A  Clean, Well-Lighted Place

(My January 2024 commentary for Brazos Living Magazine)

Sometime in the early 1980s James Michener, the famous author of forty or so novels, most of them as fat as phone books (for those of you who remember phone books), paid a visit to southern Brazoria County. 

The purpose of Mr. Michener’s trip, I think I remember, was to travel with a professional well digger for a couple of days as he went about his work, even though he didn’t need to have a well dug.  What he needed was to know exactly how to dig one. He was well known for the extensive research he did for his huge books that covered long spans of time and filled upwards of a thousand pages each. And he was determined to get every little detail right.  At the time of his visit he was writing his novel Texas, and part of his story, however minute,  must have involved the digging of a well.

While he was down here he agreed to speak at a gathering to celebrate the opening of a newly constructed planetarium at the Brazosport Center for the Arts & Sciences in Clute.  Which was fitting since his most recently published novel had been Space, a historical novel set in our race with Russia to, with apologies to Captain James Kirk, ‘boldly go where no man has gone before’.  And also, of course, because Michener’s books were wildly popular and his appearance would likely draw a huge crowd. Which it did.

Some time was given at the end of his talk for questions from the standing-room-only audience.  The one I remember wasn’t even a question, but a compliment.  Some one thanked him for the thorough research he obviously did before writing. Michener leaned back in the comfortable armchair that had been provided for him (he was then close to eighty) and said “Thank you.” Then he said that complementing a historical novelist on how well he did his research was like complementing a bus driver on how well he changed gears.  “If he didn’t know how to change gears,” he said, stretching out the last word in his crusty Pennsylvania Dutch brogue, “he should have never gotten on the bus.”

I’ve never forgotten that.  Especially when I took a stab, some years later, at writing a historical novel myself.   But before I did the digging into the past that he suggested I read several of his massive tomes to see how he worked all his findings so seamlessly into his storyline. Then I ‘got on the bus’ and got my historical facts in order before writing a single sentence.   

I’ve always counted it as a blessing that I was in the audience that night, and not just because of what I learned from that celebrated speaker. But also because I’m pretty sure it was my first time to step into that magic building that sits comfortably among pretty trees in front of Brazosport College. And it proved to be a game changer for a young high school teacher who’d recently wandered down from the piney woods of East Texas, not knowing a soul in town, to take a job I intended to keep for a year or two and ended up keeping until I retired.

Over the years the Center became a regular stop for me.  I enjoyed no telling how many plays in its intimate small theater and musicals and other events in its larger one, saw fine exhibitions in the art gallery, strolled through the collections in the museum, and attended more than a few anniversary and retirement and engagement parties there.  I made myself at home in its spacious studio often, teaching summertime drawing classes to children and calligraphy classes to adults and later conducting a bunch of creative writing workshops and writers’ peer critique sessions. During the pandemic I conducted those writing workshops via Zoom, since we were all in home confinement for the duration. I had considerable hesitation about conducting an interactive class while sitting in front of a computer screen. But my friend  Wes Copeland, the amazing director of the Center, assured me it would be fine. And it turned out to be better than fine, largely because of Wes, who helped me through a trial run of the procedure and was himself a participant in the first one, which was devoted to planning and writing a memoir.  I suspect he signed up to make sure I didn’t screw up the technical doings, and in no time at all I was chatting with the rows of faces in their cubbyholes on my screen as if they were in the room with me. The only downside was not having the platters of brownies or cookies that some participants brought to class. That, and not actually spending time in the building where some of my best memories were made.

Hemingway, by naming one of his short stories ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’, coined a term for anywhere that is welcoming, comfortable, friendly, nurturing and safe. Which perfectly describes the Center for the Arts & Sciences.

That long ago night when I first found it, a fellow teacher came over to me in the lobby full of happy folks sipping punch and eating cookies after the presentation.  She was holding a freshly autographed copy of James Michener’s novel Space and was positively beaming.

“Don’t you just love to come here?” she asked.

Yes.  I do.