Tim O'Brien at Texas State U., San Marcos

When I learned last week that Larry Heinemann, the noted Vietnam veteran novelist, is now teaching at Texas A&M, I wrote an entry on this page. Then I remembered that another celebrated novelist who served on the ground in the Vietnam War, Tim O’Brien, also has been teaching in Texas.

In fact, O’Brien—whose surrealistic, in-country novel Going After Cacciato won the National Book Award, and whose novelistically written memoir If I Die in A Combat Zone and interconnected short stories, The Things They Carried , deal with the Vietnam War—has been teaching at Texas State University, San Marcos since 1999.

According to a page on the school’s web site, ten years ago, when O’Brien was living in Cambridge, Mass., Tom Grimes, the novelist who teaches at TSUSM, invited him to come to the San Marcos, which is located between Austin and San Antonio in the Lone Star State.

“I spoke with Tim in 1998, and he agreed to come here for a year, ” Grimes, who is is the head of Texas State’s MFA in creative writing program, said. “He came, and loved the program so much that he decided to stay, and of course we arranged that.”

O’Brien now lives in Central Texas, where he is working on his next book. That one, he says, will be based on his experiences as a 61-year-old father of two boys, ages 2 and 4. “It’s a combination of fiction and nonfiction, ” O’Brien—who named his main character “Tim O’Brien” in The Things They Carried —says.

He teaches full time every other year at Texas State (formerly known as Southwest Texas State), spending one semester teaching MFA students, and the next semester talking to undergraduate English classes, conducting small workshops, and participating in campus events such as Scholars Day. On alternate years, he teaches workshops to MFA students in the Creative Writing Program.

“It’s the kind of environment I can thrive in, ” O’Brien says of Texas State. “The students are really top notch, and my colleagues, like Dagoberto Gilb and Tom Grimes, are good teachers. They take it seriously, work hard at it, and they’re also good writers.”


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