Try @ TXST

Giselle Kowalski:
Hi y'all. My name is Giselle Kowalski and I'm the digital marketing strategist here at Texas State University, and you're listening to Try @ Texas State. Today's episode is a look into the Wittliff museum. Residing on Alkek Library's seventh floor, the Wittliff museum is home to Texas history, treasures, and stories of the Southwest. Founded by Bill Wittliff in 1986, the collections and memorabilia that the museum holds has kept both students and people from around the world coming back for more. I got to speak with David Coleman, the director of The Wittliff, about the museum's history and why it remains a beacon of hope. Awesome. So for those who don't know you, can you please tell me your name and what you do for Texas State and with The Wittliff Collections?

David Coleman:
So I am David Coleman. I'm director here at The Wittliff Collections at Texas State. We are an archive, gallery, museum, library dedicated to collecting, preserving, and then sharing the legacy, the creative legacy of the Southwest is how we put it.

Giselle Kowalski:
So I wanted to dive right in about who is Bill Wittliff, because I know that some of our Texas State students and even maybe staff and faculty are unaware of who he might be. So what was he like and what even prompted him to make this museum at Texas State?

David Coleman:
Yeah, it's a great story. Bill was from small town Texas, grew up really falling in love with storytelling and people who would tell stories. He was very, very bright guy. He was not good in school, but he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams in all sorts of ways. He ended up attending five institutions of higher learning for college, including a summer session here at Texas State or Southwest Texas State. After he graduated from another university, he founded a press basically publishing books of Texas writers, and he did the design. His wife, Sally, who's still with us, was the business woman and he was the editor, designer, award-winning books for Texas book collectors basically.
And through that passion, developed a lot of friendships, developed a lot of relationships, and eventually 20 years later wanted to set up an archive, a collection that would preserve and inspire young Texans really to create. He always said that if he had known how hard it was to write and that successfully creative people and writers, how much work it took that he would've not gotten so discouraged early on that it was something you realize only much later that it takes a whole lot of work to do. So he established the Southwestern Writers Collection as it was called at the beginning, to inspire young people who, as he like to say, who had the itch to create, but not yet the courage, The Wittliff Collections is a great legacy for that.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, that's fantastic. So I wanted to go in a little bit more into the collections that are currently at The Wittliff. And the big one right now, and it's been big for a while, is the Lonesome Dove Collection that y'all have, and that's one of the most iconic ones that I have had the privilege of witnessing since I've been a student and now that I'm a staff here. And I wanted to know a little bit of how you even got your hands on such a collection. What was that like that it's beyond me to know how you even get that here at Texas State?

