Steplings

"You know when some horrible accident occurs and you can't look away? Something that commands your reluctant horrified attention? Like a train wreck, plane crash, volcanic eruption? Meet Jason Sanborn. He is that train....."

— Michelle Lancaster, Texas Book Girl and Library Thing

 "A shared road trip creates a bond between two step-siblings, but this inward-looking character study focuses at least as much on their parents. Mapping a complex web of emotional ties and stress fractures, Smith constructs long paragraphs of rumination and painful flashbacks that move among all the major characters’ points of view (with one significant exception). Exercising a real knack for making poor decisions, 19-year-old dropout Sanborn impulsively sets out one night to hitch from his Dallas suburb to Austin to confront his longtime girlfriend Lisa, who has just sent a “Dear John” letter from college—and finds himself saddled with 11-year-old stepsister Emily, desperate to see her divorced (and philandering) father. Meanwhile, Sanborn’s widowed father Burl and Emily’s mother Lily, both recovering alcoholics, find their sincere efforts to forge a marriage sharply challenged by their children’s unexplained disappearance. The author tucks in complications and minor adventures for all (the young folk are never put into real danger), plus a realistic if poignant resolution, but these only form a backdrop for his exploration of each character’s constellation of strengths and flaws. Self-analytical teen readers who find plenty to ponder in the heads of Sanborn, Burl, Emily and Lisa may be disappointed, though, that the author never gives Emily a fair chance to have her say. Slow, a little weak in the plot department, but rich in psychological insight and lit by occasional flashes of humor.”

Kirkus Reviews

”Smith’s prose is rich and sophisticated, yet accessible, and the dialogue is right on….Though Jason and Emily grapple with universal teen issues, their troubles feel like uncharted territory when expressed through pitch-perfect narrative voices. Steplings is a friendly, hopeful, humorous, and thoughtful book about growing up,” said Powell, though “watching Jason self-destruct is akin to watching someone in a horror film go down into the basement.”

Mary Powell Auslander and Galveston Rose

“With Steplings, Charlie Smith has flawlessly captured the experience of being young, misunderstood, and full of longing. He manages to craft a tale that is at once gorgeously heartbreaking and a page-turning adventure. His ear for dialogue and lyrical prose are irresistible, as are his complex, lovable Jason and Emily, these aren't characters in a novel, they're people I know. Smith has accomplished that rarest of literary feats: to leave the reader on the final page equal parts exhilarated at having finished a gripping work of fiction, and forlorn at not being able to spend more time in the world he crafted.”

— Melissa Kirsch, author of The Girl's Guide to Absolutely Everything

“C.W. Smith’s characters, including the ones encountered by Emily and Jason on their way to Austin, are fully-fleshed and memorable.  Even though I came to dislike some of them intensely, I could always understand the deluded logic they used to justify their behavior – not that I came to like them any more for it.  It did take me a while to get into Smith’s rhythm but as the relationship between Emily and Jason began to evolve I started to lose myself in the story.  Steplings is, in effect, a dual coming-of-age novel during which two very different young people help each other to grow up.  The 19-year-old high school dropout and the brilliant eleven-year-old little girl make a formidable team.  In the process of making their way to Austin, they learn a lot about each other, themselves, and life.  They grow up – despite the clumsiness of their parents.”  Bookchase

“While on the road, Jason and Emily have a variety of interactions with people who bring Jason out of his own mind, while revealing to the reader in bits and pieces the events leading up to Jason and Emily's adventure. The relationship of Jason and Emily is beautifully done while not over-analysed; these aren't siblings, they have been thrown together by the arbitrary marriage of their parents. Jason is a screw-up but his heart is in the right place and his character makes self-conscious justifications that any reader will recall experiencing in their teens. All in all the joy out of reading this book is mainly in the journey and the characterisation, and in these regards it is excellent.” Illiterarty.com

REVIEW AND INTERVIEW WHITE ROCK WEEKLY

By Lucy Higginbotham

It’s funny how events in your youth can circle back to you later in life. When Charles William (C.W.) Smith was an oil field hand loading pipe onto trucks, he probably didn’t think it would show up in one of his novels decades later.  

But it did, and so did several other events from his life that informed the themes and events of many of his nine novels.

His newest publication, “Steplings,” hits the book signing tour next week at SMU’s DeGolyer Library on Thurs., Sept. 29. An hors d’oeuvre reception celebrates the launch from 6-6:30 p.m. followed by a reading and signing until 8 p.m.

It is appropriate that SMU begins his multi-city tour because he has been a professor of creative writing there since 1980 and served as a Dedman Family Distinguished Professor in the English department. Currently, he does not have a class load and plans to officially retire next May.

