl coming of age on an Arkansas cotton farm during the 1930s and 1940s. The press described the book as both a valuable resource for those interested in Southern history and culture as well as a good story, well-told.

Several books will be for sale at the event including Bolsterli’s memoir and Cochran’s 1997 book; Totten’s Genocide in Darfur: Investigating the Atrocities in the Sudan, edited with Eric Markusen of Southwest Minnesota State University; Spark the Brain, Ignite the Pen: Quick Writes for Kindergarten through High School Teachers and Beyond, edited by Totten and three of the writing project’s teacher-consultants; and the Flavor of Our Words: A Cookbook, also by the writing project’s teacher-consultants.

The event is free and open to the public. The authors will sign books.