In his book The Ornamental Hermit, which Texas Tech Press published in 2004, essayist Robert Murray Davis, long-time professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, includes an essay on the state of Oklahoma writing and publishing. In doing so, he must compare Oklahoma, and every other state, to Texas. He notes that no other state except New York, of course, and perhaps California (and I would include Mississippi) has a literary culture to compare to that of Texas. He writes:

Not long after I came to Oklahoma, the latest in a long series of new university presidents commissioned an artisan to fashion a mace to be carried before him in academic processions and then revealed the object with considerable fanfare. Not long afterward, I passed a display case in the Undergraduate Library of the University of Texas and saw twenty-eight maces, one for the president and every dean on campus. In other words, we're in the position of East Germans before the Berlin Wall crumbled: those bastards on the other side have more of everything than we do. . . .

Davis goes on to compare the writing and publishing output of the two states, and I'll follow along, paraphrasing and using more and more of my own observations as I go:

Oklahoma writer and publisher Frank Parman says that Austin alone has more publishers of poetry than Oklahoma has practicing poets. According to the 2005 Literary Market Place, Oklahoma has seventeen publishers. Texas has seventy-two. And when it comes to literary journals, The International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses lists ten Oklahoma journals and sixty-three journals published in Texas.

Besides the numbers, consider the quality of some of the best of our Texas journals: Southwest Review at SMU, Descant at TCU, RE:AL: The Journal of Liberal Arts at Stephen F. Austin State, Southwestern American Literature at Texas State, Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas at Tarleton State, Concho River Review at Angelo State, Texas Review at Sam Houston State, Short Story at UT Brownsville, American Literary Review at the University of North Texas, Gulf Coast at the University of Houston, and Iron Horse at Texas Tech.

In the matter of awards, the Texas Institute of Letters gives eleven awards for writing and publishing each year, and the Writers' League of Texas and other organizations add to that number.

Texas has Texas Books in Review and the Review of Texas Books, and they have plenty to review. We have enough good writers to be able to put out anthology after anthology such as Writing on the Wind and Let's Hear It, the Texas Bound volumes, Don Graham's Lone Star Literature, and Billy Bob Hill's Texas Short Stories 1 and 2.

We have John Graves and Larry McMurtry and Judy Alter and Robert Flynn and Carolyn Osborn and Elmer Kelton and Shelby Hearon and Marshall Terry and LaVerne Harrell Clark and Stephen Harrigan and Paula Mitchell Marks and the list goes on and on. We've even got Kinky!

Of course we have a long tradition of writing and publishing. Even before Dobie, Bedichek, and Webb there were distinctly Texas writers. Even before SMU Press was established in the 1930s or before Frank Wardlaw founded the University of Texas Press in 1950 books were being published in Texas.

Why is this? Why, except perhaps for Mississippi, does no other state away from the great publishing centers of the northeast have anything approaching the literary tradition of Texas?

Part of the reason, I think, as Robert Murray Davis implies in his essay, is the things that make Texas so distinctive through our history: our size and our independence. I've been in the editing and publishing business in Texas for over thirty years, and although I've seen many changes, one thing has remained the same: the sense that Texas writing and publishing are uniquely independent and self-sustaining.

Texas' history and size contribute to that sense of uniqueness as well; its reputation as a "whole other country," as the Texas tourism industry claims, rings true. And it has a sense of identity and unity despite the variety of its component parts. Would Austin writers alone create such a synergy? Perhaps as much as those of Mississippi and the rest of the South have, but not as much as that created by the inclusion of writers from Dallas and Houston and San Antonio and Abilene and Beaumont and Brownsville and El Paso and Lubbock and all the other places where Texas writers have had their start.

The literary tradition in Texas is like a nuclear reaction: once a critical mass was reached, the reaction has continued on its own. Texas reached that critical mass long ago. Today, the reaction can be easily seen in things like the Texas Book Festival, where authors and publishers get together from throughout the state and the nation and thousands of people troop through to see and buy Texas publishers' latest offerings. And in the Texas Institute of Letters, which preserves the idea that Texas writing and publishing are unique and must be preserved and encouraged. And in the annual output of Texas's book publishers. And in the many other outlets for Texas writing that Robert Murray Davis listed, plus more popular venues such as Texas Monthly, The Texas Observer, Texas Highways magazine, and Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine.

Will our tradition continue? I say, of course! Again, a nuclear reaction continues as long as there is enough fuel for a critical mass. I don't foresee Texas getting any less massive, and although the tradition will inevitably change--Texas writers of the future will undoubtedly write in styles and with voices that we today might not recognize--the elemental tradition of writing in this state would be hard to stifle.