Though Texas remains very much a Republican state, one Texas Democrat still holds a high approval rating throughout the country. With a documentary making the film festival rounds, the play Ann headed for Broadway and now a biography on her life hitting the bookstores, Texas’ own white hot mama, Ann Richards, still blazes in our imagination six years after her death.

Why does her life, personality and politics still fascinate us? This is the question I posed to Jan Reid the author of Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards, when I spoke to him before his visit to Houston and Brazos Bookstore on Monday night.

In this political world of scripted politicians and 30-second sound bites, Reid believes Richards lives on so vividly in our memories because she was “such a refreshing difference from what we see now.”

Reid, a journalist and novelist, first met Richards in 1980 and would later serve as an advisor on environmental policy during her 1990 race for governor. During her governorship, he was sometimes a speech writer for her appointee John Hall, who served as chair of the Texas Natural Resource Commission. (Reid’s wife, Dorothy Brown, was a friend of Ann’s who served as a chief aide on her staff.)

In the prologue to the book, Reid is upfront about his connection with Richards.

“I knew people would know who was I was and who my wife was, so if I wrote a puff piece about Ann Richards, I’d just get beat to hell. I was really taking pains to give the warts in addition to the smiles. I was really careful about that. But I also thought I had to be upfront about it. I couldn’t pretend that I was never in the picture and that I didn’t have a personal relationship with her. [But] I didn’t want that to intrude,” he said.

The real Ann?

During the book’s recounting of her run for Texas governor, Reid references an October 1990 Texas Monthly profile of Richards where she says, “Everybody wanted to let Ann be Ann. And they all had different Ann's.” I asked Reid if this was also a problem he had to confront when writing the book.

“Well yeah, particularly the more I found about her other periods. I had the picture of her when she was 47-years-old, when her political career was just taking off. But I kept finding layers and layers of Ann both from what people told me and that wealth from the archive,” he says.

Reid says that researching and speaking with her friends and family that knew her before she began running for political offices led him to understand that the woman we remember striding that motorcycle with white hair piled high as the Texas skies was one of many Ann's.

“When she decided to become Ann the public person, she created the persona that worked pretty well for her. Not to say this was a dishonest strategy on her part. She was a born entertainer,” he explained, adding that she understood style and show business and used them to accomplish her goals in government.

Yet by delving into some of Richards' correspondences, especially those between Richards and Edwin “Bud” Shrake, who in the prologue of the book Reid describes as the “second great love of her life,” Reid found a Richards who “had a lot of fear. She was fragile in a lot of ways. That was the biggest surprise to find how human she was. It was good to discover that.”

Though deeply focused on mapping the “amazing narrative arc” of her life, Reid pauses throughout the book to provide historical and cultural context for the reader. All this background information helps us understand how Texas created Richards and how Richards changed Texas.

The many photographs of Richards with political and media celebrities included in the book also help give the impression that Richards knew everybody and was always in the center of the action. When I made this observation to Reid he agreed.

“Oh she did. Her family was way too close for comfort near the Kennedy assassination. She had these very unpleasant face-to-face encounters with LBJ and Carter. She was in New York during 9/11. There was big earthquake in San Francisco in the '80s and she happened to be in San Francisco. It seemed like she was just everywhere all the time.”

Ann's Legacy

Though Texas might remember Richards with great fondness, I wondered if Reid still saw her presence in the current political landscape. Reid said he continues to see Richards' influence, even in Gov. Rick Perry’s administration when it comes to diversity in political appointments. Thanks to Richards, we can never go back “to the old, white boys club."

“She was also the first ardent feminist elected to a major office in the United States. You hear a lot about the cracks in the glass ceiling. Well, she put some of them up there. Hillary Clinton considered Ann her mentor when she was first lady and then Senator of New York,” he said.

As we finished our conversation, I had to ask Reid if he felt a sense of deja vu when watching Richards' daughter, Cecile Richards, the current president of Planned Parenthood, speak at the Democratic Convention.

“Of course. Cecile is a star--just in a different way — just like her mother was. She’s just blossomed, as all her children have. . .But Cecile’s a politician. She can’t come back to Texas and run for office, it doesn’t seem, but she’s probably accomplishing more now than she would if she had an office. The last many weeks of the presidential campaign she was on the road with Obama. He was seeking her council all the time.”

And how would Ann feel about that campaign and it’s outcome? Reid believes, “To have been able to see that in her lifetime would have just been amazing to her.”

