The following chat discussion is brought to you in part by the support of the Texas Education Agency (http://www.tea.state.tx.us).

 

4empowerment: Welcome! We are so excited to present the opportunity to chat with best-selling Texas author, screenwriter, and journalist Stephen Harrigan. A former staff writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly, he has appeared in many other publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Conde Nast Traveler, and Life. Harrigan's sixth and best-selling novel The Gates of the Alamo was published in 2000. Some of the shows Harrigan has written for television include the award-winning The Last of His Tribe for HBO, the biopic entitled Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder for CBS, and the Western King of Texas for TNT (starring Patrick Stewart), which is based upon Shakespeare's King Lear. Also, Harrigan is a scuba diver and has woven his diving experiences into two of his novels.

 

4empowerment: Have questions about how to construct a great story? Wonder what kind of process it takes to create an entire novel? Ask Stephen Harrigan what career path he took to become a well-established writer.

 

Stephen Harrigan: I'm very happy to be here. And I'm eager to answer any questions you have.

 

Velvet: What is the best advice you ever got for writing?

 

Stephen Harrigan: Telling a story is all about conflict and clarity, so the best advice was to make sure the main character's motives are clear and there is a discernible goal that he or she is after.

 

Lindsay: The fictional characters of Mary Mott and Ed McGowan are wonderfully detailed - were any of their characteristics based on people you know? If not, how do you develop such depth?

 

Stephen Harrigan: In Edmund's case, there were a number of botanists and natural historians who were working in Texas around the time of the Texas revolution who were real people. I took some of their experiences and observations, and in a few cases their personal traits, and worked them into the fictional entity of Edmund McGowan. But basically, he and Mary were fictional creations, and not consciously based on any particular person I know. They just sort of sprung out of my imagination somehow. I'm sure it's true with most novelists that your characters tend to be in some way pieces of yourself. In other words, there are 5 or 6 main characters in the book and each one, whether good or evil, is a fragment of my own personality.

 

Sandy: Since your book "Comanche Midnight," would you say there has been an improvement in conditions for the contemporary Commanche?

 

Stephen Harrigan: I have to honest and say I don't know. That piece in that book was written quite some time ago, and I have since moved on to other subjects as a writer, and haven't had time to see how the conditions for the Comanche are now as opposed to ten years ago. I would have to defer to someone who is an authority on how the Comanche are today.

 

Simon: Stephen, you have written a few teleplays. How difficult is the transition to plays, and where is the focus placed when writing a teleplay as opposed to a novel?

 

Stephen Harrigan: A teleplay or screenplay is almost entirely about action, as opposed to reflection or language or interesting details that you might want to inform the reader about. It's sort of breathtaking how singular the demands of a movie are. It's difficult as a novelist or a poet or an essayist to understand how marginal the "writing" is in some ways. It's a difficult thing to get used to, that a movie is not about writing; it's about action, about imagining scenes and the order in which they take place, far more than it is about writing dialogue or scene description.

 

Rio Grande College: What do you believe the most authentic Alamo movie that has been made?

 

Stephen Harrigan: This is a fascinating question, since I am a scholar of Alamo movies! All Alamo movies, by their very nature, are terrible. But the one that has so far escaped the curse is the IMAX movie that is shown in the River Center Mall, called "Alamo - The Price of Freedom." It's only 40 minutes long, and I think is in a separate category from the other Alamo movies because it's not intended for a vast public, but just for the people who visit the Alamo. But I think it's the most historically accurate. It's the only one in which the final battle takes place, as it did historically, in nightfall rather than broad daylight. And it makes a fair-minded attempt to tell the story, to some degree, from both sides. Of all the other dreadful Alamo movies, my favorite is "The Last Command" for reasons I can't quite explain. Certainly the best-known most historically inaccurate Alamo movie is John Wayne's "The Alamo," which is wrong in almost every detail.

 

Raven: What is a typical working day for you? Are you structured in the time you allot to writing?

 

Stephen Harrigan: Yes, I'm structured in the time I allot to writing in that I give over the entire day to writing or working on projects. But every day tends to be different, because I'm typically working on more than one project at once. Usually, I'm always working on a novel, and that tends to be the constant background against which I do everything else. So a "typical" day would be working on a screenplay during the morning, say; researching another screenplay for the future for a couple of hours in the afternoon; and writing on my novel for 2-3 hours every day, either in the late afternoon or at night.

 

Sharpsberg: Do you always know the ending of your book, or are you sometimes surprised as to the outcome?

 

Stephen Harrigan: It's important for me to have a vague and at times very vague idea of the ending of the book. I need to know, to some degree, where I'm headed, but I don't want to know so specifically that I foreclose the possibility of surprising myself along the way. So for me, it's a kind of balancing act between keeping myself ignorant of what's going to happen, and knowing there is a sort of secure point I'm trying to reach.

 

Cat: Stephen, your book "Water and Light" was of your experiences diving the Grand Turk Islands - was this location chosen for any particular reason?

 

Stephen Harrigan: Yes, it was chosen because it was the only location I could afford. I had the offer of a free place to stay, and I had a relatively small advance on the book and needed to make the money stretch as long as possible. I was there for about two months, diving every day. It turned out that Grand Turk was an inspired choice, because there was not much happening above the surface, so I could focus almost all my attention on what was going on underwater.

 

Sam: Can you remember your first dive? What was it that drew you to this pastime and would you say that it was the first dive that had you hooked?

 

Stephen Harrigan: I remember very well my first dive. It was in a YMCA swimming pool! And it did have me hooked. There was something amazing to me about being and remaining underwater, even in a place where there was almost literally nothing to see except the bottom of the pool, and other people's flailing limbs. My first real dive was in Cozumel, Mexico, and it was the first time I had ever seen clear water in my life and I was completely overwhelmed by the notion that there was an entire world that was visible, with all sorts of strange and unreal properties.

 

Roma love: When writing your books, do you sketch out the plot and then fill in the detail, or do you just develop characters and then let the story just unfold while writing it?

 

Stephen Harrigan: I tend to do both. As I said before in an earlier question, I have a sketchy understanding of the course of the book, and then it becomes up to the characters to take me through these events. As they become clearer to me--and they only become clearer thought writing--they tend to predict or determine what the book is about and where it's headed. It's important to allow yourself to be surprised by unexpected turns that your characters may take. It's very common for me to introduce a minor character that I haven't thought about much who becomes a powerful driving force in the novel.

 

Greg E: What/who were some of your favorite books/authors when you were young?

 

Stephen Harrigan: When I was a kid, I read a lot of Hardy Boys books. In high school, when I was trying to be a little more discriminating, I tended to read a lot of historical fiction, especially Kenneth Roberts who wrote "The Northwest Passage." Later, when I really started taking literature seriously, my favorite writers were Herman Melville (I think "Moby Dick" is one of, if not the greatest novel ever), Hemingway, Flaubert, Willa Cather, and a number of recent novelists like Wallace Stegner and my most recent favorite is Patrick O'Brian. I've read all 20 of his Aubrey/Maturin novels.

 

Wendy: If you were not writing, what would you like to be doing?

 

Stephen Harrigan: I can think of a number of things I'd like to be doing, but only in the context of wanting to write about them. Archaeology, a trial attorney sometimes...but these things interest me because they're such fascinating things to write about, but I don't seem to be able to think about anything without that echo of writing about them. So I guess, in answer to your question, I'd be at a loss if I weren't writing. Diving fascinates me, I love diving and hiking and going to movies. There are many things I'd be thrilled to do pretty much all day long. But I think it's probably true of writers and actors, etc. that the thrill resides in being able to communicate about it and without the communication, these things would not be as interesting.

 

Dandy: What was the first teleplay you wrote? Are we to see more teleplays in the future?

 

Stephen Harrigan: The first television movie I ever wrote was called "The Last of his Tribe." It was the true story of Ishi, the last "wild" Indian in North America. It was produced by HBO in 1992 and starred Jon Voight and Graham Greene. Since then, I've written over a dozen television movies and had them produced. Two will be shown this year. One is a sequel to an earlier movie about Laura Ingalls Wilder that CBS aired a year ago, and the other is a movie for TNT starring Patrick Stewart and Marcia Gay Harden called "King of Texas." It's a Western retelling of Shakespeare's "King Lear," and it will be shown sometime in 2002.

 

Dembo: "The Gates of the Alamo" was obviously well researched. How long did the research take for this book?

 

Stephen Harrigan: It took me 8 years to research and write the book. It was a long time! But I spent 2 years researching before I started writing, and I never stopped researching as I wrote; not just about what happened at the Alamo, which is perpetually in dispute and will never be fully solved, but it was also important to convey a sense of the time in which these events took place. To do that, you have to know all kinds of weird stuff, such as when somebody puts their hands in their pockets, where are the pockets? Are the pockets in their pants? In their waistcoats? Are pants even called pants, or are they called pantaloons? You have to search for period expressions, and understand the entire social context of the time. You're always looking for little nuggets of historical detail that are not always easy to come across.

