An Interview with Gary Keith

Gary Keith is a long-time resident of Austin, Texas. He and his wife walk with their goldendoodle Ivybelle and enjoy Austin’s vibrant music and food scenes. After retiring from teaching and writing academic works, Keith moved to Oregon, where he explored the coast, rivers, and mountains, then to Washington, where he loved riding the ferry back and forth from Seattle to his home on Bainbridge Island. But Texas pulled him back, and with that re-rooting came a turn to writing fiction. His debut novel, Austin Blues, came out in 2025, and now the follow-up to that novel, The Mansions on Woodlawn Boulevard. He is currently working on two more novels as well as short stories and poems.

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Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

One day, as I was out on my neighborhood walk, I strolled by an old mansion in Austin that had been built by a mid-nineteenth-century governor. He called his land the Woodlawn Estate. As I walked the streets and surveyed all the mansions in the area, the title came to me: The Mansions on Woodlawn Boulevard. And the story started flowing from the title, as I learned about the history of the neighborhood and the adjoining areas. On one of the streets, the mansion owners had adopted vanity numbering: instead of 1611, 1703, etc., they had adopted addresses as No. 1, No. 2, and so forth. So, I fictionalized it all into the novel, with a character on my Woodlawn Boulevard determined to get his fellow mansion owners to adopt vanity numbering. Little did he know what trouble that would stir up, what history would come alive to expose the past—that really is not in the past! Then, Austin Blues emerged from that story (even though I published it first). Two of the characters on Woodlawn Boulevard emerge as the main characters, with music, law, politics, and corruption driving the story. The “blues” referred to in the title, then, evokes double meanings: blues music and the blues of corrupt officials and battles against them.

How did it feel when you first saw your book cover? Or when you first held your book in your hands?

I had had a great experience with the Atmosphere Press team on the cover for Austin Blues, with its great blending of a guitar, the Texas capitol and Lone Star flag, and a war helicopter—all depicting elements of the story. So, when it came to designing a cover for The Mansions on Woodlawn Boulevard, I was hopeful for another cover that would also be visually appealing and startling—and true to the story. I was pleased again with what the team designed: a slave’s chain dangling over the book title and a mansion. Now, a person first viewing the cover won’t know the story, but my hope is that the appearance of the slave’s chain will be so dramatic that it will cause him or her to reach for the book, wondering why it would be suspended over a mansion. The story, of course, digs down into that history of a neighborhood of mansions and what might have happened there before.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

I have forty-five years’ experience in the fields of public policy, political science, and law, after earning my BA from Baylor University and doctorate in political science from Brandeis University. I taught political science and served as pre-law advisor at several places in my career, including the University of the Incarnate Word, Tarleton State University, Huston-Tillotson University, Baylor University, and the University of Texas at Austin. While at Tarleton State, I also served as a public policy analyst for the Texas Institute for Applied Environmental Research. Throughout these academic appointments, I wrote textbooks, conference papers, and policy papers on Texas politics, environmental policy, and law, and was in leadership positions in professional associations.

Beyond my academic profession, I worked in state government and in political campaigns. I served as executive director of a caucus at the Texas legislature, worked for Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, ran Hightower’s Texas Populist Alliance, and worked in political campaigns.

What readers will not know about me, but that informs my values and outlook on life, is that I grew up on a farm in Missouri and, like many who left the farms, I developed a deep appreciation for our lands, our waters, and our fellow creatures on this planet. I have long had an urge to get back to the land, and even visited a commune and explored intentional communities here in Texas, around the nation, and in literature. This keen interest in living on the land sparked my environmental activism and environmental policy work.

Oh—and another thing readers may not know about me—here, fifty years after running in the very first Capital 10,000 race in Austin, I am running again, preparing for the fiftieth anniversary run in 2027.

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

Readers of my first novel with Atmosphere Press—Austin Blues—know that my writing is filled with references to songs and songwriters, mostly with Austin connections. Indeed, chapter one is entitled “Soundtracks”! My character Dude is a bass guitarist, playing with numerous Austin musicians and in clubs across the live music city, his lawyer friend Sandy being one of his most faithful fans. In this new novel, The Mansions on Woodlawn Boulevard, Dude and Sandy reappear, though they share the boulevard with more characters this time. Music references abound in both books! So, my soundtrack for both books would include some of the following.

Joe Ely: “All Just to Get to You” and “Because of the Wind”

ZZ Top: “La Grange”

Allman Brothers: “Whipping Post,” “Get On with your Life,” “Midnight Rider,” and “Sweet Melissa”

Credence Clearwater Revival: “Bad Moon Rising”

Hubert Sumlin: “Just Like I Treat You”

Guy Clark: “Like a Coat from the Cold”

Muddy Waters: “Got My Mojo Working”

Jimmie Vaughan and Kim Wilson’s The Fabulous Thunderbirds: “Powerful Stuff”

Steve Fromholz: “I’d Have to Be Crazy”

Alvin Crow: “Lovin’ on Borrowed Time”

Butch Hancock: “Moanin’ of the Midnight Train”

Angela Strehli: “Something’s Got a Hold on Me”

Jimmy LaFave: “Buffalo Return to the Plains”

Lou Ann Barton and W. C. Clark: “Baby, I’m in the Mood for You”

The Ramones: “Pet Sematary”

Mandy Mercier: “Forgiveness and Rage”

Buddy Holly: “Not Fade Away”

Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings: “Take it to the Limit”

Jerry Jeff Walker: “Mr. Bojangles”

Led Zeppelin: “Immigrant Song” and “Stairway to Heaven”

Danny Barnes and the Bad Livers: “Lust for Life”

What is one thing you hope readers take away from reading your book? How do you envision your perfect reader?

With both The Mansions on Woodlawn Boulevard and Austin Blues, I hope that my readers find, in these fictional stories, themes that reflect our real social dynamics. The Mansions on Woodlawn Boulevard is dedicated “to the memory of the Freedmen’s Bureau and to persistent champions of equality.” I also include the William Faulkner quotation, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” So, my hope is that through reading my fiction, readers become more aware of the connections between our current lives (social, economic, political, spiritual, ecological) and what came before us. What may even, as in my story, be under our feet! My perfect reader is one who first comes away from the book determined to look more alertly, with curiosity, at places, events and people around them, and second, comes away with a hunger for reading more stories like this.

What creative projects are you currently working on?

A novel can be a long, long undertaking! I am beginning two novels, but know that my research, drafting, and rewriting could take quite a while before they are ready. I am also now writing short stories and poems. They are definitely quicker to finish!

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