“Nobody ever had a better job, but it feels a little weird not to be teaching or preparing lessons right now,” he said.

“I don’t miss the involuntary reading, but I will miss being around smart young people.”

Smith’s career as a writer spans several decades and genres including novels, short stories, a memoir, and non-fiction. For a short time during the 80s and 90s, he penned the ethics column for Esquire magazine and was a film critic for Texas Monthly. Prior to that he was a reporter and film critic for The Dallas Times Herald.

The process of writing has sometimes been a struggle, but always rewarding.

“It has taken an average of two to three years to produce a book. You write what you can write, and I read a lot of fiction as a kid. I was addicted to creating imaginary worlds, plus they’re cheap to build,” he added with a wry smile.

Sometimes the process bogs him down.

“I enjoy research, but it confuses you – what to keep in and what to leave out. My initial manuscript for ‘Purple Hearts’ was 1000 pages but got pared down to 438,” he said.

Sometimes feedback from peers makes him rethink his project.

“All three of my friends had the same feedback for ‘Steplings,’ that it takes off about page 140. And I thought ‘I’m in deep doo doo if it doesn’t take off until page 140,’ so I had to re-structure the plot,” he continued.

His imaginary worlds traverse space and time from World War II (“Purple Hearts”) to the oil fields in Oklahoma and New Mexico (“Understanding Women” and “Buffalo Nickel”) to here in Texas where others are set (“Gabriel’s Eye” and “Steplings.”)

His resume is filled with more awards than you can shake an eraser at and includes some prestigious kudos from the literary world such as twice winning the Jesse H. James Novel Award from the Texas Institute of Letters and twice landing the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships.

Three themes seem to emerge from his nine novels. Three books concern the lives of young men, their love troubles and coming of age.

“I suppose that part of my life made a big impression on me,” Smith mused.

Others address the racial and cultural conflicts in the Southwest where Smith has spent his life.

“Those are features of the world I grew up in. They still are a feature. It interested me to take on the conflicts around me,” he said.

Marriage, in both its supportive and unsavory forms, creates the foundation for four other publications.

With no more papers to grade, Smith spends more time puttering around his home down the street from St. Thomas Aquinas, discussing literature with fellow writers in what he calls his “Alice Munroe Lunches,” named after his favorite short story author, and embracing voluntary reading.

“I long for the day when I can read a whole issue of The New Yorker,” he sighed.

He is a one-book-at-a-time kind of reader and has a varied palette. His most unusual flavor of choice? Harlequin Romance novels. In Spanish.

“Smith has created rich, complex characters in the guises of his two young protagonists. It is rare for a writer to capture so keenly and so accurately the everyday thoughts and speech of young characters and temper them so well with moments of soul-searching revelation. Smith has also created a wonderfully complex character in Burl, a man seeking his son's approval yet at a loss as to how to forge a relationship with this young man who is making a painful transition to adulthood….Steplings is a richly detailed, complex novel. It is filled with issues of social and personal conscience, inhabited by characters a lot like us: people needing and seeking meaning in a broken, fragile world, people always on an odyssey of one sort or another. Steplings is deceptively quiet at times, subtly and wisely offering several contradictory yet valid perspectives to eternal verities and conflicts within a dense yet accessible prose style. Granted, Smith has given us characters to identify with but, more importantly, he has given us characters to remember.” Mira Cranfill - Pembroke Magazine

“Smith provides a magnifying mirror in which parents will recognize their image and teen-agers can learn a few things about parents and teenagers. You will be dismayed by the choices both parents and children make. You will be reminded of the dumb things you did, and you'll want to shout at them to stop, to think about what they are doing and the consequences of their actions. You will also understand the need that drives them, the need for a family where you will always be at home…. It's a wonderful story for parents and should be required reading for teens to meet this ordinary family and share those three extraordinary days with them. They will break your heart but you'll also want to hug them and welcome them home. And wonder at the end if Jason again made a bad choice.”

— Robert Flynn San Antonio Express-News

REVIEW AND INTERVIEW By David Martindale FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM

“Sometimes an author just never knows where the next story idea will come from -- or where it will lead.

Consider C.W. Smith, a North Texas novelist whose latest is Steplings (TCU Press, $32.95).

The retired Southern Methodist University professor was musing about the audacity of a "squatter" on campus, and somehow that morphed into a coming-of-age, road-trip adventure involving a 19-year-old lovesick boy and his 11-year-old stepsister.

"It's very odd," Smith says. "I don't always know why things take the direction they take."

