A poetic touch: ABQ author David Meischen delivers sensitive portrayals of life in fictional 'Nopalito, Texas'

Albuquerque author David Meischen can pinpoint the town of Nopalito on a map.

It’s in Jim Wells County, not far from the county seat of Alice, 100 miles south of San Antonio and about 40 miles inland of Corpus Christi Bay.

The county, the county seat, the bay and San Antonio are all real.

A poetic touch: ABQ author David Meischen delivers sensitive portrayals of life in fictional 'Nopalito, Texas'

Nopalito is fiction, the invention of Meischen.

“Nopalito, Texas” is also the title of a group of linked short stories that Meischen wrote.

The stories are sensitively portrayals of life in Nopalito from 1955 to 1998.

The vividness and vigor of the characters rise out of the author’s own experiences growing up on a farm in South Texas.

The collection’s first three stories have women at the center. “I think part of the reason that women are prominent is that I was that kind of kid. I was in the kitchen a lot, baking a lot. I was close to my sister, my mother and my paternal grandmother,” Meischen said in a phone interview.

The first story, “Nothing Happened Here,” focuses on the character of Evelyn Smith, who at age six unexpectedly witnesses her babysitter, Opal, and an unidentified, bare-butt man mixing it up on the kitchen table.

Afterward, Opal, “her voice came out lower than ever, the words husky with threat,” cautions Evelyn, “Nothing happened here this afternoon. A game is all.”

Thank goodness, Evelyn thinks, that her four-year-old brother Grady was playing outside at the time.

Later in the same story, Evelyn, now 14, hears the voice of Clayton Moore, the town’s legendary heartthrob, rise over others in a crowd: “She didn’t hear words but tone and timbre. In the instant, she knew it was the voice she’d heard that afternoon …”

Fast-forward. Evelyn is at college in Corpus Christi. She gets a call that Grady had walked out to look at a storm’s floodwaters along Agua Dulce Creek, and was not seen again. Dead or alive.

That phone call devastated her: “… the bits of happiness she’d collected over the years were taken from her.”

In another story, before Grady’s disappearance in the flood, Grady’s dad Ed spies his son and the neighbor Domingo having an intimate moment.

That attraction is more than Ed can accept.

Meischen’s writing is suffused with a lyricism that reads like poetry.

He said his writing style reflects his “concentration on the line and on the phrase. Poetry is written in lines and phrases.” The way the stories are written owe a lot to the years that he was studying and writing poetry, Meischen said. He authored the award-winning poetry collection “Anyone’s Son.”

Here is an excerpt from the story “The Empty Rooms” that displays the silent despair of the adult character Dorene Wahrmund: “What she heard was time. Not the ticking of clocks … Her inner ear opened to the way time stops, or seems to. And when it starts up again the clocks have changed — the calendar, the year, the decade even. Time has put someone else in your place … What will she do about the stillness that waits in the rooms of her house?”

Meischen said this collection of 12 short stories is the first full-length work of fiction that he’s published. The University of New Mexico Press is the publisher.

Ten of those stories had previously appeared in various literary reviews. Two of them won the Best Story Award from the Texas Institute of Letters and another won the Short Fiction Prize from the journal Talking Writing.

Meischen said he and UNM Press are discussing the possibility of developing into a novel three additional stories set in Nopalito but not in the collection.

“I wanted to be a writer of fiction since I was 10 years old,” Meischen said. “But you have to make a living.” He did, teaching high school in Elk Grove, California, near Sacramento, as well as in Galveston and Austin, Texas.

Meischen is 75. “I love being this age. And I am beyond excited about the book of stories. It took me this long to get there and I’m glad I got there,” he said.

EDITOR’S NOTE: “Nopalito, Texas” contains sexual content.