Irish-Canadian writer Emma Donoghue, the best-selling author of Room, is on a journey to Texas on her tour for her new book Astray. So perhaps it is appropriate that her collection of short stories is obsessed with types of immigration and travel, some physical, some mental.

These stories of wandering characters, who travel to or within a North America still new, are all based on historical events or on real people who left footprints in the historical record that are little more than footnotes. After each story in Astray, Donoghue provides the reader with that footnote, the historical documentation that sparked her story.

Reading Astray is a bit like watching a magician create a wondrous illusion before you and then reveal a few enticing hints as to how she did it. When I talked with Donoghue before her trip to Houston for the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series I asked why she felt it important to give away Astray’s historical inspirations. She explained the choice was more ethical than aesthetic.

“While I’m getting great pleasure out of sort of resurrecting these dead people, I in no way own their stories. I don’t want to set down these stories as if I have ownership of them. I really feel strongly that I want to get these lives back into the public domain of knowledge,” she explains and hopes other writers, readers, or historians might further explore these forgotten people whether that exploration takes the shape of biographies, online projects, or other fictive works.

And how does she find these lost lives to turn into the fodder for story?

“I always look for something that’s unexplained and puzzling which is never going to be explained to us by the sources, especially because a lot of these people are truly obscure, the nobodies of history. I don’t think we’re ever going to find a clear explanation, so fiction can move in wonderfully in a situation like that. . .I look for a fresh angle that fiction can bring,” she says.

Searching for Mavericks

When I next asked Donoghue what it is that attracts her to these “nobodies of histories” much more than the somebodies we all might remember from history class, she says it’s the oddities and freaks of the past that she looks to for her fiction, the people “with strange bodies, people with strange minds, people who break rules.”

For Donoghue it’s all the better if these “mavericks” are not representative of the rest of the world or era she’s depicting. As an example, she cites the story in Astray, “Last Supper at Brown’s,” her take on an obscure bit of Texas history of a slave who killed his master and ran away with the widow. In Donoghue’s imagining the wife was abused by her husband and longed for freedom as much as the slave.

Donoghue notes that these types of cases were extremely rare but the “marginal cases can illuminate the everyday.” She believes “sometimes by looking at the most strange outlining case you can glimpse something that is true.”

Throughout Astray, Donoghue keeps at least a century’s distance between the historical subjects of her stories and her readers. The one exception is the last story “What Remains,” a quiet, heartbreaking scene from the last years of the U.S-turned-Canadian artists Frances Loring and Florence Wyle. The story depicts Wyle’s struggle to reach through Loring’s dementia to reconnect with her by visiting one of Loring’s great sculptures. The women died within three weeks of each other in 1968.

I asked Donoghue if writing fiction about two artist who are much closer to us in time and who are still well known in their adopted country puts restraints on her story telling. She says that there has been warm responses to the story in Canada.

“I think people are generally thrilled if you pay the compliment of fiction to somebody they’ve known or cared about. Yes, it’s a bit more uncomfortable writing about the 20th century then say the seventeenth, but on the other hand there are great rewards because I think people are often deeply moved when you’re dealing with something a bit closer in time to their experience,” she explains.

Emma Donoghue the Character?

And what of her own life, I had to ask. Donoghue has written several essays on her experience as a Irish woman, immigrant, lesbian, and mother. In interviews she has been so open about her life to even reveal what qualities she and her partner, Chris Roulston, looked for in a sperm donor. So if a hundred years from now some writer not-yet-born wanted to write a story, novel, or play in which Donoghue was a character, would she approve?

“I would feel free. I couldn’t care less what they do a hundred years from now, and I’d be honored,” she says but doubts the possibility, as she judges her life not to be good inspiration for story. “It’s been a very fairly even, peaceful, and happy life, not the stuff of fiction at all. That’s the paradox, I’m drawn to these strange, dark, particular stories and that’s not the way I actually like to live. But [writers can] feel free. They can do what they like.”

Emma Donoghue and novelist Hari Kunzru take the Hobby Center’s Zilkha Hall stage on Monday, Nov. 12, at 7:30. The Inprint web site sells admission tickets for $5.

What would people give up if they could achieve a society without poverty, hate, war, or crime? Would the loss of music, colors, love, choice and memories, both lovely and horrific, be worth living in that seemingly perfect world, or would those losses turn a utopia into a dystopia?

