Sanderson, Jim 1953-

PERSONAL:

Born December 12, 1953, in San Antonio, TX; son of Maurice Gene (a printer and production manager) and Marjorie (a dresser and stagehand) Sanderson; married Summer Marshall, 2006. Ethnicity: "Anglo." Education: Southwest Texas State University, B.A., 1976, M.A., 1978; Oklahoma State University, Ph.D., 1982; additional graduate work at Oklahoma State University, Texas Tech University, and Southern Methodist University. Politics: "Democrat/liberal." Religion: "Lutheran/none." Hobbies and other interests: Fitness workouts.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Beaumont, TX. Office—Lamar University, Box 10023, Beaumont, TX 77710; fax: 409-880-8591. E-mail—jbsanderson@sbcglobal.net.

CAREER:

Odessa College, Odessa, TX, associate professor, 1982-86, professor of English, 1986-89; Lamar University, Beaumont, TX, assistant professor, 1989-94, associate professor, 1994-2000, professor of English, 2000—, writing director, 2006—. Texas Reading Circuit, codirector, 1987-2001; Texas Commission on the Arts, member of literature panel, 1991-93.

MEMBER:

Associated Writing Programs, Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers, Texas Institute of Letters.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Kenneth Patchen Prize, Pig Iron Press, 1992, for Semi-Private Rooms; Literary Initiative Award for Touring, Texas Commission on the Arts, 1994-95; Frank Waters Award, Martin Foundation and Frank Waters Foundation, 1997, for El Camino del Rio.

WRITINGS:

Semi-Private Rooms (short stories), Pig Iron Press (Youngstown, OH), 1995.

A West Texas Soapbox (essays), Texas A&M University Press (College Station, TX), 1998.

El Camino del Rio (novel), University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), 1998.

Safe Delivery (novel), University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), 2000.

La Mordida (novel), University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), 2002.

Nevin's History: A Novel of Texas, Texas Tech University Press (Lubbock, TX), 2004.

Work represented in anthologies, including Getting By: Stories of Working Lives, edited by David Shevin and Larry Smith, Bottom Dog Press, 1996; Texas Short Stories II, edited by Laurie Champion and Billy Bob Hill, Browder Springs Press, 1999; New Texas '99, edited by Jim Lee and Donna Walker-Nixon, 1999; and Lonestar Literature: From the Red River to the Rio Grande, edited by Don Graham, Norton, 2003. Contributor to literary journals.

ADAPTATIONS:

The story "Ladies Man" was read by actor Larry Hagman for Texas Bound Series 4, Dallas Museum of Art, Arts and Letters Live Program, 1998. "Ladies Man" was also read by John Feltch, Alley Theater, Houston, TX, 1998, and subsequently by others.

SIDELIGHTS:

Jim Sanderson reflects on the flavor of his native Texas in his books and stories. Sanderson's Semi-Private Rooms is a collection of eleven short stories written mostly in the first person. Peter Theis said in Cimarron Review, "Voice, irony, and pleasure are the elements of good storytelling, and Sanderson has employed them with great facility. He takes us into the lives of illegal aliens, strippers, adulterers, single mothers, drunks, roughnecks, ranchers, and crooked bankers, subjects which could easily be made into merely sensationalistic narratives. But Sanderson does much more, crafting very fine stories which give us the harsh realities these characters must face, the dreams they strive for and only sometimes get." John A. Pyros wrote in Small Press Review that Sanderson's work reflects the "no frill, no froth adventures of Texas folks just trying—another day/another dollar—to make it." San Antonio Express and News reviewer Clay Reynolds observed that Sanderson "strips away the facade of political correctness and polite conversation and reveals the bone and sinew of the ‘real’ Texas." "The black humor which makes these stories so readable seems to always be at the expense of life in general or of society, not at the expense of the individual characters," noted Bill Shute in the Texas Writer's Newsletter. "Semi-Private Rooms is the work of a careful craftsman whose unblinking vision of blue-collar people may startle, shock, or even offend some readers," wrote Kenneth W. Davis in Texas Books in Review. The critic continued, "Despite the emphasis on losing that informs the stories … the book does not depress. For, even in the midst of their failures, their losses, Sanderson's characters do offer commentaries that help define the success they are fated not to achieve." Brett Alan Sanders said in Small Press Review that Sanderson's "characters [are] worth caring about, as the author obviously does."

A West Texas Soapbox is a collection of nine essays, seven of which had been previously published. Jerry Bradley, reviewing the book for Michigan State University's on-line site H-Net Review, commented that the essays, most of which are set in Odessa where Sanderson taught junior college, "expose the foibles of college administrators and oil patch trash, students and free-enterprisers, hypocritic zealots and drunks, and they are as instructive as they are entertaining." A Book Talk reviewer felt the essay "Texas and Women" "is worth the price of the book."