 

Soso: 8 years to research! How do you keep the enthusiasm going?

 

Stephen Harrigan: That wasn't a problem, because the subject was an obsession. Ever since I was a little kid, I'd been fascinated by the Alamo, and I knew since the age of 14 that I wanted to write a novel about it. The deeper into the subject I got, the more fascinated I became. And for me, that's true with any novel I undertake. If I start getting bored with it after 8 years, it's probably not something I should have been writing about in the first place!

 

Mr. Peabody: Do you ever get writer's block? If so, how do you deal with it?

 

Stephen Harrigan: Writer's block is caused by not having enough information about your subject, I think. It's not because you're afraid to write, or because you've lost your gift; it's because you don't know the people you're writing about, you've lost focus on who they are, you've written yourself out of your comfort zone and you're beyond the range of what you understand. For me, the cure for writer's block has always been research. If the world I'm writing about starts to feel static, it's because I'm not fully engaged in it, I've slacked off. The only way to get cranking again for me is to learn more about the people and the world I'm writing about; to be active rather than passive. My own personal understanding of writer's block is that it's kin to depression, and I think depression is a passive condition, a deflated condition. The only way out of it is activity and forward movement. So writing is the only cure for writer's block, and if you can't bring yourself to fully engage with the writing itself, go out and interview people. If you have a scene in a factory, go out and see the factory and talk to people who work there. Make yourself work toward the goal of finishing the book in whatever form you can.

 

Rosenator: Who or what inspires you as a writer today?

 

Stephen Harrigan: I honestly don't know what inspires me. Inspiration, to some degree, comes from repetition. I've been writing long enough that I have a certain professional pride in what I do and an audience that expects a certain standard. It's holding myself to that standard, and just wanting to be active that keeps me doing it. It's like training for an athletic event or going to the gym every day--you start to crave it because your body and your mind are used to it. It's when you fall out of the patterns that you become vulnerable to things like writer's block.

 

Stephen Harrigan: As for who inspires me, I'm not sure there's a specific answer to that. I think creative endeavor requires you to inspire yourself. There are certainly inspirational people and stories out there, and yet I think it's a mistake to try to specifically emulate them. Sometimes real stories inspire me, as does reading about real people. But as a writer, it all rests on your shoulders--you're the one who has to get up in the morning and write. I don't believe in anything like a "Muse." As you do the work of filling a computer screen each day, you discover the part of yourself that can be has created a muse. You discover the clarity that only comes from hacking your way through a disorienting jungle of words.

Jad: Have you always lived in Texas and what do you think are the greatest selling points for the State?

Stephen Harrigan: I was born in Oklahoma, but have lived in Texas since I was 5. What's great about Texas, and what can be obnoxious about Texas is that it has a powerful sense of its own history and identity. This can grate on people from other parts of the country, but it provides a very strong sense of belonging to people who have lived here most or all of their lives.

 

Sweloquent: Agents...love em? Hate em?

 

Stephen Harrigan: I love my agent, which is fortunate because I think agents can be a problem. I have one of the great agents of all time. Agents are, in my experience, a necessary part of doing business with the New York publishing world. It's set up that way. I also have a movie agent that I'm very fond of, who I've been with for many years. There, agents are even more necessary. I think agents are often caricatured as soulless, bottom-line opportunists. But in my happy experience, they are comrades in the endeavor of trying to formulate what it is you want to say as a writer.

 

Mackie: Where is it best to start researching for historical facts?

 

Stephen Harrigan: I always start with a kind of biography or narrative history of the time I'm researching. Then I go directly to the bibliography of the book, to look for the more specific sources that can tell you in greater detail the things you need to know. I've found it's very important not to trust any biography or history on its face because the sources are often contradictory or spurious. So it's necessary to double check the authors and their interpretations.

 

Stephen Harrigan: For me, one of the most valuable tools as a researcher is children's books, because if you're researching the life of Ancient Rome, for instance, there are picture books that tell you much of what you want to know--what people's houses looked like, what they wore, what they ate--and those are the very things it's often difficult to find in a vast sweeping history. Of course you have to check everything, but these pictures are a starting point. It's always good to read Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," but if you want to find out how people held up their togas, you won't find it. You're better off with a sixth-grade level picture book.

 

Stephen Harrigan: It's also important to go back to the primary sources, and to make your own decisions about what they're saying and how reliable they are. In the case of writing about the Alamo, this was crucial since there's such a wide variance in opinion about whether the sources are even legitimate. One of the major historical documents about the Alamo that historians have used for years is subject to an open debate about whether it's a forgery. So you have a sense of perspective and experience to be able to make those decisions for yourself.

 

Albatross: How did you get to where you are now, as a successful writer?

 

Stephen Harrigan: I began writing with no real expectation of writing as a career because I didn't know that was even possible. I think sometimes it's a mistake for people to expect too much that way. I've always wanted, more than anything else, to be a novelist, until I realized it was not possible to make the kind of living I needed to make and support a family on the erratic and puny income of a novelist. So I began my career as a yard man, mowing lawns. I was a yard man who wrote poetry in his spare time, then I became a yard man who wrote magazine articles in his spare time. Eventually I was making enough writing freelance magazine articles that I could give up mowing yards. But as a magazine writer and later as a movie writer, I was frustrated that I couldn't concentrate full time on writing fiction, which is what I wanted to do. One of the lessons of being 52 years old is that all the things you resented doing in your life turn out to be the things you most needed to do to get where you are! So I think it's a mistake for someone to think of a writing career as having a clear trajectory, of a specific goal-oriented stratagem. Authors tend to be successful mostly by virtue of a combination of factors, the most important of which is how badly they want to do it, and how the pursuit of that goal sort of underlies almost every other aspect of their lives.

 

Steffi: What would you like to be doing 5 years from now?

 

Stephen Harrigan: I'd be very happy to be doing what I'm doing now. It feels right to me to always be working on a novel, and to always be working on a screenplay of one sort of another. I'd like to be more focused on fiction than screenwriting but I think it's good for me to work in different genres because it keeps me fresh and alert and aware that in fiction, for instance, a certain amount of narrative velocity is not bad thing. That is a lesson I learned in years of writing screenplays.

 

Matt: Any words of encouragement for a budding journalist? How to get my foot in the door and how to make my work stand out?

 

Stephen Harrigan: Get your foot in the door by not waiting for somebody to give you an opportunity, but taking the initiative and going out and writing things--short magazine or newspaper pieces, even if you don't have an assignment to do it. Go interview people, see things, write them up, and send them to your local alternative newspaper or whatever you have in your town that's most receptive to freelance writers. It's important not to be discouraged by editors and your own ineptitude and inexperience, because what makes a journalist "happen" is curiosity and an active engagement with the outside world, rather than with your inside thoughts, and the craft of telling a story. All of this can be, to some extent, learned or at least refined. I would tell a budding journalist to be prepared for not just months, but years of abject frustration. A period during which the only person who believes in yourself is you. It's very, very hard to get the attention of the people whose attention you want. Nobody bestows anything on you, nobody comes after you until they see that you are somebody they want to be in business with. So you have to create yourself as a commodity, and that is something that is a result of just not giving up.

 

Robbie: Do you have another book in the pipeline? Can you share it with us?

 

Stephen Harrigan: Yes, I'm working on a novel set in the space program about the lives of astronauts and people who work at NASA. The working title is "NASA Road One" which is the name of the street in Clear Lake City, TX that is NASA's address.

 

4empowerment: Stephen, sadly our time is up this morning. You've been a terrific guest. Any final comments before we close for the day?

 

Stephen Harrigan: Only that it's been very satisfying to answer such interesting questions. I wish everyone out there who has an interest in being a writer the best of luck. It's all about perseverance.

4empowerment: Thank you for joining this fascinating discussion! Now that Stephen Harrigan has revealed some of the mysteries of writing, don't forget to watch the 4empowerment website for new info on topics ranging from film to water sampling to literature and more!

 

Also check out Stephen's Profile.

 

ARTS IN AMERICA; The Alamo Remembered but Transformed
By JIM YARDLEY (NYT)

 

SAN ANTONIO -- There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that late one evening a few years ago a young father brought his baby son to the Alamo. With spotlights bathing the limestone mission in a yellow glow, the father supposedly lifted the newborn above his head, oblivious to the workings of the modern city, as if making an offering at an ancient altar.

This, it might be said, was a real Texas baptism.


Stephen Harrigan, who heard the story while researching his new historical novel, ''The Gates of the Alamo,'' passes it along not necessarily as fact but as a reminder of the enduring claim made by the Alamo on the imagination and identity of Texas. Even today grade school students across the state are taught the Alamo's legend of doomed sacrifice and valor, as a sort of spiritual bedrock upon which Texas was born and built.