So he says, but don't believe for a minute that he wasn't in complete control of his work.

Not only does Smith deftly enter the head of 19-year-old Jason, a troubled high-school dropout from Mesquite who gets a "Dear John" letter from his college girlfriend, but he's also at home  inhabiting the thoughts of Jason's exasperated dad, whose new marriage is quickly coming apart.

It's elegantly written, sometimes funny, often heartbreaking, and it never hits a false note.

Here is the situation that provided the germ of Smith's story idea:

"Years ago we had a squatter on the campus," he recalls. "She was sleeping on the couches in the library and the lounges and going into the break rooms and getting food and passing herself off as a student.

"None of which has anything to do with my present book except that when Jason and Emily get to Austin, they spend one night in the UT library. That's the only connection.

"The first thing that happened after that was I changed it from a squatter to a young guy who had come to campus to find the girl who had dumped him. And my story took off from there."

Steplings, Smith's ninth novel, isn't the first book in which he has channeled the thoughts of a teenager. Understanding Women, published by TCU Press in 1998, was narrated by a 16-year-old.

"Being that young is still vivid for me," he says. "I think I have more trouble imagining myself in the mind of someone my own age."

Smith retired in May. But only now, with summer over, is he beginning to feel "an instructional itch" that he can't scratch. "I know I'm going to miss having the company of smart young people," he says.

The award-winning author wasn't always a man of letters.

"I read a lot as a kid, but I never thought about being a writer," Smith says. "In fact, I remember in high school that we had the choice between taking an English course that would be of the college level and required a lot of writing and a less-demanding English course that would allow you to build a guillotine when you read A Tale of Two Cities. I chose the second one."

But while studying at the University of North Texas in Denton, he discovered Steinbeck, Faulkner and Dostoevsky and was hooked.

"There were books that spoke to me," he says. "I read all of the "Cannery Row" series right off the bat, and I felt that I was encountering characters in Steinbeck that I had never seen represented in literature, this blue-collar world that I was very familiar with when I worked in the oil fields. I thought, 'Oh, man, you can write about things like this?' And the more I read this kind of stuff, the more I wanted to write it."

REVIEW BY JOY TIPPING — DALLAS MORNING NEWS

“Texas novelist C.W. Smith has received just about every literary award the state and region bestow, and his latest work, the sprightly and wise Steplings, will no doubt add to his reputation as a Lone Star star. Set in 2003, the book starts out in Dallas and, like its young protagonists, eventually makes its way to Austin . Nineteen-year-old Jason and his 11-year-old stepsister, Emily, form the heart of the story. He’s a boy-man adrift, missing his mother, who has died of cancer. Awkwardly entering adulthood, he’s out of work and hoping, best-case scenario, that one of his applications to “all three Mesquite Pep Boys” will bear fruit.

Emily is reeling from her parents’ divorce and her mother Lily’s marriage to Jason’s dad, Burl — a romance begun when the couple met at Alcoholics Anonymous. (Burl had been sober, but his wife’s death yanked him off the wagon.)

The new marriage, fraught with blended-family issues, is also haunted by the dead wife, as Burl stumbles on constant reminders of Sue: “In the kitchen utility drawer, a nightlight with a plastic translucent angel that Sue’d gotten for Jason’s room when he was a baby … a small muslin bag she’d stuffed with sage. … It was a little as if Sue had been reincarnated as a pack rat who crept about at 2 a.m. planting those little land mines of memory.”

When Jason decides to take off to Austin to find his AWOL girlfriend, Emily forcefully tags along to see her dad, who lives there. The relationship between the stepsiblings wobbles, then strengthens as they discover one another’s passions, weaknesses and unexpected soul-pockets of fortitude. Back at home, the already-fraying ties between Lily and Burl come close to snapping, especially after Lily’s fear results in an Amber Alert being issued and the police looking at Jason as a possible kidnapper and child molester.

Smith’s narrative especially soars in scenes where Jason and Emily meet others on their way south. They hitch a ride with “wandering Africans” Jacob and Emmanuel, whose odor of “cooking oil, sweat and an unidentified spice that might’ve come from their food or something stowed in the van … marked them as exotics.” The sound of a male chorale purrs through their van from a CD or tape. It “lured Jason’s ear, and when he asked about it, Jacob said, ‘They are singing hymns in Dinka.’”

Smith’s most abundant gift is his superb way with description, setting scenes with such veracity that the reader’s senses are at once fully engaged. But he sometimes falls a bit too in love with a specific vision; the notion of a “swimming pool full of good vodka” is one that I’ll never need to encounter again.