David Coleman:
Well, this is one of those great stories, I mean, Bill passed almost five years ago now, and so much of what we have gotten over the 30 plus years that we've been around as an institution has come through Bill one way or the other. And Bill was the Lonesome Dove movie creator basically. That was a book not written by him, written by Larry McMurtry. But actually Bill got attached to that project, as they like to say. Remember I mentioned Bill was a publisher early on and one of the early books he did was an anthology of short stories or essays rather, by Larry McMurtry, who later wrote Lonesome Dove. So Bill and Larry knew each other well.
And then fast-forward to the ’80s after Larry has written the book, Lonesome Dove, then it gets optioned by a production studio, Motown Records actually. They signed up to do a Western, the book then won the Pulitzer and the movie was on CBS, found the funding for it, and Bill was selected with Larry McMurtry's blessing to adapt the book into a screenplay or I guess technically a teleplay at that time. So Bill adapts the story into a screenplay and is co-executive producer of the whole project. Bill was very headstrong in a really positive way. He didn't get involved in a project unless he had what's called creative control. He had the final say. So he had just with his wife, Sally founded the Southwestern Writers Collection. This is all connected, you see.
And when he got involved with Lonesome Dove, they had just set up the Southwestern Writers Collection. So Bill when he was on set every day of this whole television production, he begged, borrowed, stole from the sets as they struck each set and they moved from one location to another. He grabbed everything he could. So we have this tremendous, what's called a production archive, all the scripts, a lot of props, costumes, et cetera. And a lot of behind the scenes stuff that is really remarkable that exists for a TV production from way back in 1988, shown in 1989. It's very, very rare for a TV show to have an archive in the first place.
But Bill was passionate about this project. Everybody that was involved in this project was passionate. It's the Gone With the Wind for Texas in a way. And there were many, many, many, many people who were Texan and proud of that story and got involved with the making of that film. So it was a real passion project for Bill, and that's why now we have it and still on display at The Wittliff. Bill and I always talked about how maybe someday people will stop coming to see that exhibit and then we'll change it out to do something else. But for generation upon generation, people love that film. There are so many students that come through that know it from their grandfather or some other family member. And then we get a lot of visitors just generally speaking from the general public. So people come from all over Texas. They actually come from Japan, they come from Germany. Japan and Germany, they love their cowboys. This is a huge cowboy Western moment in film history. Anyway, we love getting visitors, and Lonesome Dove shows no signs of slowing down.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, that's for sure. It's funny because I came to Lonesome Dove because of this office where I work because multiple of my coworkers had told me that it was their favorite book. And then I put it aside for so long because I was like, "Whatever, it's just a Western, I'm not into Westerns." And then I read it and it is now my favorite book that I have made since then, maybe three or four different people read. And I have a book that's just almost about to fall apart. And one of my favorite things in that exhibit is this is a spoiler but of Gus' body.
It's just so wild to me because I never really fully watched the series, but I read the book and the book was so detailed to me. And then seeing that too is just a little bit... That reality meshing together with what my literature was and then what the actual show was, was crazy. And it's a fantastic exhibit. I really appreciate it and I think it's wonderful. So I wanted to ask you a little bit about The Wittliff and Texas State and how do you think that The Wittliff represents not only the culture of Texas, but the culture of the school?

David Coleman:
I love that question. And at The Wittliff we talk about how... We use this phrase spirit of place, and it's a unique collection. I've worked at other places. There's lots of special collections as they're called or collecting institutions all across the country from Harvard and all the way in California. What makes Wittliff very special — and we'll get to Texas State, it does tie in to me — is it's very much focused on our plot of land, this piece of Texas, this piece of the Southwest. There's something very special about this place and more importantly, it's important for people who are here, spend time here to get to know a little bit more about this place. And so if you read the writers who are writing about this place, if you look at the photography that is taken here, in our case it extends into Mexico as well.
If you're listening to the songs from Texas songwriters or people singing about this place, you really develop just a really nuanced and layered sense of an appreciation for this place. And I think Texas State really embraces the local and the regional. As much as we are running to R1 and embracing online and global, I think there's a factor and a flavor of Texas State that's always going to stay true to what's here, serving the majority of students who are from here. And that's great. And then we can help them get to know what here is and what it's all about and why we have the values we do. Not that they're the best values, but it means something to learn about the place you're from.

Giselle Kowalski:
Oh, I love that. That was a beautiful way of saying it, that we are learning about what is here and what makes us so grounded in why we love Texas State and why it's like the Hill Country. We always say we're the most beautiful in the Hill Country, but why are we the most beautiful in the Hill Country? It's like, "Look at what we've built." So I do love that. So when people come from all over the world to come and see The Wittliff and even students and maybe someone who doesn't even know an iota of what Texas is, what do you hope that they take away from a visit?

David Coleman:
Wow. I think of course the touchstone that we talked about a little bit already of Bill's interest in inspiration for creativity. He really wanted to inspire people who wanted to be creative. So that's a big part of what we hope people get out of it. I think it really depends on the visitor as what they will absorb. What I love about our space, and I guess I should say spaces, we have nine galleries of material to see, but we try to set up a place that's friendly and warm and welcoming and not... You may go to some museums that are really grand and intimidating, huge libraries of marble or whatever, and we're a lot more warm and welcoming. That's what I'm trying to do and that's what we are all trying to do and be very friendly about it too.

