In 2018, Will Evans, the founder of Deep Vellum Publishing, sat down in a meeting of local arts leaders with representatives for the Kimbell Art Museum, the Nasher Sculpture Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Dallas Theater Center and others for a roundtable discussion at The Dallas Morning News.
"I'm the only literary organization," he said. "I'm the smallest organization in the room." It didn't intimidate him. "That's great!" he said. "Literature is there in the discussion alongside the visual and performing arts, which it had never been in the history of the city."
Evans' operation is hardly the only book nook around town that has traded its novelty status for real citywide recognition. Many other organizations that began cropping up in Dallas a few years back are entering their sophomore stages, too. Interabang Books, the North Dallas literary outpost at Preston and Royal, is celebrating its two-year anniversary this month. The after-hours reading series Lit Night started by Dallas author Sanderia Faye entered its second year last month. Wild Detectives is gearing up to offer round two of the Hay Festival, an international literary event that brought a handful of Latin America's most acclaimed young writers to Bishop Arts in 2018. D Magazine is out with the third installment of the summer fiction series it introduced in 2017 to spotlight local writers. A new independent bookstore called Commonplace Books recently opened up in Fort Worth.
A number of groups have been around for much longer. This weekend, hundreds of local and far-flung writers are gathering at a hotel near DFW International Airport to talk shop at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, which the University of North Texas has hosted for the past 15 years. The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture and The Dallas Morning News hosted its annual panel discussion last month on the The Literary City, part of the Dallas Festival of Books and Ideas, a combined version of an event that debuted in 2015. Wordspace, Arts & Letters Live and the Writer's Garret continue to offer regular programs for readers and writers as they've done for years in Dallas.
"The public side of the literary arts has never been stronger in Dallas," says best-selling Dallas author Ben Fountain. "If you've got a mouthful of words, there's a place for you to go and recite your poetry." Readers and writers who've been around here for anything more than a few years know this wasn't always the case.
In 2018, the city of Dallas released a new version of its Cultural Plan and Policy, which outlines the kinds of works that the city is committed to supporting. Included for the first time — alongside visual arts, theater, music and other creative pursuits — was literature. Jennifer Scripps, Office of Cultural Affairs director, said the decision was a no-brainer. "We did neighborhood meetings," she explained. "The literary meeting, we hosted at Wild Detectives bookstore. And the turnout was unbelievable."
So, now that our local literati have a seat at the table next to the movers and shakers who advocate for other forms of art, what would they like to see happen? And now that city leadership recognizes writing as central to Dallas' identity, how might literature reshape our understanding of the place where we live?
A city worth writing about
Already, the answers to these questions are coming together differently than they did in cities with literary circles that incorporated earlier on. The reason is both unexpected and, well, right in front of us: Dallas' urban environment forms a different kind of grid that writers and readers must navigate.
Consider New York City. Ever notice how this book haven is packed tighter than any other American urban center? That does something. Stories play out on street corners. People run into each other and their personal narratives converge. A passing remark becomes someone's snippet of dialogue. "New York's density allows for a certain type of storytelling," says Evans, "that you can go on the subway and you can encounter people who are not you, who look different than you, coming from a different place. And you can envision stories with them."
So, what does that mean for the rest of America — Dallas included — where the streets are quiet except for the sounds of passing cars? Chitchat and random speech don't fill the air around us with abundant inspiration. Just getting to a public space, for some, takes time and finding and telling a story requires a whole different process of listening?
According to Evans, "It doesn't make that story any less good. Someone getting in their car and driving from Plano to Dallas every day, I don't think that's any less real," he said. "I don't think it's any less real to sit here," he adds, "and to say what I just said about this, than someone who can go out in Brooklyn and like step outside and run into 20 writers who were published by [Farrar, Straus and Giroux] and Random House, right?"
Perhaps those cities like New York — where local writers have thrived for generations, and against which Dallas has a habit of measuring itself — aren't the be-all and end-all of literary stomping grounds, he argues. It's a radical belief that redefines what the Dallas area has to offer by taking it on its own terms. And by regarding it as fertile ground for writers that call it home.
It's also the driving notion behind Deep Vellum's new publishing imprint, La Reunion. Set to focus solely on works about Texas, the new imprint marks a departure from the translated literature Deep Vellum built its reputation on since its founding in 2013. Evans sees it as the natural next step for his nonprofit. "The way that we bring underrepresented translations to English, we can take underrepresented Texas authors and stories out to the world, too," he says.
La Reunion takes its name from a bygone socialist colony founded not far from present-day downtown, on the south bank of the Trinity River in the mid-1850s. An English translation of the French manifesto that the colony's founder Victor Prosper Considérant wrote is forthcoming from La Reunion in 2021. When published, it'll be the first time that the manuscript, Au Texas, has appeared in English, according to Evans.
