David M. Parsons, 2011 Texas State Poet Laureate and Montgomery County resident, has a new memoir out from TCU Press.
It is called “”Austin Relativity: Coming of Age in the ’60s” and captures what it was like coming of age in the 1960s in Austin.
“Austin Relativity is a graceful and deeply honest memoir of growing up in late 20th Century Austin, Texas — a rich portrait of the city in the days before it became one of the nation’s 21st-century boomtowns,” said Annette Gordon Reed, Pulitzer Prize in History winner in 2009 and the National Book Award winner in 2008 for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Reed is a Conroe native.
To celebrate the new release, Parsons has several upcoming launches and book signings.
The first is from 7 to 9 p.m. Feb. 1 at Book People in Austin. The Conroe launch is from noon to 4 p.m. Feb. 22 at the Conroe Barnes and Noble.
An event in The Woodlands is from 2 to 4 p.m. March 8 at The Woodlands Barnes and Noble.
The memoir was a four-year project from the time Parsons had a reading of the first chapter at the Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers conference at TCU.
Dan Williams, the editor of the press, was in the audience and after the reading he asked Parsons about his plans and told him that they wanted to publish a full book.
The book is the first in TCU’s new series, The Texas Writers Series.
Raised in Austin, he was named by the Texas State Legislature in 2011 to a one-year term as Poet Laureate of Texas, commemorated by the publication of “David M. Parsons New & Selected Poems” by the Texas Christian University Press.
He is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, an Adjunct Professor of English at Lone Star College-Montgomery and founder and co-director of M.C. Literary Arts Council and the Writers In Performance Series.
The series celebrates the birthdays of poets Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and brings in distinguished poets monthly.
Parsons works include Editing Sky, Color of Mourning, Feathering Deep, David M. Parsons New & Selected Poems, Reaching for Longer Water, Far Out: Poems of the 60’s and most recently the memoir.
A bust statue of Parsons is in Conroe’s Founder’s Plaza Park in downtown Conroe.
“Dave Parsons exquisitely captures the essence of what it was like for many to come of age in Austin, Texas, in the 1960s. He writes entertainingly about his antics, running buddies, neighbors, drinking, carousing, road trips, girlfriends, wives, fistfights, athletics, singing, adventures and misadventures, failures and successes, and, yes, tragedies,” said Neal Spelce, an award-winning journalist and prize-winning author who chronicled Austin’s evolution for decades. “He weaves his original poems meaningfully with his story-telling prose. Importantly, his moments of serious reflection, as exemplified by the “Good Friday” section, are at once poignant and powerful – a perfect melding of prose and poetry. Dave’s memoir doesn’t stop with the 1960s. He continues to share his life with you as he settles down (well, almost) into his later years. You should find the entirety of his memories fascinating, as I did.”
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