Giselle Kowalski:
Right. It's also a very consumable museum in the sense that when you walk in, you can see things in a... Since it's not as large as a city museum, it feels like you can be more intimate with the space because you are so close, you're able to really see everything for what it is.

David Coleman:
Oh, that's a wonderful thing to hear.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's how I feel whenever I get there. I feel like I can actually spend time there and not be pushed aside by major crowds because it is in our seventh floor of the Alkek Library. So it takes a little bit to get up there.

David Coleman:
It takes a little bit of work. It does, yeah.

Giselle Kowalski:
It's our little hidden gem, but it does feel like a more intimate, more personal look at what Texas is and what we have to offer here at Texas. So I love it over there. What is something that you wish more people knew about The Wittliff?

David Coleman:
That's easy, that we exist.

Giselle Kowalski:
That it's on the seventh floor.

David Coleman:
That you can get to it. As we said, it takes a little bit of work. We're open to the public. On the flip side, so many students come into the library. So many students even come up to the seventh floor of the Alkek Library and have no idea what we are or who we are or that they're welcome to come in. And we try to do what we can to make it inviting for people, but just knowing that we're there and that the doors are open and it's free and people can come in anytime we're open basically every day.

Giselle Kowalski:
I know what, go, it's an amazing place.

David Coleman:
Yeah, every cultural institution like museums and things, every institution wishes they had more visitors because we work hard at it and we love it so much. We don't know anyone who walks in that space and doesn't just fall in love with it.

Giselle Kowalski:
For sure. I know we do a lot of, whenever we have a new employee, we bring them to The Wittliff and they're always so impressed because we have a lot of out-of-staters or maybe out of the city and they don't know San Marcos that well, and we show them this and they're like, "I didn't know this existed." I'm like, "I know. And we have it here and it changes. There's different things all the time. It's fantastic." What do you think is the most unique or interesting piece you have at The Wittliff, whether it's on display or not? It's just something that you're like, this is crazy that we have this here.

David Coleman:
Yeah, I always hesitate to talk about things that people can't see. Well, the King of the Hill display is pretty great, so that's pretty much on permanent display. So I'll tip my hat to the visitor that might hear this and want to come see whatever I mention. But one of the real foundation stones for us is a 1555 edition of a book written by Conquistador Álvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca is part of an expedition to the Americas in the 16th century from Spain, is one of a literal handful of survivors of a couple different shipwrecks that put him and his colleagues on Galveston Island. And then over the next several years, they're captured by the native population, they're enslaved, they escape, they go on a quest of faith healing really.
And this is how they make their way around the coast through Texas, and then finally down into Mexico. And eventually they reunite with the Spanish forces, the armies in Mexico. And Cabeza de Vaca, who's really the good conquistador, I like to call him, writes this report to the king of Spain detailing his trip in incredible detail, which is wonderful. It's the first written account of Texas, and I know I'm all Texas, Texas, Texas. But it's that pride we have that not every state shares, but I love the chauvinism, I guess you might say that we have for Texas. And this is the first published account of anybody writing about this part of the world, which is pretty amazing.
And it's also great because he's writing to the King of Spain saying that the soldiers, the Spanish army is treating the native population terribly, incredibly disrespectfully. That this population that they came in contact with, they're actually leading more Christian lives than the soldiers are. They're not exposed, they're not Christian Christian, but the value set that they have and the way they take care of family and the way they take care of other people and look out for people, just those values. So it was a fascinating argument that he's making in the 16th century is like, "OK, king of Spain let's, yeah, hear me out. Let's change." Of course, it didn't really do anything, but that kind of act of protest is pretty powerful.

Giselle Kowalski:
Wow that's wild.

David Coleman:
And we have a copy.

Giselle Kowalski:
And you have it.

David Coleman:
Yeah, we have one of, I think a dozen copies of that book anywhere in the world.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's fantastic. How do you even keep that intact? Is it falling apart?

David Coleman:
No, it's in really remarkably good shape and we keep it in a box, in a safe, in a room.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's how you keep things in a pristine condition.

