Students listen in on a novel reception

Troy’s English department welcomed a Fulbright Scholar and an author with a well-known name to Troy’s campus last week. 

Dr. Nicole Camastra and Dennis McCarthy spent last week speaking to and sharing their experiences with Troy’s English students across five class visits, two panel-style discussions and a more personal reception at the end of the week. The events were set up by Assistant Professor of English Dr. Patrick Bonds and the Chair of the English Department Dr. Kirk Curnutt. 

“It's been a wonderful week,” Curnutt said. “I think what it's really taught our students is about the stuff you can do when you get outside into the real world. 

“I think the thing we want in the English department the most is to really put literature in the streets, and help our students understand that it's a living, vibrant thing out in the world. Lifelong learning is a very important ambition to have.” 

Camastra is a Fulbright Scholar who recently spent a year in Norway working with upper secondary students in American Studies. For her, the greatest benefit from that opportunity came from the experiences she gained living in another country for a whole year. 

“I think my goal is to give [the students] a greater understanding of how important it is to travel and to have any kind of cross-cultural experience that's offered to them,” Camastra said. “It just broadens your perspective, and that's one of the biggest parts of education.” 

In her time abroad, Camastra said she has learned that what you know should never be stagnant, but always advancing and growing. 

“I think educators have a really important job,” Camastra said. “Sometimes, individuals and institutions can rest on their laurels, and they just kind of keep doing the things they've always done, because it's easy.  

“Instead, when you search out new experiences, and when you're actively trying to challenge things that you thought were true about education or about learning – about what purpose an education serves – then it forces you to refine your own sense of mission and vision. And that's going to affect your pedagogy, or it's going to affect your leadership, or it's going to affect your school's ethos and culture.” 

The other speaker, Dennis McCarthy, is an author and brother of the late Cormac McCarthy, an award-winning author and screenwriter known for his books and the movie adaptation of “The Road,” “No Country for Old Men,” “All the Pretty Horses” and many more.  

One of his major points of discussion with the students was explaining to them his experience being the executor of his brother’s estate. 

Part of that job entailed  deciding what to do with Cormac’s library and his collection of annotated books. Over the course of two years, he and a group of scholars have gone through the entire library of books and distributed them-- some to family, universities, collections or libraries. 

“I pulled all of Cormac's books out of storage and put them into his house at first,” McCarthy said. “He had a big house, -- 5,600 square feet, three floors, and now it's just full, and I mean full of books. 

“He would take on the author, you know, even to the point in some cases, he would rewrite somebody's sentences in a published book. He would scratch it right over the top. And those books are now incredibly valuable.” 

This love and fascination for writing didn’t just make its way into the life of one of the McCarthy brothers, rather both. Dennis himself, who had been a writer his whole life but never thought he would ever write fiction, published a novel in 2021 thanks to support from his brother, titled “The Gospel According to Billy the Kid.” 

The book takes the life of one of the most famous outlaws in American history and reimagines it, asking, “What if all of the tales you hear about Billy the Kid aren’t the truth?” McCarthy said that the idea came from his moving to New Mexico and discovering how little we know about the famous outlaw. 

“I loved the Southwest, loved the history of the Southwest, and I started reading about it, and I just started reading about Billy the Kid, and he’s really a fascinating character,”

McCarthy said. “Everything we ‘know’ about Billy the Kid is based on a book theoretically written by Pat Garrett, who theoretically killed Billy the Kid. 

“It's called The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, but he didn't actually write it. A journalist friend of his wrote it, and wrote it in about six weeks, and it turned out it was basically a work of fiction. What we actually know about Billy the Kid is virtually nothing. We don't know what Billy the Kid's name was. We don't know where he was born.  

“We don't know when he was born. We really don't know when he died, and we don't know where he's buried.” 

With an animatic character for inspiration and his brother at his back, Dennis was finally able to write the work of fiction he didn’t think was possible. Last week, he also attended a book signing in Montgomery, Alabama, for the novel on top of his several meetings with Troy students. 

McCarthy knows and appreciates more than anything that without the support from his late brother and his wife, such an accomplishment would not have been possible. 

“I’ve known a lot of amazing people in my life, and [Cormac] is a most amazing person,” McCarthy said. “Not the most amazing person – he is a most amazing person – he's number two. 

“Number one was my wife. They died on the same month one year apart. I feel enormously fortunate to have two absolutely incredible people in my life.”