Writer-editor collaboration emphasized at Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference in big, bold Texas

      BOB Blog note: Joe Hight recently attended the recent Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, which he calls the best in the country for nonfiction writers. He also wrote this blog.

       No one should doubt The Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference is all Texan. It's big. It's bold. It's loud. And it even has a Friday night "Southwest Soiree" at a place called the Austin Ranch, a western-theme banquet hall near the Hilton hotel where the conference is held in Grapevine.
         It's also big and bold in that "The Mayborn," as it's called, brings in some of the top nonfiction authors in the country. The 11th annual one was no different with famed author Barbara Ehrenreich being among the speakers.
         One panel that was particularly interesting was called "Lessons in Collaboration: Two Nonfiction Writers Worked with a Highly Involved Editor to Produce Acclaimed Works of Literary Nonfiction." (You see, the titles of the workshops are big, bold -- and long, too.) It featured Jeff Hobbs, author of the recently published "The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace" and Helen Thorpe, who wrote "Soldier Girls: the Battles of Three Women at Home and at War." The editor of their books was novelist Colin Harrison, who's also vice president and senior editor at Scribner.
          All three don't live in Texas and don't fit the big and bold image either. Hobbs will call you "sir" and jokes he doesn't like to read Harrison's novels because they're too dark. Thorpe doesn't look at all like the former wife of a national political figure, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper. She also admitted Harrison had to push her to get out of her house to see the nightlife of her book's main characters. Harrison kept deferring to the two writers to question and talk to each other during the workshop. He also seems to be the type of quiet but demanding editor every writer wants or should have.
            "Both books had an extraordinary degree of difficulty," Harrison said. However, that didn't stop him from calling for the writers to rise to "a level that cannot be faked; it must be summoned by the trumpet in the mountains."
            "A writer should be really challenged," he said.
            Hobbs' book was about Robert Peace, his best friend and roommate at Yale. Peace was an outgoing, intelligent young man who also happened to sell marijuana on the side, Hobbs said, and who was "killed violently and painfully," surrounded by marijuana in a house about a mile from where he grew up in Newark, N.J.
            His book is on the "Staff Picks" of recommendations at Best of Books.
            "I had no claim to objectivity. I cared a lot about my subject," Hobbs said about Robert Peace, who he called "Rob." But I also "had the responsibility of telling the whole story."
            Thorpe said her challenge in writing "Soldier Girls" was in organizing the shelves full of notebooks and the "mountain of material," as Harrison called it. She followed the lives of three women soldiers, who were all deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, over a 12-year period. She finally had to resort to software in which she could dictate her notebooks out loud and then refer to them later.
              Hobbs and Thorpe said Harrison likes proper usage of words, strong verbs and movement in writing. He'll push you to get precious details and to connect the flaws that propel the "human mystery."
              And, Hobbs said, he'll question you if he thinks there's too much swearing in your book.
              But, most of all, an editor of Harrison's caliber will keep encouraging you "to look for the trumpets," whether you live in Texas or not.