Mr. Harrigan, now 51, was once one of those students. He visited the Alamo as a 7-year-old on a family trip and left transformed. When he decided as a teenager to become a novelist, he concluded that he would write about the Alamo. Three decades intervened before he managed to take up the subject, but much to his surprise he found it largely unplowed, at least in fiction.

''Everybody thinks it's hackneyed,'' Mr. Harrigan said recently over lunch at the Menger Hotel, a block from the Alamo. ''When I would tell people I was writing a book about the Alamo, they would tend to roll their eyes: Hasn't that story been done to death? But, in fact, as I started doing the research I realized, no, it hasn't. The mythological story is very, very familiar, but the real story is not.''

Of course, the real story remains a subject of debate. The central tenets, at least as told on the Texas side, is that the vastly outmanned defenders, including William Barret Travis, Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett, refused to surrender although no help was coming, and fought to the death against Santa Anna and his Mexican Army. When Santa Anna was later defeated in the Battle of San Jacinto, thus liberating Texas from Mexico, the victorious Texas army famously shouted, ''Remember the Alamo!'' Recently academics and Alamo enthusiasts convened at the University of Texas in Austin to consider the authenticity of the diary of Jose Enrique de la Pena, a Mexican soldier who took part in the Alamo assault. The diary includes a small passage that describes the capture and subsequent execution of Crockett. That Crockett would have surrendered suggests that perhaps the defenders were not quite so eager to die, and many ''Alamoheads'' claim the diary is a fake. But if academics could not determine its truthfulness, they did confirm its authenticity.

This tension between mythology and revisionism meant that Mr. Harrigan's novel would require as much historical research as imagination. Determined to provide a ''cold splash of reality,'' he repeatedly interviewed experts: Stephen L. Hardin, the historian, and Thomas Ricks Lindleyan, an independent scholar. He pored over old medical journals, military manuals and records of the Mexican government. From diaries he picked up period expressions like ''Well, if that don't take the dilapidated linen!''

Ultimately, and not surprisingly, he discovered that many of the old myths he had learned as a child were not true. Perhaps the most famous Alamo story is of Travis gathering his men inside the besieged garrison, informing them that reinforcements were not coming and drawing a line in the sand with his sword and challenging his men to cross it and fight to the death for freedom. It is a stirring anecdote but one considered a fabrication by many modern Alamo scholars.

''That moment to me is the linchpin of the Alamo myth,'' he said. ''Once that is gone and once that idea of deliberate self-sacrifice is gone, the Alamo story becomes a human story and not a mythological one. You realize these guys were not intent on dying, they were intent on living.''

One problem in plotting a novel around the real events of the Alamo is that the end is something of downer: everyone dies. To navigate this, Mr. Harrigan framed his book around fictional characters, Texan and Mexican, tossed in a love story and took pains not to tread too fearfully around the historical icons. He paints Bowie as something of a charming swindler and Travis as a foolish but magnetic leader enthralled with his presumed destiny. He admits to being charmed by the homespun Crockett.

''I was surprised in my revisionist heart how much I like Crockett,'' he said. ''What a good guy he seems to have been.''

Bruce Winders, the resident historian and curator of the Alamo, credits Mr. Harrigan with creating a vivid story but one based on credible historical assumptions he described as ''extremely current.'' Recent new research suggests that reinforcements were en route to the Alamo, Mr. Winders said, and that Travis, contrary to popular interpretation, knew it.

''There is much more willingness to accept new interpretations when it's based on solid research,'' he said.

Mr. Harrigan, who has written two other novels, a nonfiction book about scuba diving and two collections of essays, has enjoyed the success of his latest book. The novelreached The New York Times hardback fiction bestseller list for one week in April and has enjoyed almost universally glowing reviews. His publisher, Knopf, sent him on a national 11-city tour, which ended this month.

''I draw the line at wearing a coonskin cap,'' he said with a smile. ''You wouldn't believe how many people have asked me to do that. And on me, a coonskin cap looks like a toupee.''

Born in Oklahoma City, Mr. Harrigan grew up in Corpus Christi on the Texas coast, attended the University of Texas in Austin and published his first novel, ''Aransas,'' about a dolphin trainer. In the early 1980's he joined the staff of Texas Monthly, the magazine that has nurtured many of the best Texas writers, and for a decade the job allowed him to explore Texas.

With three daughters and a wife to support, Mr. Harrigan began writing screenplays after leaving Texas Monthly in 1991. Now he is part of a small but successful weekly breakfast club of Austin screenwriters who include Bill Broyles, whose credits include ''Apollo 13,'' and Lawrence Wright, the novelist, screenwriter and writer for The New Yorker. Mr. Harrigan's credits range widely, from the critically acclaimed television drama ''Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder,'' broadcast in January, to far less acclaimed screenplays like the recent ''John Denver Story.''

He began ''The Gates of the Alamo'' eight years ago, working weekends, nights and mornings around his ''day job'' of writing screenplays. When he finally finished the book, he struggled with a title, dismissing ''Remember the Alamo!,'' out of fear that it would evoke a B-movie cheesiness. One day as he drove down the highway groping with different titles, he looked up and saw a sign that read, ''Alamo Title Co.'' He considered it but thought otherwise.

Mr. Harrigan's ultimate target in writing about the Alamo was Texas itself and ''the death grip'' its history holds on its inhabitants. Even today, the Alamo remains the most visited historical site in the state, with more than three million visitors every year. And Mr. Harrigan believes that even if the real story of the Alamo is something less than the legend, it is no less powerful, or to him, inspiring.

''The Alamo as an icon speaks to an ideal that I think is very legitimate and very alive and transcends all sorts of cultural and ethnic boundaries,'' he said. ''The ideal is that there is something worth dying for, there is something you would willingly give your life for. Whether that's the liberation of Texas from Mexico, or the stealing of Texas from Mexico, or any other enterprise is kind of irrelevant. What matters is that people have faith in that concept. That's why people remember the Alamo, because that ideal is worth remembering.''


------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright 2002 The New York Times

INTERVIEW

Stephen Harrigan

Interview conducted by Dr. Stephen L. Hardin

ADP: The Gates of the Alamo is a departure from your earlier books. What drew you to the story?

Harrigan: The Alamo has been a magnet for me all my life. I first saw it when I was seven, not long after seeing the Fess Parker movie, and I don't think I've ever fully recovered from the impact. I remember the sense I had standing in the Alamo church and feeling that I was in a completely different realm. It was the first time I ever felt the presence of history.

ADP: You dedicated the book to the memory of James E. McLaughlin, 1918-1948. Who was he?

Harrigan: He was my father, a World War II fighter pilot who died in an airplane crash a few months before I was born. I never knew him, but dedicating the book to him felt right to me, since the novel itself is an attempt to come to terms with an ungraspable past.

ADP: The dust jacket notes describe your characters as "vibrant" and "unexpected." They're certainly that. I can't think of another writer who would cast a botanist as a major protagonist. Did you attempt to avoid the stereotypes and clichés common to the genre?

Harrigan: I desperately wanted to avoid the cliches, to jettison the myths of the Alamo and try to present an imagined but credible reality in their place. And as my protagonist, I wanted somebody who was active and engaged in an important pursuit but who was fundamentally an agnostic when it came to the war itself. One of the myths of the Alamo and the Texas revolution is that all these colonists rose up as one against the tyranny of Santa Anna, but as anyone knows who has studied the period with any care there was considerable divisiveness and ambivalence. It made sense to me to have a character who could reflect the complexity of the situation, and whose heroism was of a different sort than that usually associated with the Alamo story.

ADP: Your earlier books—Jacob's Well, A Natural State, Water and Light: A Diver's Journey to a Coral Reef—reflect your interest in the natural world. To what degree did your own proclivities influence the Edmund McGowan character?

Harrigan: The novels that excite me the most present a living, breathing world. To write about Texas in 1836 and not write about its most obvious feature—the landscape—would have been peculiar. I wanted readers to have a sense of being steeped in that landscape, to see it sharply and in detail. And what better eyes to see Texas through than those of a man driven to notice everything?

ADP: The book leaves at least one question unanswered. In the world you created what became of McGowan's manuscript of Flora Texana?

Harrigan: In my mind, the Flora Texana is still moldering in some forgotten Mexican archive, waiting to be rescued from obscurity.

ADP: I don't want to give too much away for those who have not read the book. Suffice it to say that McGowan has some "issues" that relate to his sexuality. How did his conflicted sexuality drive the character's development? Why did you opt to portray him as a person so at odds with his sexuality?

