Listen · Read by Willa

Read by Willa, named after the writer Willa Cather.

When people learn that my new novel takes place in Texas in the last few months of 1901, and that its main character is a fifteen-year-old boy, named Cowboy, who rides out with a horse named Buddy, they almost always stretch for the same word,

“So, it’s a Western?” they ask.

Others, a little more cautious, might call my new book an “historical novel.”

A few more have asked whether it is a “ghost story” or “gothic horror.”

I have learned to smile and say that it might be all of those things, and that I am not so sure the answer matters as much as these questions suggest.

Still, honest questions deserve honest answers.

What does it mean to write and to set a book in a specific year more than a century now gone? Does a date on the first page turn a story into a mask? Or is there another way to go back? One that does not keep the past behind glass, but brings it close enough to touch?

I have been thinking about this since I was eight years old. In Grade 2, I discovered that words — especially the printed word in a book — written down by someone long ago could reach across Time and Space and land inside my own head — that a person and a mind whom I would never get a chance to meet could speak to me as if we were sitting across from one another at the same table.

Writing, for me, has always been a way of reaching beyond Time and Space, whether it is reaching towards a single reader or to a group of readers. Whether the other person lives in 1901 or 2101, or next door, has never seemed, for me, to be the most important part of a story’s equation.

The Nine Muses opening a Window onto A Boy and his Horse

My novel, Cowboy — or, A Communion of Saints, did not begin with a genre. The book, the genesis of the story, began with my son, Thor, when he was six years old (he’s now ten).

In the fall of 2022 — in October of that year, to be precise — Thor was six years old, and he was playing Minecraft in the living room on his PlayStation 5, and he had found a horse in the game, a gray-and-white one, and he was riding his horse, which he had named “Buddy,” across his blocky-little world with such great seriousness.

As I watched my small son, I remembered a ceramic or plastic horse I once had owned as a very small boy (much younger than he was then at that time), and it was the kind of object a child adores with all his or her heart and mind. I had not thought about that toy horse in decades (I had just turned 43 at that time).

Later that same night, I woke at around half past three in the early morning, still very much dark out, with an image on my waking mind so very much alive and so complete it felt less invented than received: a fifteen-year-old boy and his horse, Buddy, alone on the frontier in Texas, and the year was 1901.

I did not choose the year, but the year had chosen me; I got up, went to our small kitchen table, with only a small kitchen light on, and I wrote for about three hours while my son slept, and it felt to me like there were Nine Muses, or Nine Angels, who had arrived and opened a bright window onto this world and story, and all I had to do was to sit and to write what I was seeing, what I was being shown.

That was in October 2022. The book, Cowboy — or, A Communion of Saints, would take me another four years to write and edit and type and revise and to create and to polish — until October 2026 — and much of the story of that boy and his horse was tested in the most honest way I knew how to test the aliveness and authenticity of the fictive dream:

I read the scenes and sections of the chapters aloud at our kitchen table to my son, Thor, and to my wife, Axton — usually after dinner over dessert.

As a writer, you can learn very quickly, reading to a child, which sentences are alive and which are only decoration. A child does not care whether a book is a Western or Historical Fiction, or coming from or pointing to Mythology or Folklore.

A child simply cares whether the boy and the horse are going to be safe and all right, and whether or not the story will have a happy or a sad ending. Simplicity is often a key to great storytelling.

Living Inside the Year 1901

If the year 1901 arrived as a gift, it also arrived as a responsibility. I had lived in Texas for twenty-five years and I know well the red dirt that stains your shoes and your jeans, the mesquite that will tear your sleeves and skin if you are careless, the rattlesnakes you learn to hear before you can ever see them.

I know the smell of oil in the air in certain parts of the state — out in West Texas, especially nearing Andrews County, where Elmer Kelton was born (an area named after Richard Andrews, “the first Texan soldier killed in the Texas Revolution” on October 28, 1835) — a smell that the people who live near the oil fields call “smelling money.”