El Camino del Rio, Sanderson's first novel, was described as "lean and lyrical" by Marilyn Stasio in the New York Times Book Review. The story takes place in the border town of Presidio, Texas. The narrator is forty-year-old border patrol officer Dolph Martinez, the son of a Mexican mother and Anglo father. A Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that Sanderson portrays Martinez "as a fully dimensioned character, a credible combination of grit and grace in the face of troubling ambiguities in a moral borderland." With his partner Pat Coomer, Martinez routinely returns illegal immigrants to Mexico but becomes involved in drugs and guns during the investigation of the deaths of two smugglers. He suspects a nun may be the link to the trafficking business of Vincent Fuentes, who is wanted on both sides of the border. Sister Quinn also seems to have a connection to Ariel Alves, a resort manager who becomes Martinez's love interest.

The many elements of the plot "all provide intriguing complications," said a Library Journal reviewer. Washington Post Book World's Paul Skenazy felt Martinez's "tangled struggle between personal loyalty and duty gives the novel a solid substructure, and his emerging hope for self-redemption makes him a convincing, sympathetic guide to the tangled miseries of this desert world." Tom Pilkington wrote in the Dallas Morning News that Sanderson "is especially good at contrasting the clarity and austere natural beauty of the Chihuahuan desert with the murky, Orson Welles aura that envelops human society there…. We are all products of our natural and cultural environments, but rarely in recent fiction has the point been made so compellingly."

Sanderson once told CA: "I believe that my desire to write came from my solitary playing as a child. Unknowingly influenced by films, juvenile and adult histories and fiction, and encyclopedia entries, I made up whole dramas and characters for my play and would dedicate several hours of my day to playing out these dramas. I played alone.

"A horrible actor, a bad artist, tone deaf, musically illiterate, I drifted toward writing and the liberal arts in college. I discovered that I always wanted to write. With the study and application of craft, I found that writing was the most difficult thing that I could imagine doing, but also the most necessary. I couldn't imagine why other students weren't trying to write. Writing, then, has become something that I cannot not do. I keep thinking of ways to make the bricks fit so that the structure I make doesn't fall over. So I spend a lot of my time distracted by or thinking about bricks and structures. This ‘structuring’ is a lot like play or playmaking.

"I sometimes worry that I have conditioned myself to see the world so that it fits into what or how I write. As a result, I don't see that I'm writing fiction as much as just reacting to the world in a certain way and through a certain medium. And just as often, I can't tell if what I write will be fiction or nonfiction, a short story, a novel, or an essay.

"Conversely, I know what I will do and what will turn out when I write scholarship. I have been passing myself off as an academician—as a scholar and a teacher—while I have tried to become a writer. I like ideas and talking about them, so I teach and hang out with academics. I also have been teaching creative writing for some time now. While I think that I sometimes learn more about the academic subjects that I teach, I sometimes think that I have less and less to say about fiction writing, or maybe it's just that I don't think that I can explain what I think it is that I know."

Sanderson later added: "I have begun to revisit my characters. The minor characters in short stories show up in novels and vice versa. So I may be writing interrelated books. I also continue to write short personal essays.

"I am returning to mysteries with a literary bent. But I also want to try another historical novel. To date, because it was so difficult to write, Nevin's History: A Novel of Texas is, I believe, my best work, or maybe it's just my fondest."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Book Talk, October, 1998, review of A West Texas Soapbox, p. 12.

Cimarron Review, October, 1995, Peter Theis, review of Semi-Private Rooms, pp. 86-88.

Dallas Morning News, October 4, 1998, Tom Pilkington, review of El Camino del Rio; September 8, 2002, Tom Pilkington, review of La Mordida; June 5, 2004, Dale I. Walker, review of Nevin's History: A Novel of Texas.

Houston Chronicle, August 31, 2000, P.G. Koch, review of Safe Delivery.

Library Journal, September 1, 1998, review of El Camino del Rio, p. 219.

New York Times Book Review, October 11, 1998, Marilyn Stasio, review of El Camino del Rio.

Publishers Weekly, July 20, 1998, review of El Camino del Rio, p. 212.

San Antonio Express and News, April 30, 1995, Clay Reynolds, Semi-Private Rooms; September 23, 2000, Fred Bonavita, review of Safe Delivery; May 9, 2004, Fred Bonavita, review of Nevin's History.

Small Press Review, September, 1995, John A. Pyros, review of Semi-Private Rooms, p. 10; May, 1996, Brett Alan Sanders, Semi-Private Rooms, p. 8.

Texas Books in Review, fall, 1995, Kenneth W. Davis, Semi-Private Rooms, p. 5.

Texas Observer, July 21, 2000, Clay Reynolds, review of Safe Delivery.

Texas Writer's Newsletter, fall, 1995, Bill Shute, Semi-Private Rooms, p. 14.

Washington Post Book World, July 19, 1998, Paul Skenazy, review of El Camino del Rio, p. 1.

ONLINE

H-Net Review,http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/ (June 11, 1998), Jerry Bradley, A West Texas Soapbox.