Harrigan: Characters aren't interesting to me unless they have some internal conflict. I wanted Edmund in some way to be a hostage to his own pride, and in the 19^th century, in particular, pride could take people off in peculiar directions. We forget, in the sloppy liberation of our own time, what a powerful and unpredictable force unreleased sexuality can be. We forget that there were once people—even adventurous, heroic people—for whom this basic human urge was deeply frightening. Or so I speculate. The fact that I grew up Catholic and spent a lot of time among presumably celibate priests probably helped to plant this notion.

ADP: Readers will enjoy the skillful way you weave your fictional story into the documented history in a way that is virtually seamless. What historical sources did you find the most useful?

Harrigan: Well, your book, for one. Texian Iliad is a very elegant summary of the revolution, and Gary Zaboly's illustrations were a revelation the first time I saw them. But after reading the big sweeping histories, I found myself going back time and again to the same primary sources—Travis's letters from the Alamo, Almonte's diary, and then more recently Ramirez y Sesma's battle report. The books that assembled all of these accounts in one place, like Bill Groneman's Eyewitness to the Alamo and Alan Huffines's Blood of Noble Men were especially useful. But by far the most important research activity was just sitting around with you and all my other historian friends and arguing or theorizing about various aspects of the Alamo story.

ADP: You made a pact with fellow novelists Elizabeth Crook and Jeff Long that relates to the actions of the characters in each of your three books. Could you tell our readers how that concept developed?

Harrigan: A little over ten years ago, just as Elizabeth and Jeff and I were getting to know each other, we discovered that we were each writing a historical novel about the Texas Revolution. Theoretically, we weren't in direct competition. Elizabeth was writing the novel that would become Promised Lands, which tells the story primarily of the Goliad Massacre. Jeff was doing San Jacinto in Empire of Bones, and I was taking on the Alamo. Still, we all felt a little nervous—me most of all, because their books were almost finished and mine was not even begun. So I suggested that, instead of thinking of ourselves as competitors, we should think of ourselves as collaborators. The net result of that is that fictional characters from each of our novels wander through the pages of the others. So, for instance, Terrell Mott—from my book—shows up at a campfire with Sam Houston in Empire of Bones, and Hugh Kenner, the doctor from Promised Lands, makes a cameo appearance in The Gates of the Alamo.

ADP: In the "Author's Note" you make the following observation: "The debate over the authenticity of [the de la Peña] manuscript is abstruse and sometimes peculiarly heated—it matters to people how Davy Crockett died—but in my own relatively dispassionate assessment I have come to the conclusion that de la Peña, forgery or not, is a document of dubious historical veracity." As you know, Alamo de Parras has followed this debate in some detail. Do you care to expand on the above comments?

Harrigan: There are two separate questions about the de la Peña manuscript: 1) is it authentic? and 2) is it reliable? On the first point, I prefer to stand back and let Jim Crisp and Bill Groneman and Tom Lindley slug it out, because I know I'll never have the command of the material that they do. On the issue of its reliability, I just feel that it's squirrelly. If José Enrique de la Peña was its true author, it's still obviously something of a clip job, and when it comes to Crockett's death scene, for example, it just has the ring of hearsay to me. I understand the exasperation that some historians feel over the endless barrage of suspicion aimed at this document, but I also feel that until recently de la Peña has never really been looked at critically at all. So I tried to keep a judicious distance from it, though I'm very interested in the ongoing debate.

ADP: You have a wonderfully detailed scene in chapter three wherein Jim Bowie wrestles an alligator. I'm almost afraid to ask, but how did you become such an expert on this arcane pursuit?

Harrigan: This is a direct result of the wonder of the Internet. I went onto the pets forum of America Online and posted a message under "Reptiles" asking for information about how to wrestle an alligator. In less than a day I had five or six messages, one of which was three single-spaced pages specifying, in minute detail, how to wrestle an alligator.

ADP: Those of us who write books never know what the press people are going to put on the dust jacket. The dust jacket around Gates, for example, makes the following claim: "[F]or the first time the story is told not just from the perspective of the American defenders but from that of the Mexican attackers as well." That person was clearly ignorant of John R. Knagg's The Bugles Are Silent: A Novel of the Texas Revolution (1977) that also showcased several Mexican characters that told their side of the story. Had you read Knagg's earlier novel before you began writing Gates?

Harrigan: Oops. I should have caught that. Yes, of course I've read John's novel, and admire it. I suppose the reason the comment slipped by is that The Bugles are Silent seems to me not to be primarily an "Alamo" novel so much as it is a panoramic novel of the Texas Revolution. The same is true of J.Y. Bryan's Come to the Bower, which also features Mexican characters. And of course Elizabeth Crook's Promised Lands is prominently peopled with Tejanos.

ADP: Your depiction of the Alamo assault is the best in print. Since it's better than the one in Texian Iliad, it gives me no special pleasure to concede that. It is also realistic in terms of the damage done to the human body on nineteenth-century battlefields. Do you fear that some readers will be repelled by all the blood and guts—not to mention the urine and excrement? This is not the way Alamo heroes die in the movies!

Harrigan: Writing these battle scenes was slightly troubling to me, because I became aware for the first time of what the phrase "pornography of violence" means. But you can't tell the truth about combat without beginning to feel, in some way, that you've gone too far. On the other hand, there is also a certain obscenity in the sanitized, glorified version. I guess what I hope is that readers will realize I have tried to find an honorable middle ground.

ADP: You have a reputation for not only writing well, but also writing quickly. I know that you worked on Gates for years. Why did this one take so long?

Harrigan: A book this long, and this detailed, requires a tremendous amount of research. I read for about two years before I felt I knew enough to even begin writing it. And then I had to work on the novel in and around other projects. Typically, I was working on at least one screenplay, not to mention various articles, at the same time I was trying to write the novel.

ADP: How long have you been a professional writer? How did you make your start in the business?

Harrigan: I sold my first magazine article in 1973, when I was mowing yards for a living, and have been a professional writer ever since. I started out as a free-lance magazine writer and over the years have gradually morphed into a novelist and screenwriter. It hasn't always been easy, but I feel I've been very lucky to make a living doing something that brings me so much pleasure.

ADP: You have had a long relationship with Texas Monthly. What is your current status with that magazine?

Harrigan: I'm now listed on the masthead as a contributing editor, though it'd be more accurate to call me a contributing writer. I still publish occasional pieces in the magazine—this current issue, in fact, has an article of mine about how to visit the Alamo—and I have a close allegiance to the publication and a long friendship with many of the people there. In many ways, Texas Monthly made my career. It was an incredible catalyst for Texas writers, and I think working for the magazine sharpened my wits, enlarged my curiosity, and helped me learn to write.

ADP: I've heard through the grapevine that someone has optioned Gates for a feature film. Do you have anything new to report on that front?

Harrigan: Several production companies have expressed interest, but at this point, nothing concrete has happened. Part of the reason, I'm sure, is that there are three or four other Alamo movies in various stages of development. This is probably because of all the middle-aged studio executives out there who, like me, were transfixed by the Fess Parker movie and are now reexamining the icons of their childhood.

ADP: How has the word processor changed the way you write? Which system do you use?

Harrigan: I wrote this book on a Macintosh with Microsoft Word. I now have an IMac, with a newer version of Word, which I absolutely detest. There's this creepy little computer creature who pops up unbidden on the screen to constantly inquire into your business. But even with these sorts of aggravations, computers are an unbelievable blessing. I wrote my first two novels in longhand, two or three successive drafts in composition books. And though there was a certain satisfaction in having amassed all those pages full of ink, I don't miss the tedium a bit.

ADP: I know you do be a remarkably disciplined writer. Describe an average writing day.

Harrigan: As I said before, I tend to work on more than one project at once. So a typical writing day for me might be working on a screenplay in the morning and a book or an article in the afternoon. I'll often work for an hour or so at night as well, though I try as much as possible to stick to a 9 to 5 schedule. Being a free-lance writer, however, means you run a small business, so there is an alarming amount of time spent on the phone, answering e-mail, raiding the refrigerator, paying bills, and waiting longingly at the door for the Federal Express man to bring you that magic package whose contents will forever free you from all financial anxiety.

ADP: The people at Alfred A. Knopf have a hectic book tour planned for you. Can you tell our readers how a book tour works? Which cities will you visit?

Harrigan: I don't really know how it works, since this is my first one. But my impression is that I will be whisked about from one city to the next, endlessly repeating in 50 words or less to various interviewers what my book is about, and then giving a talk or a reading at a bookstore or library at night. It's supposed to be exhausting. But it's a different kind of exhaustion than writing, and so I'm ready for it.

ADP: Gates had a first printing of one hundred thousand copies. Obviously, the editors at Knopf believe that the Alamo story has an appeal outside Texas. What is it about the Alamo battle that engages the interest of people all over the country and, for that matter, all over the world?

