“I grew up here and my dad – both of my parents really – were around in the 70s, at the Armadillo and going to all these shows,” says author Callie Collins, describing the second-hand nostalgia that inspired her debut novel Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine. “I grew up with like just collections of gig posters from these shows in the 70s. And their favorite musician in the world was Doug Sahm, and Doug Sahm is kind of the impetus for this book.”
Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine isn’t a Doug Sahm biography, Collins makes clear. “It definitely, you know, is inspired by him, but the character in the book is certainly not him,” she says. Though it’s inspired by the Austin music scene of the mid-70s, the story is a work of fiction and all the names have been changed.
“It's about one particular musician who kind of comes into this old honky tonk space [which is called Rush Creek Saloon in the novel] and transforms it into more of a blues bar and brings a new clientele with him,” Collins explains, “and there's a lot of kind of bumps in the road. So it takes place almost entirely in a bar and, and yeah, it's about fame and kind of local fame in particular. What it does to a person. And I think it's really about kind of a young social scene and the kind of machinations of figuring out how to kind of bring a huge group of diverse people together and kind of the fun and the misery of that pursuit.”
Born in the 1980s, Collins missed out on that ‘70s scene but still grew up in an Austin that seemed fixated on it. “when I was growing up here, the 70s were what people remembered of Austin,” she says. “Austin is a town that runs on nostalgia, and I think… that Austin can kind of have this conservative impulse that is surprising to me sometimes, where it's like, we really are looking backward a lot of the time. There's that line that Austin was better two years before you got here, whenever that was. And I think, you know, it's interesting for a place that thinks of itself as really progressive and inclusive and kind of wants to have these values to most often be looking backward. And I think in the book, it's certainly kind of a tribute to that sort of nostalgia, but it challenges it too, I think, in that there are characters who don't fit into what we imagine Austin to have been. And it's not like everything was glittery and tolerant in the 70s, you know? We do need to kind of investigate the impulse for that nostalgia a little bit more than I think we do, and realize that Austin was always changing. It was always transforming. People in the ‘70s felt the same way we do now. Like the town's getting too big [and] we don't know who these people coming in are. And that is a conservative impulse, and it's interesting to kind of reckon with that now, because I think the ‘70s have this kind of dreamlike hold on a lot of people who have lived in this town for a long time, and it certainly wasn't… I mean, there was great music happening, beer was cheaper, weed was cheaper, all of those things. But it was hard for people, and there were still all of the problems that we're facing today. And so I think I want to challenge that nostalgia a little bit and also have fun writing about the scene in the ‘70s.”
The novel has three central figures, and Collins has found that most readers seem to pick a favorite (though she herself loves them all ‘equally and differently').
“There are three characters in the book who each get to kind of have their own POV and it's been really interesting to see as people read it, who they relate to. Like which one they feel… really kind of attached to. And I've had a couple of people say I wish you wrote the whole book from this voice. And I think that mirrors to me the way that we experience life. I want to tell a story from multiple perspectives because I think we all experience the same event quite differently. We hear different things, we see different things, we're coming with all of our baggage and our whole life to a space, and so it felt truer to me to kind of approach the situation from three different angles.”
Of the folks who have read the book in advance of its March 18 release date, two were particularly important to Collins. “[My parents] have read it. They fact checked my cigarette brands for me,” she says. “They really wanted me to get it right, you know, cause they were there. And I think they feel like I did [get it right], so I'm happy about that.”
'Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine' is out March 18 wherever books are sold.