David Coleman:
Very few people know how to get into. But we do occasionally bring it out because that's one of these classic arguments that you don't really care about in archives of are you preserving something for somebody 20 years from now or 200 years from now? But how are they any different than you walking in the door today? Why are you less important today than someone 200 years from now? So we do get it out on occasion and let people see it and let people touch it, and it's an amazing thing.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, I do care about that argument, by the way. You said I don't, but that is a very interesting thing and I like that you brought that up. Thank you very much. Is there an exhibit that has already passed that you guys have put up, maybe put back in the archives that you wish that you could bring back out?

David Coleman:
Oh yeah. There's a number of them. We miss all our children once they leave.

Giselle Kowalski:
They're your babies.

David Coleman:
They are. We work hard on them. And I think every curator who does a show does look a little wistful after that show comes down. We did an amazing exhibition, photographs that were taken by a big landowner in Texas. Louise O'Connor is her name from Victoria. And the fact that she's a big landowner doesn't really enter into this, but she took these remarkable portraits of the people working on the ranches that her family owned, and it's the ranch owners all the way in the highest caste level, maybe we would say, of the ranch owners, but then all the way down, all the different levels of people working those ranches, to the poorest of the poor to people who just do day labor. And she took these amazing photographs.
And then what's even more remarkable is that she interviewed hundreds and hundreds of them over many years, and in the exhibition we had little QR codes to go to recordings of a lot of these people talking about their daily lives and how this was a project she did in the 1980s. So you hear about how ranching has changed over the decades, but you just hear about the daily life of what it was like to be on the ranches, the love of the land, the love of the animals, the games they played, the fun they had, the tragedies they experienced and so on. So it was this living exhibition that we had with her photographs. And the photographs are part of the collections now. The audio is part of our collections. She's still a big fan of The Wittliff, which is wonderful.
But it was great to see students especially coming into that space and seeing. The population and the people who work those ranches in that part of Texas is very, very diverse. You've got African Americans got Mexican Americans, and you've got white German and white Polish and it is just an amalgam of all different classes and races and pretty widespread throughout the hierarchy I guess you might say. So it was really fascinating to see students come in and just see people that look like their, here we're back to grandparents, people that look like their fathers, their mothers or their grandfathers or grandmothers. And that was really powerful for a lot of people when they came in and walked around and saw the show.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, I wish I could have seen that.

David Coleman:
Yeah, it was great. It was great.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's fantastic. Do you have anything in particular that's your favorite right now that is there that you would like to shout out?

David Coleman:
Yeah, every story that's good has a little personal part to it. So this is me loving one little exhibit that we have, which is a celebration of Rick Riordan who is an author of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians. So we have Rick Riordan's archive, we have that writer's archive. And he approached, this was before I got here, he approached our literary curator, or our literary curator approached him and Riordan was teaching in San Antonio. He wrote Detective stories at first, I love those books. And so we acquired his archive based on that writing, and then a couple of years later, he said, "I'm going to start writing these young adult novels based on Greek mythology. Would you guys be interested in that?" And apparently, we said, "Sure." Which was a fantastic idea. And so the Lightning Thief and the other series besides the Olympians, are amazing books, we had an event in 2013, I think. Rick was promoting, I forget which book in the Cain Chronicles, I think not even the Percy Jackson series, but he was promoting a book, we had a huge event in the LBJ Ballroom.
It was 800 middle schoolers that were here from the surrounding counties, including my daughter who was in middle school and trying to write her own little stories. And so we still talk about that event as probably, maybe easily in the top three events that we've ever done. And it's not even our demographic in a way, but talk about inspiring young people to be creative. So we have this great case in celebration of the Disney+ series that just came out, which was great. And we have the sword from the first movie. I don't know if you liked the first movie or didn't like the first movie. It doesn't matter. We have the sword from that, and we are celebrating, and the library's joining in because a lot of library staff love Rick Riordan and the Percy Jackson series.