Steplings comes to a completely realistic, bittersweet conclusion that will disappoint readers who like their endings tied in neat bows. But Smith is no fantasist — he’s a writer who can be depended on to write life as he actually sees it, not as he (or we) might wish it were.”

REVIEW - AUSTIN CHRONICLE

“It's said that kids adapt to change better than adults. What's usually not mentioned is that predicting the nature of that adaptation is nigh impossible. In Steplings, the characters struggle with the usual destructive forces within a family: divorce, death, alcoholism, poor communication, and the stupidity that accompanies youth. C.W. Smith, who teaches at Southern Methodist University, tosses in a crisis and explores how the cards play out for the older and younger members of a Dallas family.

Burl and Lily, widowed and divorced, respectively, find comfort in the stability of their new marriage. That stability does not extend to the child each brought to the marriage. High school dropout Jason hit the skids after the death of his mother, putting Burl over his head in the choppy waters of parenting. The aggressive nature of Jason's anger contrasts sharply with the quiet resentment of Emily, Lily's 11-year-old daughter. It only takes a letter from Jason's sweetheart breaking off their relationship to ignite the powder keg Burl and Lily have unwittingly created by coming together.

The book splits its time between the kids' exploits on the road, as they escape what to them is a situation beyond salvage, and Lily and Burl's desperation in the absence of their children. The juxtaposition of these two couples provides the engaging core of the novel. Smith positions the kids' quick adaptation to their ever-changing situation in stark contrast to Burl's and Lily's opposing and unbending plans for retrieving the runaways. While Emily and Jason manage to create a tenuous friendship, their parents' relationship buckles and cracks from the pressure. And despite parental niceties insisting that love is equal for biological kids and stepchildren, when push comes to shove (and it does here), parents choose their offspring over everything and everyone else.

Even though these kinds of relationship dynamics have been mined many times before, Smith's story rings true and never feels stale. A dash of international politics spices up the personal politics of Steplings in a way that isn't forced or incongruent. The only misstep is a brief glimpse into the life of Jason's girlfriend that reads like a long parenthetical to the real story – a story of bonds between siblings and spouses, parents and children, and the fallout when they pull in different directions.”

REVIEW DALLAS OBSERVER

By Brentney Hamilton

“SMU students may remember C.W. Smith as the curmudgeonly creative writing prof who had permanent dibs on a particular wooden chair in Dallas Hall; others know him as the mentor and ally who helped them find their voice, or who simply told them for the first time that they were good at something. 

Smith left SMU this spring to pursue his own writing full-time and to enjoy a bit of the sweet life: traveling with his wife, Marcia; caring for a disabled -- but adorable -- geriatric pooch; kayaking up a storm on White Rock Lake; and endearingly ranting about local Realtors' jingoistic insistence that his lawn bear an American flag each Fourth of July. Former students held an impromptu retirement soiree at Ozona Grill and Bar (where Smith had historically held the last class of each semester), and if the turn-out was any indication of his influence as a teacher, Smith left a lasting impression on more than a few grateful SMU grads. 

Smith has worked as a freelance film reviewer for the Observer and has also freelanced for other less-sophisticated (we kid, we kid) publications such as Esquire and Texas Monthly. As an artist, he has produced nine novels, a collection of short stories and a memoir, and has been honored with a host of prestigious awards, including most recently the 2011 Lon Tinkle Award for "sustained excellence in a literary career" from the Texas Institute of Letters. Smith awaits his newest release, Steplings, which hits stores tomorrow, September 29. Be sure to RSVP for a reception, reading and book signing beginning at 6 p.m. tomorrow evening at DeGolyer Library on the SMU campus.

Steplings details three days in the lives of 19-year-old Jason and and 11-year-old Emily, children from strikingly different backgrounds, united both in the new home their parents have formed together, as well as their own respective desires to flee it. When the pair decide to do just that -- inadvertently and unknowingly eliciting an Amber Alert -- their impetuous hitchhike across Texas results in an even more dire situation for Jason, now legally an adult, and already awaiting a court date for assault charges stemming from an accident and its subsequent misunderstanding by an injured party. 

As Jason spirals, we readers witnesses his naive attempts to heal overwhelming depression with love, substance and music, and we wonder helplessly at the grief-stricken young man's succession of bad decisions. Along the way, the precocious and charmingly "truculent" Emily finds, too, that home is not always where one has last left it. However, Steplings is not merely a coming-of-age novel -- while we see Jason and Emily come to terms with lives that neither have chosen, it is too the story of young people encountering seemingly insurmountable class systems that affect who they can and do love, as well as their options and futures.”