Harrigan: I think it's the notion of deliberate self-sacrifice, the idea that there is an ideal or a principle that is worth dying for, and the hope that we ourselves might be capable of such a choice if we were ever called upon to make it—that we would "cross the line."

ADP: What is your next project? Can our readers expect another historical fiction from the word processor of Stephen Harrigan?

Harrigan: I've just finished a screenplay for TNT which is a western reworking of King Lear, set in South Texas in 1842 and culminating in a rather historically loose version of the Battle of the Salado. Sorry to disappoint, but I think my next book project will be a contemporary novel. After that, however, I might dip into history again. Writing an historical novel is a bit of a chore, but I've never done anything else that was quite as much fun.

February 2000

 

 

Stephen Harrigan
(1948- )
PAPERS 1971-ongoing

 

 

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Acquisition: Donation since 1987. Donors: Stephen Harrigan, Bill Wittliff.

Access: Direct inquiries to Archivist, Southwestern Writers Collection, Texas State University-San Marcos, San Marcos, Texas, 78666-4604.

Processed by: Jennifer B. Patterson, May 1994, Amanda Oates, 2000.

10.5 linear feet
21 boxes plus oversize

 

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Biography

Stephen Harrigan was born on October 5, 1948, and grew up in Oklahoma City, Abilene and Corpus Christi. After receiving a degree in English from The University of Texas at Austin in 1971, Harrigan briefly attended graduate school and worked as a yardman and as an ad writer for the University Co-op. He contributed articles to a number of magazines, including Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire and The Texas Observer. He became a regular writer for Texas Monthly archives shortly after its inception and co-founded and edited Lucille, a journal of poetry, which published 10 issues between 1974 and 1978.

Harrigan received a Dobie-Paisano fellowship in 1977, which allowed him to complete his first novel. Aransas, published by Knopf in 1980, tells the story of Jeff Dowling, an alienated young man who comes to terms with himself and the world as he trains two dolphins for a circus in Port Aransas, Texas. The New York Times named the novel one of the notable books of 1980, and reviewers praised its realism and style. His second novel, Jacob's Well, also focused on man's relationship with nature, following the lives of three people who are drawn together to explore an artesian well in Central Texas. The book was named one of the best books of 1984 by The Washington Post and The Dallas Morning News.

Harrigan's recent books, until the publication in 2000 of Gates of the Alamo ,have been nonfiction. As a freelance writer and later staff writer and editor for Texas Monthly, Harrigan displayed a talent for journalism, contributing interviews and other investigative pieces, but he also focused on the natural environment, writing about rivers, Big Bend, Padre Island and other Texas landmarks. Many of these essays were collected in Harrigan's third book, A Natural State: Essays on Texas (1988), which was recently republished by the University of Texas Press. His 1992 book Water and Light: A Diver's Journey to a Coral Reef combined research on aquatic life with his own experiences scubadiving off a coral reef in the Caribbean. The New York Times Book Review called Water and Light "moving, intelligent ... literary," and praised Harrigan's "remarkable ability to discuss the metaphysical and spiritual aspects of underwater exploration." Harrigan has also published a book of poetry and written screenplays, one of which, The Last of His Tribe, was broadcast on HBO.

Harrigan's works are characterized by an intense interest in humans and their relationship to the environment around them. He once wrote of his interest in natural subjects: "I don't know what nature is exactly--whether it is a category that includes human beings or shuts them out--but for me it has always contained that hint of eeriness, the sense that some vital information--common knowledge to all the universe--has been specifically withheld from me. Sometimes, as with the snake, this secrecy has seemed malevolent, but far more often it has been wonderfully tantalizing. For much of my life I have been obsessed with nature, but not in the way a naturalist would be obsessed with it--driven to classify, to define relationships, to comprehend the world's marvelous intricacy. I have simply wanted to feel more fully a part of that intricacy, to see something other than neutral scorn in the eyes of that half-imagined snake." (A Natural State, UT Press, 1994, intro., p. x)

Harrigan lives in Austin with his wife Sue Ellen and three daughters.

Stephen Harrigan: Re-visioning the Alamo

Roger Gathman -- 3/20/00

"The last thing you want to read about, in a way, is the Alamo."

Stephen  Harrigan's two-story house is located in the Terrytown section of Austin, an older residential neighborhood of ranch houses favored by professors and professionals. Big trees and yards lining streets with names like Bridle Path and Cherry Lane lend the area a pastoral charm, but it is also conveniently close to downtown Austin and the campus of the University of Texas. Go a little farther east and you are in danger of drowning in a sea of undergraduates; go a little farther west and you are in the hills that climb above Town Lake, where the secluded houses are big and expensive, and the yards tend to end at a cliff's edge.

It took a flurry of calls to Boulder, Colo., where Harrigan is working on location for CBS making a film about Laura Ingalls Wilder, for PW to arrange this Friday morning appointment. Harrigan's first script about the author of Little House on the Prairie was successful enough that CBS commissioned him to write a follow-up. Harrigan is on the road most of the week working on the sequel, but he has time Friday and Saturday morning to meet with us before he has to attend a writer and p ts' benefit in Houston. These days, Harrigan is an awfully busy man.

He's going to be even busier this spring when he embarks on the author tour for his third novel, The Gates of the Alamo (Knopf; Forecasts, Jan. 17). Aransas and Jacob's Well, Harrigan's first two novels, were published to critical acclaim, as was his nonfiction diving book, Water and Light, but The Gates of the Alamo, already in its second printing only a week past its early March pub date, is poised to break new ground.

Harrigan's house is a little boxier than its neighbors, and the yard isn't quite so lush. The author walks PW through the house, and introduces his wife, Sue Ellen, who makes coffee. The three of us briefly engage in that staple of Austin discussions--the terrible traffic--and then Harrigan leads PW to his office, a converted backyard shed.

The books and papers that clutter the office announce the professional writer. However, the visitor's eye is immediately drawn to an array of foot-high plastic dolls on top of one of the bookshelves, representing real or folkloric figures from America's past, all mounted on prancing plastic ponies. These are '50s collector's items, which Harrigan has kept from his childhood. He rather sheepishly points out Jim Bowie, sandwiched between George Washington and Geronimo, but denies that the doll had any influence on how he visualized the Bowie in his novel.

What the figures do show is a continuity between Harrigan's pre-adolescent hobbies and obsessions and his writing interests. He claims, in fact, that he has planned to write about the Alamo since he was 14, "because it had such an impact on me as a kid." Seeing the actual Alamo in San Antonio was less of a catalyst than seeing Fess Parker in the Disney three-part TV drama about Davy Crockett, which created a nationwide phenomena when it aired in 1955 (not to be confused with the John Wayne-directed movie of 1960, which was widely panned)."The thing with the cap had a galvanizing effect upon me," he jokes.

He's only half kidding when he elaborates: "There was a wonderful photograph in Life Magazine of all these kids standing next to the Alamo, and it is just a sea of coonskin caps. That movie was the Star Wars of its time. The other, really more primal thing is that--this being a more innocent time in the 1950s--there had never been a movie in my experience in which the hero dies in the end. That was a very traumatic event, and a lot of 50, 55-year old men now are trying to come to terms with it." After considering this statement for a second, we both laugh.

Still, it raises a question. Can the history that thrilled Americans in the "innocent" '50s still engage people today? As Harrigan himself admits, "The last thing you want to read about, in a way, is the Alamo." The Gates of the Alamo proves that statement false. The narrative follows a number of real and fictitious characters as they converge bloodily in Texas in 1835. The cast includes a virginal botanist, Edmund McGowan; a widowed innkeeper, Mary Mott, and her son, Terrell (who makes it out of the Alamo before it falls); an ambitious Mexican officer, Telesforo Villaseñor; and a slave, J . It also includes real people, like Mexican leader Santa Anna, Crockett (portrayed as a corruptible Southern politician, with a nice sense of the balance between bunkum and shrewdness characteristic of the breed), William Travis and Jim Bowie. The final third of the book, which shows how the collision between Texas stubbornness, greed and naivete and Santa Anna's monomaniacal rule leads to the Alamo's fall, reads like great war reporting, but it is the book's smaller touches that communicate the sensibility of the time: Mary Mott's killing of a Karakawa brave, for instance, with its insistent gruesomeness, or Edmund McGowan's long, belated journey to sexual maturity. Harrigan realizes that some readers will find the spectacle of a 44-year old virgin male ridiculous, but he feels that his character reflects the moral climate of the time. He also d sn't see such a scenario as impossible. "I grew up a Catholic and met a lot of priests who seemed to be following a vow of chastity. It isn't untrue."

An Epiphany Behind a Lawn Mower

Harrigan was born in Oklahoma. His stepfather, who was in the oil business, moved the family first to Abilene, then to Corpus Christi, a midsized town on the Gulf of Mexico south of Houston. "I didn't really discover nature until I moved to Corpus Christi," he says.