Such are the types of questions asked by the Newbery award-winning children’s book The Giver, a novel for kids that has been lauded and assigned in hundred of school districts across the country and challenged and banned in others. The Giver’s author, Lois Lowry, has just completed Son, her fourth and final book in the series, and will be in Houston for Inprint’s Cool Brains reading series Sunday afternoon to meet with her many fans both young and old.

Lowry has been writing children’s books for more than three decades, so when I had a chance to talk to her before her Houston visit I had to ask about her audience. Do the kids of this generation want and need the same kind of stories they did when she first began writing?

Her answer is decidedly no.

“They want faster paced books," she says. "They want action and they want things spelled out. They don’t like, for example, the ambiguity of the ending of The Giver. There was a time some years ago when kids were willing to be forced to use their own imagination and that seems less true now.

"I’m over generalizing, of course, but they want things told to them. I suppose that has to do with technology. They’re just so accustomed to having information come at them all the time that when something forces them to slow down and think . . . they don’t necessarily like that."

Dystopias for Kids

This change in kids might also be the reason for the popularity of dystopian novels, like The Hunger Games series. With the publication of The Giver in 1993, Lowry became the forerunner, or perhaps the mother, of the dystopian trend, but she thinks it will eventually fade like vampire books before it.

Yet, she also thinks there might be a reason kids gravitate towards these novels.

Recalling her own childhood growing up during WWII, she says her father served in the Pacific, so of course she was aware of the war, but she was never bombarded by the images of it like children today see of their own torn and strife-filled world.

“Kids are not exempted from knowing the terrible things that my contemporaries and I were protected from as children because of the media being less of a presence in our lives," Lowry says. "I think the fact the kids are being forced to think about what the world will be like as they grow into it is perhaps the reason they’re interested in speculative fiction, books about a future world that they’ll be part of."

Lowry doesn’t believe that kids want to actually live in those dystopian worlds, but that kids do believe they can change what’s wrong with our own world.

“Nobody these days, whatever age they are, is unaware that there’s a lot of things wrong in our poor world," she says. "I think kids are very much aware of that, but I think that kids are optimistic. They believe, as they should, that they’re going to grow up and they’re going to be educated and learn stuff and they’re going to do better than the last generation.

"And maybe that’s true. I guess one has to hope that’s true."

Moments of Recognition

Like The Giver’s protagonist Jonas, Claire in Son, a 14-year-old assigned the role of birth mother in the Community, begins to recognize that there is something wrong with this community. It is only with that recognition that these young heroes can make changes, but it also proves to be an agonizing loss of innocence when they realize that the safety and security they knew in the world is all a facade.

When I make this observation to Lowry, she acknowledges there was probably some truth to it and notes: “It’s probably not surprising that in that particular series of books each protagonist is at the age of entering adulthood. I think with that age of entering, and that entrance into, the world of adults comes a sort of recognition of responsibilities. I think it’s my favorite age to write about for that reason.

"A boy that age, like the boy in The Giver, is still a child at the same time he’s beginning to become a man. It’s such a complicated age and very interesting to me.”

Much of Son tells of Claire’s journey and what she will sacrifice to unite with her son once he is taken away, like all “products” are taken from “vessels” in the Community.

Lowry wrote an autobiography in 1998 and in her many speaking engagements and interviews, she has been open about the fact that part of the inspiration for writing Son came from the death of her own son Grey, a U.S Air Force pilot who died in a plane crash in Germany only a few years after the publication of The Giver.

When I ask her if she is the type of writer who takes some comfort in sharing her real life with the readers of her imagined worlds, she tells the story of an actor friend who sent her a simple quote from Macbeth when he heard about her son’s death: "Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak/Whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break."

“I think that’s an important thing to speak of our strong feelings,” she says, “And of course that relates to The Giver where people have no strong feelings to speak about with each other because they’re so deeply repressed because of the way they’re been programmed. So I do think it’s an important thing to speak about what we undergo.”

Fans old and young can speak with Lois Lowry 3 p.m. on Sunday at Johnson Middle School.

Novelist and screenwriter Attica Locke has lived in Los Angeles for 20 years but she thinks she’ll probably be writing about her hometown Houston and the Gulf Coast region for the rest of her life.

Locke’s first novel, Black Water Rising, was set in Houston in the 1980s and her recently published second novel, The Cutting Season, takes place on a restored Louisiana plantation in 2009. In my interview with the author before her trip home this month, she explained she is one of those writers whose early environment continues to have great influence on her creative work.