Those are the types of details and things that were in my body and in my soul long before I ever wrote a word about them, but Memory is not research, and 1901 is not the Texas I once know or knew.

On the first day of my research back in late October 2022, I found online an old Rand McNally map of Texas from 1901; one of the historical maps the University of Alabama has made available online.

I printed and laminated that old Texas map, and laid it on my writing desk. The plastic-covered map of 1901 Texas stayed on my writing desk, and near my small Moleskine notebooks where I wrote the story by hand, for four years, and throughout Cowboy’s and Buddy’s journey across Texas.

As Cowboy and Buddy traveled, I followed their route on that map with my finger, landmark by landmark, town by town, river by river, asking each time whether a boy on a horse could really cover that much ground, that many miles, in a single day, and whether or not there would be water or a chance for a reprieve to rest.

When the story eventually makes its way to the town of Dickens, Texas — a small and growing community of about six hundred people at that time — I wanted the hotel’s name to be exactly and historically accurate (and not just some made up, created, fictional name), and through my diligent research, I found that there was one hotel, the Clay Hotel, then owned by the Clays, H.F. Clay and Lucile. (This particular hotel began in 1893 by Cottonwood Jim Jones, then sold to Ned and Janie Richards five years later in 1898, and then sold again to the Clays in 1901, and the hotel had been popular and well-known across many parts of Texas back then for its good food.)

I checked that fact three times (probably more like ten) from three different sources over multiple days — spending hours on that minute detail alone — because it is exactly the kind of detail that no reader will ever thank you for getting right and every careful reader will notice if you get it wrong.

Regarding Writing, I think of this kind of work as what I call impermanent perfection. It is an idea I have carried with me for a long time: that we can strive for the true and the exact, knowing all the while that whatever we build, whatever we write and create, will be partial and temporary. Our striving and our efforts are not diminished by the impermanence.

The idea of impermanent perfection was likely and slowly absorbed into me and my beliefs and my ways of writing from the Asian cultures I have lived in and visited (which are extensive) over the last twenty years, because the idea of impermanent perfection, as a general definition, can mean “a state of beauty, value, or grace that exists precisely because it is temporary, flawed and changing rather than permanent or sterile,” and it is a concept tied to Wabi-sabi, a “traditional Japanese aesthetic philosophy.”

A novel set in the past, especially in 1901 (some 125 years ago), is a perfect and prime example of impermanent perfection. I will never be able to fully reach and touch Texas in 1901, but I can strive and struggle for it honestly, and the reaching, the striving, the effort, is where the life of the book and the characters come from, and what makes Cowboy — or, A Communion of Saints a special and endearing novel and story for my family, and, I pray, for other readers.

The Devil’s Rope

For me the setting is not a backdrop; the setting, the land itself, is a Character as well.

In my novel, Texas in 1901 is a character, very much alive and perhaps the largest one, and like any good and memorable character it is in the middle of a change it cannot stop.

By then, in 1901, the open range was closing, had been closing since 1875. Barbed wire had spread across the open fields and endless plains, cutting up land that had once seemed untouchable and boundless.

Many cowboys, back then, had called the newly emerging barbed wire the “devil’s rope,” (I, too, had often heard this expression — that historical nickname and metaphor, that kenning — growing up in Texas in the 1980s) and I understand why — to be a certain kind of man or woman who had driven cattle across unfenced country his or her whole life, the barbed wire, or devil’s rope, meant that the world he or she knew was being captured, broken into pieces, and parceled off and sold — bit by bit, square by square, acre by acre.

The outlaws of the Wild Bunch era were also still in the air, but the railroads, the telegraphs, and the fences were swiftly closing in and rising up — a sign of emerging technology across the wild lands of Texas.

This is the part of the label question that interests me most: if a “Western” is a story about cowboys, then yes, my book has cowboys in it — the boy himself is even called Cowboy.