In Corpus, he began a love affair with the ocean in particular that informs all of his nonfiction, from his essays for Texas Monthly to Water and Light, his book-length account of diving off Grand Turk island, at the southern end of the Bahamas. It is also the underlying theme of his first novel, Aransas, which is about capturing and training dolphins. Harrigan still possesses his 1961 copy of John Lilly's classic, Man and Dolphin. He also recalls the thrill of seeing his first dolphin. "I was a kid going fishing on a boat and this was just after we moved [to Corpus Christi]. I was sitting in the boat when all of a sudden this beast came out of the water. I couldn't believe it. I had never heard of dolphins. I didn't know what it was."

Harrigan attended the University of Texas at Austin, in the '60s. His time in high school had convinced him that he was a writer, but he didn't know what he wanted to write. He enjoyed the rambunctiousness of the period. "Our recreation was demonstrating," he says. But he was not a "front-line" guy. After graduating with an English literature degree, "I stayed here. You have to understand that if you grow up in Texas, and you see Austin, you get an impression at 17 or 18 like going to Paris. It was such a sophisticated place. To an extent, I'm a victim of my own provincialism, since it never occurred to me to go anywhere else." Harrigan worked as a yard man and wrote p ms (he even had a book of p ms published, Sleepyhead, which "is a rare item now, justifiably").

"The first magazine story I wrote I published for $150 in Rolling Stone. I was mowing yards one day and I thought, I bet I could write magazine articles and make more money. And then I started doing some pieces for the Texas Observer, which was when Molly Ivins was editor there. Somebody saw my pieces for the Texas Observer and told Greg Curtis, who is now the editor at Texas Monthly, but was then the assistant editor. I started a freelance relationship with them, and then joined the staff around 1980 or so, and worked full time for a long time."

"I wrote oddball stories. I've never been much of a journalist. My curiosity tends to run elsewhere. I've never written about politics or business. I never even read the paper with any degree of attention or interest. I was at a strange kind of cockeyed distance from the magazine world. Ultimately, being a magazine writer served me well because it got me out of the house. It triggered my curiosity about things I would never have looked at otherwise."

Harrigan has collected some of his pieces in two books, Comanche Midnight and A Natural State: Essays on Texas. His pieces do for Texas what Joseph Mitchell's pieces did for New York: define the essence of the place by highlighting the margins. He has produced several pieces on Texas history, from the Battlefield of San Jacinto to the resurvey of the Camino Real, which was the ancient route used by Spanish explorers on their way into Texas. He has written several excellent essays of natural history, from a large, sad piece about the pollution of Galveston Bay to an essay about exploring Big Bend Park with a zoologist who has a contract to extract parasites from roadkill. The zoologist, who is always scanning for specimens, will remind readers of The Alamo of Harrigan's character, Edmund McGowan. Reading the essays, one sees how they work as a source for Harrigan's fiction.

Harrigan is less keen on the naturalist genre now. "It feels a little too confining to me, a little too rhapsodic. I am interested in the human relationship to nature. I find Thoreau and Edward Abbey and those people less and less interesting. Thoreau's just kind of lecturing me on what I should feel, or lecturing me on the superiority of nature to humankind, when I feel that the kind of unexplored territory is humankind as part of nature. I think when we reject or embrace nature, we tend to detach ourselves from it. Those are two poles of the same logic, in a way."

Harrigan's move to magazine writing coincided with his meeting Sue Ellen Line on a blind date. When they married, they agreed that Sue Ellen would stay home and take care of the kids, who soon numbered three, all girls. Even as a staff writer at Texas Monthly, Harrigan's responsibilities as the family's sole breadwinner were daunting. Still, he persevered with his fiction while he was working on his articles. His first novel, Aransas, actually grew out of a magazine piece he did about capturing dolphins. Aransas was published by Texas Monthly Press, and was chosen as a notable book of 1980 by the New York Times. Harrigan's first agent, John Sterling, sold his second novel, Jacob's Well, to Simon & Schuster before becoming an editor at Houghton Mifflin. Houghton gave Harrigan an advance to write his diving book, Water and Light, but unfortunately, although unanimously praised, it sold poorly. "Divers, it turns out, don't read very much." Like Harrigan's collections of essays, the book is now on the U.T. Press list.

In the '80s, Harrigan also started writing screenplays. He and his neighbor, author Lawrence Wright, got some movie scripts, saw how it was done, and wrote a screenplay they actually sold. "Beginners luck," Harrigan says. Although the script was optioned by Sydney Pollack, it was never made into a film. A long dry spell followed, until finally HBO bought one of Harrigan's scripts and made it into a TV movie in 1992. Since then, he's added screenplay writing to his schedule.

The Alamo book was at first signed by Sterling for Houghton Mifflin, "but when John moved to Broadway Books it was orphaned."

"Larry [Wright] knew Ann Close at Knopf. By this time Esther Newberg at ICM was my agent. She submitted it to Ann at 100 pages, who accepted it. But it turned out the book took five years longer than I thought it would."

Harrigan knows that any account of the Alamo will be examined from every angle in his home state. Although he believes revisionism has gone too far, he hasn't tailored the book to fit the "myth of the Alamo as an ennobling defeat," which is of course the Texas party line. "The myth is this glaze you have to hammer through to what might be the reality. There's no more powerful myth in American history than the Alamo."

Profile of Stephen Harrigan

by Laura Ohata in The Good Life magazine, April 2006

Open the door to author Stephen Harrigan's office and you stand face-to-face with a cardboard cutout of Chewbacca. Steve smiles and says, "My youngest daughter gave me that because she is a Star Wars freak." After I get past the wookie guarding the door, I see tree branches waving in the morning sun through two skylights that brighten Harrigan's enviably airy workspace. A Macintosh computer sits on a lightly littered, metal office desk that is more functional than fashionable. A decade of bound magazine back-issues from Harrigan's years as a staff writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly sits on a built-in shelf along the back wall.

These days, Harrigan makes a busy day-job out of writing screenplays. In his spare time he writes books, like The New York Times best-seller Gates of the Alamo. His new novel, Challenger Park, comes out this month. It's about a female astronaut who balances her dangerous career with her duties to her children.

Much like the astronauts in Challenger Park, on the surface, Harrigan's life is calm, but at times his work puts him in danger. Some of Harrigan's real-life adventures include watching open-heart surgery and diving in underwater caves, such as the one he wrote about in Jacob's Well, a critically acclaimed novel published in 1984 about an underwater cave beneath Wimberley's Cypress Creek that has claimed the lives of at least eight divers. While writing an article about igloos, Harrigan traveled thirty miles across a frozen sea and was almost killed in a runaway dog sled.

Safe at home in his office, Harrigan is a creature of habit, focused on his work that often involves three projects in a single day.

Lawrence "Larry" Wright, Harrigan's friend and fellow writer, says, "Steve is a meat-and-potatoes man. He doesn't like anything fussy about his food. He will not put salad dressing on his salad. He just likes lettuce and tomatoes. The holidays throw him off because the mail doesn't come. The regular rhythms of life are disturbed. So every holiday Steve will complain. Fourth of July or Martin Luther King Day, he gets grumpy. All of Steve's turbulence and adventurousness is transferred to his writing."

Harrigan says, "At first I dawdle around for a long time trying to figure out ways to approach a project. Then it may take me three weeks to write a page. But toward the end, I'll have gathered all this force and knowledge about the characters and about what's going to happen, and I'll just blitz through it."

Wright says, "Steve's style is luminous. It has this inner light that so few writers ever achieve. He's always got one foot in the wild and that always informs his characters. And whether it's a woman going into space or himself going diving, he is always retreating into nature."

Whether writing novels or made-for-TV movies, Harrigan blends the exhaustive research of a journalist (his office abounds with boxes full of research materials for screenplays and novels in various stages of progress) with the sensual writing style of a poet, drawing heavily from a childhood spent mostly in Texas.

He was born Michael Stephen McLaughlin in Oklahoma City in 1948, only a few months after his father-a World War II fighter pilot who, after the war, became a test pilot and instructor for the US Air Force-died in a plane crash. When his mother remarried, he was adopted by his stepfather, Tom Harrigan, and his name was changed to Stephen Harrigan. Then the family moved to Abilene, Texas.

"Even in 1953, Abilene was kind of a frontier town," he says. "You rode your bike everywhere. There were all these plains and hills, and (it was) pretty much undeveloped. You could walk around and find arrowheads and there was a sense of mystery everywhere."

In 1959, the family moved to Corpus Christi.