“There’s something about the Gulf Coast and Houston and Texas that is stamped on my psyche, and I view the world through the lens in which I was raised and am hoping to hold on to some of the great things about the way I was raised,” she says.

Locke is the daughter of former city attorney and 2009 mayoral candidate Gene Locke. On Monday, the Lockes will have a bit of a public family reunion as both are set to speak at the University of Houston Political Science Department event: "Revolution on Cullen: The Personal Challenges of Integrating UH in the 1960s." Over the next few days Attica Locke will also be making bookstore appearances to read from her new novel.

The Cutting Season, though plotted as a murder mystery, is a novel that wrestles with the question of how we comprehend and make peace with our individual and national history. The novel’s reluctant detective, Caren Gray, manages the Belle Vie plantation in its 21st-century form, as an event and conference venue.

Gray’s life, and the novel, is filled with ironies of history. The successful Gray was two years into Tulane Law School before financial considerations set her into hotel management, but she is also the daughter of the Belle Vie’s former cook and the great, great granddaughter of slaves who worked the plantation. Meanwhile, the father of her own daughter, Morgan, works for the Obama White House.

Her set life is completely upset when the body of Inés Avalo, an undocumented El Salvadorian migrant worker, who toiled in the nearby sugar cane fields, is found on the Belle Vie grounds. Only by unraveling the tangled histories of Belle Vie and her own individual past does Gray manage to solve the two murders separated by more than a century.

The inspiration for the novel came when Locke and her husband attended a wedding at the real Louisiana plantation, Oak Alley. The magnificent beauty of the house and grounds juxtaposed with its ugly history left Locke unsettled but gave her much material for a novel. When I asked her if writing the book helped her to answer some of the questions the experience had left her with, she said not quite.

“What I got out of writing the book was coming face to face with my own personal ancestral history and finding peace with that, but also deciding which parts of my history am I going to carry forward in my life and give to my children and which parts of the idea of what it means to be black in America that we’ve known up until the 21st century am I going to let go of. Writing it was kind of an act of healing,” she explained.

Part of that healing came in the from a gratitude she felt for all those who labored before her so she could live in “this incredible life of freedom.”

“I also felt a sense of pride, not only in black people, but in my country. My God, look at what this country has done. Look at the breadth of progress. It’s just kind of awesome to think of the ways in which America has the capacity of self correction when we are at our best,” she says.

Creating Mystery

While Cutting Season is loaded with complex issues and themes, it is also a well plotted satisfying murder mystery. Explaining how she achieves such a balance in her work, Locke says, “The murder mystery element keeps me from going off on tangents with those big American themes. If you leave a body on page three, you have to keep things moving along.”

At the same time, Locke acknowledges the importance of writing a mystery novel that contains more than just a crime to be solved.

“The other thing about having sophisticated character studies behind the mystery is if someone figures out what the mystery, I still want them to finish reading the book. To me every mystery, on some level, is Scooby-Doo. It’s the first guy to walk by in the first chapter or whatever. There’s only so many ways you can fool people, but at least you can add all this other rich stuff that keeps people reading anyway,” she explains.

Jay vs. Gene

When Locke returns to Houston she is also set to revisit her character, Houston attorney Jay Porter, in a sort of sequel to her first novel Black Water Rising. Jay, like Caren, is an example of Locke’s interest in creating “regular people” who are “presented with extraordinary circumstances” that place them in the role of amateur detective.

The new book will take place during an election in Houston, and since the character of Jay shares some qualities and life achievements as her father Gene Locke, Attica Locke will likely have to continue to explain to people that Jay is not Gene.

“People who really know my dad, know that Jay’s not him, and I can’t control the rest of it. My dad has been a good sport. He never gave me a hard time once,” she says and then adds “Other than paying for college and giving me braces, one of the greatest thing he’s ever done as a father is not giving me a hard time about that. . .He never said anything. He just completely supported me.”

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Attica Locke will read at Brazos Bookstore on Tuesday and Blue Willow Bookshop on Wednesday.

Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer Junot Díaz likes to play games with his readers. "Not games of manipulation," he assured CultureMap during a phone conversation in anticipation of his trip to Houston to open the 2012-2013 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series on Monday night.

Instead, the Dominican-American author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao likes to create games in the sense that writer and reader play together to assemble the book.

Case in point: When reading his latest work, This Is How You Lose Her, the reader might wonder how to categorize the book. Is it a collection of short stories linked by the same narrator, Yunior de Las Casas, who has appeared in all three of Díaz's books? Or is it a novel loosely woven together by connected scenes from Yunior's life?

