C. W. Smith

Travel / Essays
C. W. Smith
A Throttled Peacock: Observations on the Old World
Dallas: DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University
978-1-878516-09-1, hardcover, $25.00
160 pages
April 30, 2015

Y’all know how writing guides advise an opening line that grabs the reader straightaway? The first essay in this collection addresses too much togetherness: “Searching for the flower clock in the Jardin Anglais, I think of nifty ways to kill my wife.” Yep.

So begins A Throttled Peacock: show more Observations on the Old World, Southern Methodist University professor C. W. Smith’s collection of essays inspired by six months in Europe with his wife, Marcia. Smith takes pains to point out that A Throttled Peacock is not a travel guide. He “sought rather to record the psychological, emotional or intellectual shifts that have come from being estranged from [his] usual life….Traveling in foreign countries…encourages comparison and contrast and calls on dormant parts of your psyche the way using weights in a gym results in new aches and pains but also new strengths.”

With a (mostly) pseudo-curmudgeonly humor, Smith muses on a wide range of subjects. He learns that “all manners are local” when a French chef is insulted by their brie-carving skills (this is also the location of the Great Texas Chili Debacle). The sometimes anxiety-inducing necessity of trusting strangers in an unfamiliar place where you don’t speak the language inspires “The Brotherhood of the Backpack” and Smith discovers that “what we thought were our ‘instincts’ about other people or a situation were feelings that depended upon an elaborate system of coded signals derived purely from a cultural context.”

Smith waxes philosophical about Mother England and her breakaway colonies while contemplating Thomas Hardy and the Ancient Mariner, as literature professors are wont to do: “The veneration of history, of tradition, gives people a sense of identity, but it likewise fixes their feet in concrete. If everything must be justified by precedent, how does something new come into being....So the idea of America begins for me in how you flee from history, not embrace it.” An encounter with an ascetic lifestyle prompts musings on American religion: “[O]ur televangelists constantly beseech us to see that wealth is how God shows his approval of our lives; therefore, the wealthy are the Chosen, their money’s the very sign of it.”

Smith’s imagery is richly evocative. On a wintry day in Geneva “the sun is a pearl button behind a gauze of high cirrus; the wind sweeps away its pale white light.” Marveling at the stone architecture during a stroll through the streets of Madrid: “[W]hat your Westerner’s eye sees as a hand-built canyon of stone, with a dry, cobbled creek bed and granite banks and neat gray or ocher bluffs coming up from the banks to box the sky above.” And at sunset in Oxford: “[T]he stone had caught the yellow light and held it. Spiced-mustard light, dusty dusky-yellow, wine-yellow, apple-yellow light thick as warm candle wax.”

A Throttled Peacock is a combination of the prosaic and the profound, of droll humor and thought-provoking observation. I recommend it for travelers planning to strike out across the globe on summer vacations and for all Texans abroad.

Originally published by Lone Star Literary Life. show less

Coming September 2011 from Texas Christian University Press

By C.W. Smith

TCU Press 268 pg

978-0-87565-437-9

Submitted by Taylor Made Press

Rating: 4

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.

But it's not as if he doesn't have his reasons: his mother died of cancer; his father fell off the wagon after 15 sober years and show more married a woman he met in AA; he now has an eleven-year-old stepsister; he has a court appearance coming up on an assault charge; he dropped out of high school and his beloved Lisa is going off to college in Austin.

Critical mass is achieved when Jason gets a Dear John letter from Lisa. He throws a few things in his pack grabs his guitar and takes off to hitch to Austin. As he is walking out the door his know-it-all stepsister Emily shows up with her own pack. She is painfully unhappy with her mother for moving her to Mesquite and away from the father she adores in Austin. Jason and Emily begin their adventures together hitching their way across Texas. Meanwhile all hell breaks loose at home involving Amber Alerts and TV news vans parked across the street as Jason's stepmother accuses him of kidnapping. So now the police are looking for them.

This novel takes off during the second half. The characters take on vivid personality and the relationships deepen in a delightfully believable way. We follow Jason as he desperately tries to contact Lisa and Emily discovers that her father is not the saint she had believed. The two make page-turning strides toward responsibility and maturity as they learn what an awesome task it is to take responsibility for each other.

For more information please take a look at the following:

www.facebook.com/Steplingsthenovel

http://www.cwsmiththeauthor.com/ show less

Steplings is an absorbing coming-of-age novel about Jason, a young man from north Texas whose world seems to be falling apart around his ears. Although his problems are largely the result of his own poor choices, neither is Jason blessed with the kind of parenting that might have helped him avoid the mess he has made of his life. His mother has been dead for a few years, and his father has recently married an emotionally brittle, high-powered attorney with an eleven-year-old daughter of her show more own. Jason, finding it difficult to adjust to his new home situation, is regularly butting heads with his father and barely speaks to his new “stepling” and her mother.

As bad as that sounds, Jason’s home life is still preferable to what he faces when he steps outside the house. Jason’s problems, numerous and crippling as they are, all stem from his impending separation from the only girl he has ever loved. Lisa’s parents do not consider him good enough for their daughter, and Jason seems determined to prove them right. If his dropping out of school just two months before graduation did not prove their point, now Jason has a Monday court date to answer assault charges connected to an incident he was too high to understand clearly while it was happening.

Lisa has decamped for Austin, and the University of Texas, where she will be studying pre-med. Jason’s former classmates have made plans to get on with the rest of their lives – and he feels abandoned and alone. When Lisa sends him a classic “Dear John” letter just three days before his court date, Jason knows that if he does not see her soon he will lose her forever. Hitchhiking to Lisa’s Austin dorm room does not seem like a big deal – until Emily, his new stepling, forces him to take her along so that she can return to her University of Texas professor of a father. The little road trip will turn out to be a defining moment in the lives of Jason, Emily, and everyone close to them.

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.

Rated at: 4.0 show less