11.26.2017  What Glenn Dromgoole teaches us — about journalism, writing, bookselling, and essential Texas reading

For seventeen autumns, the West Texas Book Festival in Abilene has been one of Texas’s most highly regarded literary events. Glenn Dromgoole has chaired the festival since its beginning, but he has decided it’s time for someone else to take the helm. An author, bookseller, publisher, and columnist, Dromgoole still has plenty to keep him busy — and he took time out of his Thanksgiving week to be interviewed by email.

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: Where did you grow up, and how did it later influence your career path?

GLENN DROMGOOLE: I grew up in the small town of Sour Lake, just west of Beaumont. My dad was the Baptist minister there for more than forty years and was very active in the community and preached about social change and the worth and dignity of all people when it wasn’t a very popular thing to do in the early 1960s. He was an avid newspaper reader, taking the Houston Post in the morning and the Beaumont Journal in the afternoon. My mother was a teacher and the kindest person I ever knew. I hope some of their passion and compassion rubbed off on me.

I started writing for the hometown newspaper (mostly sports) and was a stringer for the Beaumont paper while I was in high school. I intended to come back to the town and be the newspaper editor after I finished college, but my career took me in a different direction.

What was your first newspaper job after that?

I was editor of the student newspaper at Texas A&M, The Battalion, during a period of sweeping change at the university in the ’60s. It was a great experience, and I knew then that I wanted to be a newspaper editor someday. After graduation, I worked briefly for the Beaumont Enterprise before getting on at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where I worked for fourteen years as a reporter, assistant city editor, editorial writer, and assistant managing editor. I left there to be editor of the Bryan–College Station Eagle in 1981 and stayed there nearly five exciting years before going to Abilene.

What brought you to Abilene?

The Abilene Reporter-News and the Eagle were part of the same newspaper company, Harte-Hanks. In 1985 the Abilene editor was retiring and I was offered the job. The Reporter-News was a bigger newspaper, with a morning and afternoon edition, and the publisher wanted someone to come in and change the newsroom culture. They had never brought in an editor from outside before. It was a great challenge and really a lot of fun. I quickly felt accepted in the community and really loved the city. Still do, thirty-two years later.

How did journalism change during your career?

Of course there were many technical changes, going from manual typewriter to computer. I had been at the Star-Telegram just three years or so when the editor announced that we would be getting scanners that would read our stories (typed on electric typewriters) and set them into type. It was a nightmare. We produced some newspapers that were barely legible for a while until they worked out the kinks. And then when we went to computers, we didn’t have nearly enough for everyone to have their own, so there would be a scramble to get a computer and write your story on deadline. And the copy editors had to share computers as well. Fights literally would break out over computer access.

Journalism changed for the better for a while. I was there during the heyday of Texas journalism, I think. The Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Times Herald were battling it out and really raising the bar for excellence in Texas journalism. The Star-Telegram had to get better to compete, and the rest of the state’s dailies did, too. Staffs got bigger. Pay got better. Everyone was more competitive, and I think it was good for readers, for better government, and of course for journalists.

The recession in 1986, when oil dropped to nine dollars a barrel, hurt newspapers. Staffs got smaller, but eventually we came out of it pretty well. I think we did some very good work at Bryan-College Station and Abilene. But the Internet would change everything. In Abilene, we were the second newspaper in Texas to have a website (Austin was first) but we had no idea how it was going to revolutionize newspapers. Newspapers made the mistake, I think, of giving away our content from the beginning, and most newspapers never recovered.

In 1997, Harte-Hanks sold its newspapers to Scripps Howard, and I had a little bit of stock in the company, so I decided to take a couple of years off and see what else I might want to do. I think I got out at the right time. The staff at the Abilene paper is now down to eleven full-time. I think we had fifty-six when I went there in 1985, and still had forty-two or so when I left in 1997.

What was your first break as a book author? How did that change your life?

One night toward the end of 1997 I was sitting around watching TV. I had two little dogs, and they were just lying there on the floor happy to be close to me, and I got to thinking how much better the world would be if we treated each other as well as our dogs treat us. I wrote down thirty-two one-liners on that topic and thought it might make a little gift book, “What We Learn from Our Dogs” or something like that. I found an agent and increased the number of pithy thoughts to 125. She shopped it around, it was rejected by about fifteen major publishers, and she pretty much gave up on it.

Meanwhile, at a bookstore I came across a book by a small publisher, Willow Creek Press from Wisconsin, that paired photographs of black labs with some quotations from famous people. I sent them my “manuscript” (about six pages) and within two weeks the managing editor called and said they wanted to publish my book. They came up with the name What Dogs Teach Us, they found color photos to go with each of my one-liners, and then made a deal in the fall of 1999 with Barnes & Noble to get it on B&N’s $20 and under gift table, nationwide, at Christmas. It went to number 24 on the New York Times Bestseller Plus list in hardcover non-fiction and won the Benjamin Franklin Award as best book of humor. This was my first book, and the only one that ever approached being a best-seller!

That led to What Cats Teach Us and What Horses Teach Us, and then Willow Creek started bringing out calendars every year with those titles, and they still do. What Dogs Teach Us literally changed my life by giving me some financial independence and publishing credibility.

