Author Sean Mitchell will be in conversation with author David Searcy to discuss Mitchell’s newly published memoir of journalism and the arts, Irresistible Calling - TCU Press. Books available for purchase, with signing and reception to follow the presentation.
The only child of two working-class parents from eastern Pennsylvania, Sean Mitchell is an “accidental Texan” who grows up in 1950s and ‘60s Dallas, attends an elite boys school, and then finds himself searching for disappearing traditions in the Ivy League. Staring across the generation gap, he becomes a high school English teacher in Cincinnati before the siren songs of pop culture and journalism lead him back home to Texas and the beginning of a dispiriting job search. After discovering an alarming lack of interest in his becoming a member of the media, he finally meets an editor who gives him a chance, allowing him to display the disparate talents required for magazine writing and theater criticism before moving to Los Angeles to confront the colossus of Hollywood. He wrote for the Los Angeles Times Herald Examiner and the Los Angeles Times, profiling stars like Clint Eastwood, Ann-Margaret and Tommy Lee Jones, his former St. Mark’s School of Texas soccer teammate. While examining the nation’s preoccupation with celebrity he wondered if journalists like him were part of the problem or part of the solution?
Mitchell was teaching at a private school in Ohio when the lure of the New Journalism brought him back to Dallas, Texas. He found a calling that would require and reveal multiple skills: editing an “underground newspaper”, writing magazine-length articles about long distance truckers and ZZ Top, serving as the Dallas Times Herald’s first rock critic, then its theatre critic, winning national recognition for his reviews.
Our Bookstore features published work by the international artists and writers attending studio residencies at 100 West, alongside their recommended books and a collection of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and plays, and book by regional authors like Sean Mitchell.
“...this moving, big-hearted memoir brings a big chunk of our latter-day American history to brilliant life.” —Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Half Time Walk
“Mitchell’s journalistic eye turned inward brings a special clarity and emotional precision to a keenly intelligent life in interesting times among the famous and the appalling on both coasts.” —David Searcy, author of Shame and Wonder