"All of a sudden, there was this ocean, he says. "For one thing the water was limitless, and for another the water was impenetrable, in that it was murky. A couple of times I saw dolphins and I didn't know what they were. This was in 1959, before National Geographic TV shows. There was no Flipper, no universal fascination with dolphins and whales. They just sort of rolled out of the water with their dorsal fins." For Harrigan, the experience kicked off a lifetime fascination with the ocean.

As a young adult, Harrigan studied English at the University of Texas at Austin. After receiving a degree in 1971, he continued with studies in the graduate English program.

"I thought that to be a writer I had to go to graduate school and the more education I had the better. I thought that graduate school would be about the joy of reading literature, but I quickly discovered that it was about theory and dissecting literary works in a way that made no sense to me at all."

After a few semesters, Harrigan dropped out of graduate school and took up yard work. Then, while mowing a lawn one day, he realized that he could make more money writing magazine articles.

"My goal was to somehow pay my bills and be able to write," he says. He started freelancing for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly and others.

William "Bill" Broyles Jr., founding editor of Texas Monthly, describes the first time he met Harrigan: "Steve had a lawn-cutting company and while he was cutting my yard we started talking about writing. I asked him to do something for Texas Monthly and he did and it was so good that not too much later he gave up his yard business."

Sue Ellen Line and Stephen Harrigan were married in 1975, about the time he was hired as a staff writer at Texas Monthly.

"We agreed early on that I would take on a full-time job so that she could stay home with the kids," Harrigan says.

While on assignment for the magazine, Harrigan went out on the ocean with a dolphin-catching operation to capture live animals for the Searama oceanareum, a now-defunct tourist attraction in Galveston. The experience cemented the idea for Harrigan's first novel, Aransas, about a dolphin trainer who falls in love with the creatures he is supposed to train and the woman who wants to return them to the wild. Harrigan received the prestigious Dobie Paisano Fellowship to complete Aransas and it was published in 1980.

He moved up to become a senior editor at Texas Monthly. During his time at the magazine Harrigan wrote enough articles to publish in two collections, A Natural State (1988) and Comanche Midnight (1995). Harrigan also picked up screenwriting.

From journalist to screenwriter

William "Bill" Wittliff, the Austin screenwriter who had penned The Black Stallion (1979) Honeysuckle Rose (1980), Raggedy Man (1981) and Barbarosa (1982), nominated Harrigan and Wright to attend the Sundance Screenwriters Lab.

"It was a shotgun marriage," Wright says. "Two weeks before the deadline it occurred to us that we were supposed to have a script that we were going to be working on. (The one we wrote) was based mainly on some journalism that we had done. So the script was about one of the twelve moonwalkers who decides to get back into the program and falls in love with a new woman astronaut. Not only had we not written a movie script before, but we had never seen one. I forget how we got a script. We took a ruler and measured the tab settings and tried to get that right. Then we sent it into Sundance and (producer, director and actor) Sydney Pollack happened to be one of the judges and he liked the script, so he bought it. He had just made Tootsie and he was the most important man in Hollywood at that time. But he decided to make Out of Africa instead of our movie."

Harrigan says, "The title of the script Larry and I wrote was originally Moonwalker. But, after Michael Jackson made a video with that title, it was changed to Ocean of Storms."

The upshot of this experience was that Harrigan and Wright joined the growing ranks of authors who figured out that they could write Hollywood scripts while living in Austin. For the next few years, Harrigan and Wright continued to compose screenplays that never got produced.

A major turning point in Harrigan's screenwriting career came in 1992 when HBO produced his script for The Last of His Tribe, an award-winning made-for-TV movie, starring Jon Voight and Graham Greene.

Wright says, "Steve wrote (The Last of His Tribe) and later I wrote a script called The Siege (1998). So we both went into the movie industry separately but we started out together."

Harrigan left Texas Monthly in 1992 on the heels of his success with The Last of His Tribe to focus on screenwriting and novels. Since then he's been much in demand.

"Most of these movies are assignments. People come to me and say, 'Will you write this or that movie.' And then I write the movie and hope they make it."

While Harrigan gets most screenwriting assignments from Hollywood, some screenplays spring from his own ideas.

"I was reading Little House on the Prairie to our youngest daughter once, and was struck by how much more real and gritty it must have been than the famous TV series. The idea was to tell the story behind the Little House books, and what really happened to Laura Ingalls Wilder and her husband Almanzo (Wilder), and their parents. We tried to take a clearer look at the historic reality of the story. It was a more hardscrabble version than the Little House series. And it's funny because the first Laura Ingalls Wilder movie that I wrote (Beyond the Prairie, produced in 2000) twenty-three million people saw that movie at one time. And yet, I've never met anybody who's ever seen it. It's odd. The TV movie world is like everybody's stepchild. But, I've made a good living at it and have had fun doing it, and it enables me to write books as well."

In 2005, the Hallmark Channel aired The Colt. Set during the American Civil War, The Colt is about a cavalry trooper whose mare gives birth in the middle of a battle. The trooper fights to keep both the mare and the colt alive. Based on a short story by the Nobel Prize winning Russian writer Mikhail Sholokhov, Harrigan's adaptation was nominated for the Writer's Guild of America Award.

Writing books

While Harrigan loves composing teleplays, his passion is writing novels.

"What's great about movies and what's irritating about movies is that it's a group effort. So, it's fun to talk to people about the script and wrangle with producers and studio executives about what needs to be done and what has to be done. And finally when a movie comes out, you are only one of about one hundred and fifty people who had a hand in it; but when a book comes out, it's basically yours. You made all the decisions. If it's good or bad it's your fault or to your credit and your name is on it and nobody else's. You're in control, whereas with movies, you're just not. A crucial scene might get cut because some actor flubbed a line or didn't show up to work that day and the movie makes no sense. And that happens time and time again. But if a book makes no sense it's because you screwed up. It wasn't just some accident that occurred on the set or in the editing room."

Writing novels puts all the responsibility on the writer. That imposes a different kind of challenge.

"In some ways you have to go through all the same steps you would go through with a crossword puzzle. You have to think and ponder and research. But at the end when you finish it's not exactly ever done because you're trying to create or recreate a world, and make characters out of thin air. You know you're creating an illusion in the reader's mind, and no matter how good a job you do, you know you are barely just getting away with it."

'Gates of the Alamo'

Harrigan's fascination with the Alamo started with a childhood visit to the mission, but he didn't get to write a novel about it until thirty years later. Working nights, weekends and early mornings, Harrigan finished Gates of the Alamo in eight years. The first two years were spent entirely on research, and Harrigan continued to look up details to fill in the blanks even as he was writing the book. Eventually Gates of the Alamo landed on The New York Times hardback fiction best-seller list for one week and received great reviews.

'Challenger Park'

While Gates of the Alamo was an idea Harrigan carried around in his head for most of his life, the inspiration for Challenger Park was more recent.

"I was visiting in (the) Clear Lake (area near Houston) and went to watch my niece play soccer. My sister pointed out a woman on the sidelines who was cheering for her own daughter and whispered to me, 'She just got back from space.'

"I remember looking at that woman, that astronaut, and being transfixed by the utter normality of the life she was living here on earth. I guess I'd always imagined astronauts as unapproachable superheroes, and here was this soccer mom who just completely shattered that particular stereotype. And the more I thought about her, and the strange tensions between family and career that must rule her life, the more I realized there was a compelling story here."

To write Challenger Park, Harrigan made frequent trips to NASA for research on the technical aspects of flying in space. He also interviewed four female astronauts.

"So I asked them questions like, 'Do you worry about your children? How do you explain this to your children? Do you have second thoughts about going into space? Do you get scared at liftoff? What's your day like? What's your childcare like?' I just wanted to confirm that I was on the right track."

"I've struggled my entire career to juggle my family and my work, both logistically and emotionally. I've had to travel a good bit. On occasion I've had to do things that were not completely safe. And you ask yourself really hard questions about, 'How is this affecting my family? What are my responsibilities to them, what are my responsibilities to myself as a writer?'"

"Obviously my wife and children are more important to me than anything. But in every part of the workplace-and I think it's certainly true for women-whether you should allow parenthood to destroy your own dreams and ambitions…is that good for your children? I think not. It's always sort of this fluid relationship between your own responsibilities and your own ambitions, and you just have to keep examining that."

How did Harrigan so successfully climb into the mind of a working mother?

"Having three daughters and a wife, I feel like I understand women just by virtue of having lived in an estrogen-rich environment. I still don't know about clothes. I have to call people and ask what she would be wearing. But, the issues that women deal with are not foreign to me. There is still a much clearer (career) path for me (as a man). I'm hoping that will change, but it's harder to be a working mother than it is to be a working father."

One of the people Harrigan calls in a pinch is author Elizabeth Crook.

She says, "The way we usually work is that Steve shows me his drafts as he writes them, and I will point out anything that doesn't ring true. He's got three daughters and lots of female friends, so he is very clued-in. Every now and then I would say, 'Wait a minute, her response would be different from what you have.' But it's so rare because he's very astute from the woman's point of view."