When did you open your first bookstore? When did you open your current bookstore? How has being a bookseller changed in the years that you've been doing it?

My wife, Carol, and I opened Texas Star Trading Company in 2004 in a small space in downtown Abilene. Three years later we moved it to a much larger location downtown, where it is now. When we started Texas Star, it was pretty much a Texas bookstore with a few gift items. We didn’t carry T-shirts or souvenirs or gourmet. Over the years, we’ve grown the other departments while essentially maintaining the Texas book section as a significant, but smaller, aspect of our business. It probably accounts for about a fourth of our sales, or a little more some years depending on if we’ve had any Abilene-specific titles published. Those do the best for us.

Of course, like a lot of independent stores, we know people are going to shop online for larger discounts than we can offer, particularly on best-selling titles. We’re able to compete on Texas books pretty well without deep discounting because most of those aren’t discounted by online sellers either.

Another way we stay competitive is through our Texas bargain book table, featuring overstocked Texas titles at a huge discount, many at one-fourth to one-third the original price. The books are still viable and most of them are still shrink-wrapped. So if someone buys one or two bargain books and one or two regular priced books, they’re going to come out ahead shopping with us.  We also try to feature as many autographed books as we can.

How did the first West Texas Book Festival come about? How many people come to the West Texas Book Festival each year? Why did you decide to turn the helm over to someone else after seventeen years?

We started the West Texas Book & Author Festival in 2001. The first one was Sept. 22, 2001, eleven days after 9/11. I was president of Friends of the Abilene Public Library that year, and we had had a Texas Author Dinner for several years that wasn’t a fund-raiser, it was a fund-loser. So we decided to try something else. One of our staunchest Friends members, Jane Jones, agreed to chair the festival, and I was the program chair. None of us had ever been to a book festival. We just started inviting authors from all over the state, offering them a hotel room and a ticket to the festival luncheon. We ended up with more than a hundred authors, and we put all of them on panels and they all had assigned times in the book-signing area. It was wild.

Since then we’ve fine-tuned several times and changed the name a couple of times, finally settling on the West Texas Book Festival four or five years ago, featuring fewer authors but giving them more exposure with better attendance. We have a Texas Cookbook Gala in conjunction with it that is a fund-raiser. The festival itself pretty much breaks even because we get some grants that help cover the costs.

Total attendance is usually 2,000 or so, but that includes several hundred school kids through our Authors in Schools programs and it also includes people who attend more than one event and are counted at each one. Probably 500–600 different adults attend one or more sessions.

I decided after seventeen years that it was time to turn it over to someone else. I’ve really enjoyed it, but I’m seventy-three years old and I’m tired. And I think the festival needs new leadership with fresh ideas and a fresh perspective. If I stayed involved in a lesser capacity, I’m afraid I would become the old grouch who says, “We tried that back in ought-six and it didn’t work” instead of welcoming new people to try new things. The main thing I brought to the job was my connection to the Texas book scene through my Texas Reads column and our bookstore.

How many years have you written your Texas Reads column? How many newspapers carry it? And how many weeks out of the year do you write that column?

I started the column in March 2002 as an offshoot from our first book festival. I met so many Texas authors at the festival, and I thought they ought to get more attention for their books. About the same time, a lot of medium size newspapers like Abilene and Lubbock were cutting back on their book pages and eliminating their book editors, and so I approached some editors I knew and offered to write a column about Texas books and authors for a small weekly fee.

I started with about eight newspapers, I think, and have had as many as ten or twelve over the years. But in the last several years as newspapers have had to cut staff and other expenses, I’ve lost most of my newspaper accounts. I’m down to three — Abilene, Bryan-College Station, and Lone Star Literary Life. But I still enjoy writing the column and will continue to do it as long as a few papers stay with me.

I write the column nearly every week. I have taken off a couple of weeks in January some years, and probably will do that again this year. But in fifteen-plus years, I’ve written about 800 columns covering probably 2,500 Texas books.

You've written more than thirty books yourself. If someone hasn't read a Glenn Dromgoole book, and would like to read a few, which book or books would you start them with and why?

Oh my. I would probably suggest 101 Essential Texas Books that I did with Carlton Stowers a couple of years ago. It grew out of my column. We put together a list of books that were still in print and that provided a balanced representation of Texas history, culture, and literature. Each of the 101 books gets a one page writeup, and then we mention another 250 or so titles worthy of attention, and they’re all in the index. About 60 percent of the books we listed have been published since 2000.

Some of my other recent books are Coleman Springs USA (a collection of short stories with no sex, no violence, no bad language, and no plot!), and West Texas Stories and West Texas Christmas Stories, two anthologies I edited. They’re all available at our store and our website, TexasStarTrading.com. And I’ll be happy to sign them.

What's next for Glenn Dromgoole?

I plan to keep writing the column and spending a little time at Texas Star. My wife runs the store, I just stop by every now and then and agree with whatever decisions she has made. Seems to work pretty well. I have a book idea or two that I might work on — or might not! I also look forward to attending the West Texas Book Festival and just sitting back and enjoying it.

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