Seven years ago, I found myself in Archer City, Texas, famous as the filming location of The Last Picture Show, based on the Larry McMurtry novel. There, a group of creative types had gathered at the Archer City Story Center to figure out how to become better storytellers.
The landscape around that one-stoplight town seemed novel. I saw my first armadillo and a large tumbleweed—something I thought existed only in movies. This was the land of ranchers and oilmen, and we regularly dined on the region’s specialty: kolaches. On the last night of our gathering, one of the program directors, Kim Cross, cooked us a special meal. As I descended the hotel stairs from my bedroom to the dining space, a smell startled me—the earthy spice of dense burning hardwood simultaneously recalled warm summer nights and Sunday-morning-before-church breakfast. Cross