But the classic Western, as many of us have come to classify and absorb it, often treats the frontier as a place of new beginnings: towns to be founded and lands to be won.

My modest book, Cowboy — or, A Communion of Saints, lives at the other end. The story is about what remains when a way of life is passing, and about who will carry it forward into a new century.

Two Titles, Two Readings

The full title of my newest novel is Cowboy — or, A Communion of Saints. I gave it two titles on purpose, because it holds two readings, and I did not want to shut out or stifle either one.

Read one way, Cowboy is the story of a living orphan boy and his horse — much like Don Quixote and his faithful horse Rocinante — on a quest across a country that is changing under his feet — a story also of grief, endurance, and the strange kindness of strangers.

Read another way, A Communion of Saints and its subtitle and phrasing “Communion of Saints” opens a different door. It is an old idea, seemingly ancient and esoteric, about the bond between the living and the dead, and some readers may feel, as the journey goes on, that these figures are moving through something more like Purgatory than like Texas in 1901 — that the dead are traveling, too, and that the boy’s road may be a road between both worlds: the living and the dead.

Both readings are valid. Over the last thirty years, I have come to believe that a novelist’s job is not to shut and close the door on a reader’s imagination.

Grief does not resolve as neatly as we like it to. Myth often does not fully explain itself, either. A book that holds the living and the dead together seemed to me more truthful than one that insists on a single, authoritative, definitive answer.

This is also why I have never been comfortable letting a genre decide what a story should be, or define my style of Writing and Storytelling.

When younger writers ask me for advice, I usually tell them not to obsess over genre. Let the characters create the story. Come what may.

Some filmmakers, Quentin Tarantino among them, borrow freely from many genres at once and make something no single category can hold; other artists happily spend a lifetime inside one form. Either can work.

What does not work is forcing your characters to behave like stick figurines and one-dimensional cut-outs of a genre, of any genre, when they want to do something else — when they wish to be free and to truly live on the page and inside the minds and hearts of the readers.

“As long as we keep it alive”

There is a line in my humble, little novel, Cowboy — or, A Communion of Saints, I return to more than any other; Henry asks Cowboy whether the Old West is dying, or whether it is already dead, and Cowboy responds: “I reckon it’ll stay alive as long as we keep it alive.”

I did not plan that line as a statement of purpose, but it has become one. The past is not a closed room. It stays alive in the telling — in a boy’s memory of a horse, in a father reading to his son, in a map kept under plastic for four years.

Joseph Campbell, whose Masks of God volumes I have read and studied over the decades, taught me to see the old myths not as relics but as living patterns, stories that keep returning because people keep needing them.

John Gardner, whose thinking about craft and about the moral seriousness of fiction, also helped to shape me as a Storyteller and as a serious novelist. He helped to mold me and my writing early, and his novel Grendel (1971) showed me how an old story could be turned and made new from the inside, teaching me that a writer owes the reader both beauty and care.

Neither Joseph Campbell or John Gardner probably would have cared much whether a book was shelved under Western or Literary Fiction. They would have asked, like true Mythologists and Storytellers often do, whether the story, the book, was alive and true.

Carrying the Past

My own aspirations have never been to write “Westerns” or “Historical novels” as genres or categories. What I wanted to do, and what I hoped I did well, is to carry the past — its red dirt, its fences, its griefs, its joys, its killers and its saints — and to bring its figures as close to the present as I possibly, and reliably, can.

Close enough that a reader, perhaps a child at a kitchen table, forgets for a moment that a hundred and twenty-five years stand between them and a boy on a gray-and-white horse.

Close enough, for as long as the book is open and the story is being told or read, that the Old West is not dying, nor is it dead, because we are keeping it alive one story at a time.

Cowboy—or, A Communion of Saints will be published by Thor Media on Christmas Day, 2026.

Readers who wish to listen to or read an excerpt can find one on the novel page. My site and Amazon author page are linked below.

Read an Excerpt Visit the Site Amazon Author Page