Other works to be released by La Reunion include a memoir by local arts patron Donna Wilhelm titled A Life of My Own, a history of LGBTQ Dallas by the city's chief historic preservation official Mark Doty, a lyric essay by Oak Cliff artist and activist David Marquis and two works by D magazine editor Zac Crain.
Deep Vellum has also acquired two existing independent presses: Los Angeles-based Phoneme Media and Austin publisher A Strange Object. Phoneme focuses mostly on translated poetry and brings a catalog of about 40 published works (translated from 25 languages) to Deep Vellum's shelves. A Strange Object boasts a tinier backlist of seven titles. It specializes in debut works by American writers. Both presses will continue carrying out their respective missions as imprints folded under Deep Vellum.
It's a major turning point for the six-year-old organization and for Evans, whose bold style raised a few eyebrows when he first began publishing. "This dude cornered me, this artist, at a party," says Evans. He told Evans, in true literary fashion, "I don't know who the [expletive] you think you are, but there was literature happening here before you and there'll be literature happening after you."
Evans wouldn't have it any other way. "To institutionalize it is my interest," he says, "so that Deep Vellum lives on past me. So that literature is funded long past me in Dallas." His dream: "Writers could be like, 'I can live in Dallas and write any style, any genre and have success, to be published, to be read.'"
A dollar a word
Part of what's enabling this shift is the financial support Dallas writing groups are now receiving. "Books are a funny thing because we've been told by funders in town, 'We can't believe you're a nonprofit because you sell books.'" That perspective, he said, has begun to change as funders see literature alongside theater, dance and so on — arts genres they have no qualms about supporting.
But as grassroots organizations consider looking to bigger funders, like the ones that have existed for decades in Dallas to serve other kinds of arts groups, some fear that their work could be co-opted. "I'm taking my time," says Faye, founder of the popular Lit Night reading series, "because I've seen where, when people start putting dollars in it, then they want to put rules in it. And I don't want to. ... I want it to be what it is."
Sarah Hepola, a Dallas writer whose most recent work, a memoir, was a New York Times best-seller, put it another way: "When it's small and unfunded, everything can be authentic. And then in order to make something big and have outgrowth, you bring in patronage. And then patronage muddies the authenticity," she says.
Right now, says Faye, she funds Lit Night entirely out of her own pocket.
The results have been tremendous, partly because Lit Night welcomes in not just established writers, but emerging ones, too. After scheduled readers get 15 minutes each to speak, the event becomes an open mic, with space for audience members to take the stage. "You could come up and read 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' if you wanted to," says Faye, who's working on her second novel, Eleven. "But we've seen some beautiful work come out of the audience, you know, and like last month, one person blew us away. That was like, wow, that's ... she should be the writer, not us," she says, laughing.
Upcoming Lit Night iterations are now scheduled all the way out through August 2020, says Faye. Earlier this month, Lit Night partnered with D magazine to put some of the local authors the publication had spotlighted as part of its summer fiction series (Joe Milazzo, Harry Hunsicker, Latoya Watkins, Julia Heaberlin, Will Clarke, Joaquin Zihuatanejo, former News reporter Brooks Egerton, Blake Kimzey, Samantha Mabry and Sanderia Faye herself) on stage. "I wouldn't say we're breaking any ground here, but it is good to be able to use the magazine as sort of a spotlight," says Zac Crain, who edited the collection at D.
Javier Garcia del Moral, co-founder and co-owner of Wild Detectives who also works as an engineer, said the ad hoc nature of Dallas' literary scene is what he finds most exciting about it. In September, he'll put on the second installment of the Hay Festival, which debuted last year. Set to take place over two days, it'll bring together writers from the U.S., Canada, Mexico and El Salvador for discussions on journalism, migration, feminism, race and activism. As for where the event fits into Dallas' broader literary scene, del Moral says he doesn't think about it that much. "Just do things and see what happens. And, in the end, I think, that's how how we try to work, without really an agenda."
"I think most of the greatest scenes in the cultural history have been a thing after they were actually a thing," he said.
One of the next challenges, says Deep Vellum's Evans, is continuing to get the word out across town. "The ability to do events anywhere in town is going to be massively important," he said. "It can't just be in Deep Ellum and Bishop Arts, you know, the two postcard neighborhoods of the city." The question is how to expand into parts of the city where money and resources have been historically withheld.
"Once we start doing this and rootin' and tootin' about it and putting it out, hopefully we get the next great Oak Cliff and West Dallas and Pleasant Grove and North Dallas author," he says.
"Dallas is a really interesting place," he says. "The stories are here."
Dan Singer is a Dallas-based freelance writer