Seconding that opinion is Katy Flato of San Antonio. She had been Harrigan's assistant at Texas Monthly. Now she is a member of the National Advisory Board of Gemini Ink, a San Antonio-based nonprofit organization that nurtures writers and readers and builds community through literature and the related arts. Flato says, "I think his female lead character in Gates of the Alamo is a terrific role model in a book full of big male characters. She is the one I actually think shines through the most."

Crook also praises Harrigan's ability to bring his fictional characters to life.

"He knows how to write beautifully as far as the language, but he also understands human motives and that allows him to create these wonderful characters who behave like real people," Crook says. "He doesn't pass judgment on them. They are not prototypes and they are never cliché. You know these characters from the moment you are introduced to them."

Next up for Harrigan

Challenger Park hits the bookstores this month and Harrigan is already at work on a few new projects. Working with Bill Broyles, Harrigan just cowrote a feature film adaptation of Conn Iggulden's best-selling Emperor novels about Julius Caesar. This could be the breakthrough project that allows Harrigan-after more than thirteen years of getting his scripts produced on television-to see his work on the big screens of mainstream theatres.

Harrigan says, "Bill was my editor at Texas Monthly years and years ago, and we're old friends. Bill wrote a number of high-profile screenplays like Cast Away, Apollo 13 and Jarhead. And he had been approached by this production company, Spitfire (Pictures), to adapt the first of these novels. He asked me if I would be interested in doing it with him."

Broyles says, "I knew we wouldn't have any of the usual writer hang-ups, that we'd both just be focused on what made the script good, no matter who came up with the good stuff-and it was usually him. It was just like back in the Texas Monthly days, except this time Steve got to edit me!"

Harrigan and Broyles are hoping that, over time, three movies will be made from their collaboration on the Emperor project.

Harrigan is also producing a movie of his own.

"A movie producer friend of mine named Eric Williams (producer of Tommy Lee Jones' latest movie, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada) convinced me that I should write a script based on my first novel, Aransas., And we are trying to produce it ourselves because we'd like to maintain control of it. It involves dolphins. I don't want to catch any wild dolphins. I don't want to exploit any wild dolphins that are in captivity. I want to do it in a way that I feel like I have a clean conscience about it."

What is it like to adapt a novel that he wrote more than twenty-five years ago?

"I went back and read the book, which was an extremely painful but fascinating meeting of my old self and my new self. The senior guy wanted to kick the younger guy in the rear. I could have sat him down and said, 'The story is moving too slowly. You haven't really thought about what the story is about or given any real attention to the characters.' There were scenes that were so talky and static that I couldn't wait to transform into something cinematic."

Harrigan says that it felt good to see how much progress he's made as a writer but he was embarrassed to know how much he had to learn at the point when his first novel was published.

"I'm sure twenty-five years from now I'll look back on Challenger Park or Gates of the Alamo and be horrified, but I'll want to keep chugging ahead. As a writer, everything that you've learned and created in the past is like a big wave gathering sand and force. Every once in a while it's good to look back and see what the cumulative components of that wave are."

Laura Ohata is a freelance writer living in Austin, blissfully balancing a writing career with motherhood. You may e-mail Laura at lohata@goodlifemag.com.

Works by Stephen Harrigan

Novels

Challenger Park (2006)-Lucy Kincheloe is caught between her dream of flying in space and the horror of possibly leaving her children without a mother. When her husband's floundering career at NASA threatens Lucy's ambitions, their marriage begins to fall apart. Challenger Park addresses the often overlooked struggle of women to balance career with family life.

Gates of the Alamo (2000)-When a young boy's pregnant girlfriend commits suicide, he runs away. His mother, an innkeeper, and a botanist named McGowan follow after the boy and all three find themselves trapped in the Alamo during the 1836 battle. A New York Times best-seller, Harrigan's well-researched and lively fictionalized account cuts through the Alamo myth while paying homage to the Texas mystique.

Jacob's Well (1984)-This is a haunting tale of scuba diving in the underwater cave hidden in the bottom of a sinkhole in Wimberley, Texas. Jacob's Well was cited as one of the year's best books by The Washington Post and The Dallas Morning News.

Aransas (1980)-Jeff Dowling returns to his hometown of Aransas, a small fishing village on the Texas Gulf Coast. While trying to train a pair of dolphins that are supposed to become tourist attractions, Jeff falls in love with the creatures he is trying to train and the woman who wants to return them to the wild. Aransas was listed by The New York Times as a notable book of 1980.

Nonfiction books

Comanche Midnight (1995)-This is a collection of some of Harrigan's best articles and essays that first appeared in Texas Monthly. The title work deals with the difficulties of American Indian life and modern-day attempts to maintain a dying cultural heritage. Harrigan says that the essays in the book, "address my old preoccupations with worlds that have vanished, communication that is sealed off, and perceptions that are out of reach…."

Water and Light: A Diver's Journey to a Coral Reef (1992)-This is an account of scuba diving off the coast of Grand Turk Island, which lies in the vicinity of Cuba and Haiti. Captivating depictions of sea turtles, polyps, stingrays and the beauty on the coral reef inspire readers to take up scuba diving.

A Natural State (1988)-Harrigan's first collection of articles originally published in Texas Monthly depict the scrubby landscape of the Lone Star State, what we love and hate about living here, and why we stay.

Teleplays

The Colt (2005)-Set during the American Civil War, The Colt follows a Union cavalryman whose mare gives birth on the battlefield, and his struggle to keep the mare and colt alive. Based on an adaptation of a short story by the 1965 Nobel Prize winning author Mikhail Sholokhov, Harrigan's adaptation of The Colt was nominated for a Writers Guild of America award in 2005.

Widow on the Hill (2005)-Inspired by a true story that appeared in Vanity Fair, Widow on the Hill is about a beautiful woman who marries an older man. When her husband dies of suspicious causes, she finds herself one of the wealthiest landowners in the region.

King of Texas (2002)-When a cattle baron divides his land among his three daughters, he finds himself rejected. Staring Patrick Stewart and Marcia Gay Harden, King of Texas is a retelling of William Shakespeare's King Lear set in 1842.

Beyond the Prairie, Part 2: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2002)-After losing their home in a fire, Wilder moves to Missouri with her husband Almanzo Wilder and daughter Rose, where they settle and build a house. Almanzo falls ill, leaving Laura to work the land alone until a widowed farmer comes along.

Murder on the Orient Express (2001)-Agatha Christie's masterpiece moves forward to the twenty-first century. After solving a case in Istanbul, Hercule Poirot heads back to London aboard the Orient Express. When a landslide blocks the train tracks and a dead man is discovered in his compartment, Poirot, played by Alfred Molina, searches for the murderer with the help of his laptop computer and other high-tech gizmos.

Take Me Home: The John Denver Story (2000)-The son of an Air Force officer and flight instructor, John spent his teens learning to play the guitar and write songs, without the encouragement of his father. Adopting the name "Denver" for the city in Colorado that he loved so much, he moves to California to pursue his dreams as a musician. The famous musician was played by Chad Lowe.

Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2000)-Laura Ingalls lives on the prairie in South Dakota where she eventually meets her future husband, Almanzo Wilder. After a crop is lost to hail, their son dies and their home burns down, the Wilders make some difficult choices about how to move on with their lives. Based on the true story behind the life of author Laura Ingalls Wilder, Harrigan presents a more hardscrabble version of the inspiration behind the Little House books.

Cleopatra (1999)-After her younger brother seizes the throne of Egypt, Cleopatra lives in exile until Julius Caesar arrives. Seducing Caesar results in Cleopatra's return to power and the birth of a son, but things go awry when they travel to Rome for a visit. Caesar's wife and followers treat Cleopatra as a vanquished harlot. When the Roman Senate assassinates Caesar, Marc Antony and Octavian divide up the Roman Empire, with Antony taking Egypt and eventually Cleopatra. Harrigan's adaptation is based on the novel The Memoirs of Cleopatra by Margaret George.

The O.J. Simpson Story (1995)-This film covers the life of the star NFL running back and Heisman Trophy winner leading up to the infamous murder trial for his ex-wife, Nicole Simpson. While the film doesn't necessarily say that O.J. was guilty or innocent, it does tell the story of the influences that might have led him astray.

The Last of His Tribe (1992)-Ishi, the last remaining survivor of the Yahi Indian tribe, stumbles onto a farm where a doctor takes him in and attempts to teach him how to live among white people. In spite of new friendships and prosperity, Ishi never overcomes the loss of his family, his tribe, and his culture. HBO's The Last of His Tribe stars Jon Voight and Graham Greene.

-Laura Ohata, with material drawn from publisher's copy, Publishers Weekly and IMDB.com.