Díaz calls the book somewhat of a "hybrid," but asks readers to decide for themselves.

"Many readers will read both my first book [Drown] and this book as something far closer to a unified book than many novels . . . Other people will read it and see something completely different. I think a part of me just relishes the chance to give my readers the opportunity to be the ones to name a genre," he explained.

And how do those first and third books connect to the acclaimed Oscar Wao, his second book and first novel, which is also narrated by Yunior? Díaz thinks of all three works as "chapters in the life of this crazy, conflicted, smart but infuriating, protagonist, Yunior de Las Casas." And here again, the author asks the reader to play with him in the creation of Yunior’s world.

"A reader who actually reads all three books begins to assemble them in their heads in interesting ways. I always thought that I was writing a larger novel and each of these books was a chapter in it," Díaz said.

In This is How You Lose Her, Yunior, a Dominican Jersey boy and budding writer, records the many losses in his life from childhood into his late twenties — the majority of which are racked up in games of love, familial or romantic. Many of the short stories have been previously published in The New Yorker, but Díaz said that each was written with its placement in the book's "superstructure" already in mind.

"I conceptualized the beginning of the book from the get. I had this idea that this would be the rise and fall of a cheater. I had certain points that I knew I wanted to hit. I had a certain structure that I was really interested in. And then I had to go out and find the material that would fit it," Díaz said of his process.

Coming towards the end of the first half of the book, the story "Otravida, Otravez" seems to break that structure Díaz has set up, with the introduction of Yasmin, another first person and female narrator. The story stands on its own as a different perspective on cheating: Yasmin is the other woman in a relationship with Dominican immigrant Ramón, who has left his wife and children back home to work in the U.S.

Readers familiar with Díaz's previous two books might remember that Ramón is the name of Yunior's father and that Yunior is a writer, and will perhaps begin to wonder who is telling this story — Yasmin or Yunior?

To unravel this layering of writer, narrator and second narrator, Díaz explained, "For Yunior, a character who suffers profoundly from an inability to imagine women, I think one of the great tests for him in a journey like this is his ability to imagine a woman who he would never have any sympathy for, the woman who stole his father from the family . . . For the average reader, they're just going to think this is a completely disconnected story and that's cool. I don't mind, but for someone who's really invested in the work and has that investigative impulse, the story suddenly slides perfectly into place."

Díaz compares this kind of game with the reader who knows his writing well to Easter eggs in video games and DVDs. "I don't mind those games," he said. "As a writer you've got to take some risks. It doesn't work for everyone but sometimes you take these kind of risks because you're like: Hey, this is fucking interesting complexity."

In the past, Díaz has described the brash and broken Yunior as a bit of a dumb-ass. When questioned about the allure in creating such a character, Díaz turned introspective.

"I enjoy people who are human, which means they are flawed and imperfect and they struggle with themselves. They fail other people at the same time as they're failing themselves. I'm so attracted to those people because I've never felt perfect. I've made so many mistakes in my life. I've not done half what all I could have done if I had courage," he admitted.

"My heart goes out to those of us who are somewhat broken. I'm drawn to that. I know it's kind of weird. Other people like brand new shit; I love ruins."

And as to the question of whether Yunior will remain a ruin, Díaz leaves it up to the readers to participate and to decide for themselves. "Do you believe what Yunior is going to write next is going to transform him? Do you believe that it's possible for us to write a new future for ourselves?"

Of all the new and strange futures Díaz has written for his own life, perhaps the oddest is a model. As we finished our discussion, I had to ask how he came to play diplomat Walter Van Rensselaer Berry in an Edith Wharton garden party reenactment, featured in the August issue of Vogue. Blaming his participation on "writerly curiosity," he jokingly comparing the experience to the time he interviewed "a bunch of old torturers from the Trujillo regime."

Enticed to do "this fucking ridiculous dress up" and getting to meet famed photographer Annie Leibovitz, Díaz reasoned, "[If] I did this more than once, it would be suspect. But as someone who's curious and tries to write both high and low, I couldn't fucking resist. I said, I will wear a clown outfit so that I can see the inside of a Vogue shoot, which not many people have, and I think they’d be surprised by my point of view on it, to be honest."

Readers wanting to glimpse that point of view and come play some games in Yunior's fictive world can meet Junot Díaz in the Wortham Center's Cullen Theater Monday at 7:30 p.m..