Giselle Kowalski:
It's so wild that you brought that up because that's the reason I got into writing. Basically my whole and whatever is my career from now on is because of Rick Riordan. I read his books and I went to one of those events too at the San Antonio Museum of Art, and he showed his archives of his first draft of the Lightning Thief. And I remember seeing that and then seeing that there was so much red that he had written and scratched out so many edits. And my parents at the time, I had kept telling them, I want to be a writer. And they're like, "That's what it's going to take." And then they took me to that, and that was the first time that I was like, "OK, I want to do this for real." And that's so crazy that you brought that up.

David Coleman:
And those are like world rock concerts, it's like, yeah he's amazing.

Giselle Kowalski:
I was at Barnes and Noble the day that those books came. I had my pre-ordered book every single time. So it's crazy that you brought that up and now I'm going to have to go to The Wittliff to go check that out.

David Coleman:
And so I think we may have one on display. I can't remember off the top of my head, but one of our — collectively, because we love King of the Hill and we love this stuff too — he has this great cache of rejection letters from publishers as he was starting to try and become a writer. And a lot of writers keep their rejection letters from publishers and it's like, "Don't give up, keep trying, keep working it." And he kept them and they were important to him, and we keep them and we show them to students. It's meaningful. I can see you're-

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, I'm like, this is crazy, yeah.

David Coleman:
... You're worked up about this. This is great.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, because it's fantastic. I just didn't know that that was... It's just crazy to me that you told the story about your daughter, and I'm like, "Oh my God, this is like deja vu. It's crazy." Yeah, no, it's just inspiring, I guess. Everything that you've been saying about The Wittliff, it's like I'm realizing more and more that it's so much deeper than what it is. It's not just a museum. It's for young people to understand that there's so much beyond you and there's so much to do and look what you can make. And that was my final question, is being around so many things that are so I guess, important that hold so much value, how does that shift your day-to-day life with your perspective on objects that you keep around your house? Anything at this point can be an artifact of somebody's if they just keep going.

David Coleman:
Right? No, it's true. I think everybody in the collecting world, and I'm not a collector, and there's a difference between-

Giselle Kowalski:
I'm sorry.

David Coleman:
Well, collectors are a special breed. I know a lot of collectors, and then there's how the rest of us deal with things around the house, et cetera.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's what I'm saying. You guys keep so many things that are so important.

David Coleman:
I mean, at home, we keep certain precious items. We have a box of those child drawings that we'll never look at again, but whatever, to embarrass our kids when they get married, you got to keep some of that stuff for that, but you just learn to isolate what makes a good story, what's a good totem for the story. And it's not even the story, it's the emotion and the connection that the story brings out.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah. That's awesome. Well, thank you for this awesome conversation. If anybody would like to get a contact of The Wittliff, how could they come and visit, and what does that look like?

David Coleman:
Just look us up. We're on the internet. We're on the Texas State site. We're open pretty much every day. Of course, we're on the university schedule, so there's certain times that we shut down, but we're basically open every day. We're free. All you have to do is make it to the Alkek Library and then just take the elevator to the penthouse suite where The Wittliff is and where we reside, and where we'd love to talk with you endlessly about all the things that we love showing off.

Giselle Kowalski:
That's amazing. Well, thank you, David. This has been fantastic. Better than I could have imagined.

David Coleman:
You're very welcome. My pleasure.

Giselle Kowalski:
David, thank you so much for speaking with me and for reminding me why creativity and storytelling are the fuel to a happy existence. This was one of those conversations that made me appreciate my home state, our campus, and everything around me that much more. And thank you for listening to this episode of the Try @ Texas State Podcast. Make sure to tune in next time to learn more about something else you can try on campus at Texas State. And also remember to follow us on our social media @TXST. This podcast is a production of the Division of Marketing and Communications at Texas State University. Podcasts appearing on the Texas State University Network represent the views of the hosts and guests not of Texas State University. Again, I'm your host, Giselle Kowalski, and I'll see you next time. Bye y'all.