San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Texas author Watt returns to Mexico in latest novel
While some writers reach their peak in midlife, that’s when Texas native Donley Watt got started.
Watt — who in a former life made his living as a college dean, a gallery owner and an herb farmer — started his writing career at 47 through entering an MFA program at the University of Arizona.
A short-story collection, novellas and novels followed, as did membership in the Texas Institute of Letters and recognition from the Western Writers of America and other groups.
At this stage of life, Watt, 81, sees writing as more a vocation than career. Yet earlier this year he celebrated the release of his new novel, “Oaxaca, 1998.”
Watt, who grew up in East Texas, has found much of his inspiration as a writer from living in Mexico and from people from Mexico. He and his wife, Lynn, moved there after he received his master’s degree in 1990.
“I wrote most of my first novel, ‘The Journey of Hector Rabinal,’ while Lynn and I lived in Oaxaca,” he said in a recent interview. “From there we drove deep into Guatemala through military checkpoints and stayed for several days exploring the terraced hills of that beautiful country. I told Hector’s story through the voice of a Guatemalan priest.
“The impulse to write that story came to me in the early 1990s, both from reading newspaper accounts of the war in that Central American country and from my relationship with a Mexican national, Eulalio Sanchez, who worked for, and with, me, side by side, one day a week on our herb farm.”
Watt said the character of Hector Rabinal was inspired by his friendship with Sanchez.
“Over a couple of years, he told me his story,” Watt said, “about where he lived in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico, about his wife, Leticia, and the difficulties of his own journeys back and forth across the border twice a year. In my novel, Hector is a Guatemalan version of Eulalio, altered and embellished by my imagination, but who encounters the dangers and obstacles of journeys across the Rio Grande and in America.”
Watt’s herb farm was in Fredericksburg. After he transitioned to writing, he served as a writer in residence at Trinity University and a consultant to Gemini Ink. He now lives in Santa Fe, N.M.
Subsequent novels were set in Texas — “Reynolds” in 2002 and “Dancing With Lyndon” in 2004 — but Watt said he felt drawn back into writing a story set mostly in Mexico during the pandemic.
“The isolation in the time of COVID presented a no-excuses opportunity to work on ‘Oaxaca, 1998,’ ” he said. “Lynn asked to read an early draft of this novel, and her enthusiasm and encouragement inspired me to rewrite and complete it.”
Watt said his friend Steve Davis, a noted author and the literary curator at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, also encouraged him to finish the novel and get it published
after Watt had sent him a manuscript, which he had decided to place in the Wittliff Collection archives.
Watt’s papers, including notes, drafts and correspondence, are part of the Wittliff ’s collections.
“I really appreciated his encouragement,” Watt said. “When I sent the manuscript to TCA Press, they got back to me right away. At my age, I decided not to waste any time.”
Davis said via email that he has always admired Watt’s writing and was familiar with Oaxaca.
“So when the manuscript for his new novel about Oaxaca showed up at the Wittliff Collections to be added to his papers here, I couldn’t help but take a peek,” Davis said. “It’s beautifully written and is a good story with very compelling characters and setting. I really loved his protagonist, Maggie O’Neill, and her efforts to reinvent herself by going to Mexico. It’s a journey that so many people from Texas have undertaken, often with romantic impulses, and Donley excels at illuminating the places where romanticism gives way to reality.”
Although “Oaxaca, 1998” is set a few years before cellphones and social media, the conflicts it explores are still contemporary.
Watt’s hero Maggie is 40-ish Houston resident with a grown son. Recently divorced from a man who wanted to plan out the rest of her life, she is determined to re-create herself — but not quite sure how she’s going to do it.
Deciding to leave everything behind and drive into Mexico with only a good SLR camera and a basic travel kit of clothes and supplies, Maggie makes an artistic pilgrimage to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico City before finding herself in the florid beauty of Oaxaca. She begins to make a new identify for herself as a photographer by taking portraits of rugged people in rural towns, encouraged by a Texan visual artist named Connor, who is eking out a living giving painting classes to locals and tourists.
The cast of characters includes ambitious young people eager to leave their villages and climb into the Mexican middle class, gang members and diligent farmers and ranchers.
Watt said he got to know his characters so well that all he had to do to was listen to them.
When it came time to write a concluding conversation between Maggie and Connor, he said, “I just pulled up a chair next to their table and listened to their talk.”
“I didn’t really know what they were going to say, but honestly I just thought they told me what was going to happen,” he said. “That’s the way it was — I just wrote down what they said, and that was beautiful.”
When asked if he found it difficult to write of an adventurous woman’s midlife crisis,
Watt said he “grew up in East Texas, a place where women told the stories, especially of families, and I listened.”
“My mother’s nickname was ‘Talkie.’ So far, no one has told me that my women characters were unconvincing.”
He added that he has written stories from a variety of points of view: “11-year-old girl, a 14year-old boy, two women in their 30s and 40s, middle-aged men and an old widower struggling with his mortality. Someone has said that if a writer can write only from his or her birth identity or age, then everything risks becoming a memoir.”
Given that Watt has successfully reinvented and found himself as a writer in later life, does he have any advice for aspiring writers of any age?
“My advice to any beginning writer is to critically read accomplished — rarely the most popular — writers, and then write and write and write until you discover your own unique and authentic voice and stay true to that.
“Don’t concern yourself with competing media. Film, video of all sorts, and photography all have their strengths, but ‘writing stories as if they matter,’ as Tobias Wolff said, will endure.”