Leslie Muzingo asked Stephen J. Matlock:

Where did you get the idea for Stars in the Texas Sky?

Stephen J. Matlock Now there's a question....

I was raised in a part of the United States where we didn't talk about or acknowledge race. Which is actually most of the United States.

I was challenged by a friend to see him as he was: black. It was very upsetting to me because I'm a very nice person who doesn't offend people, and here I was offending him because I didn't recognize one of the more salient parts about his existence!

So I set out to learn about what I was deliberately choosing to ignore.

And boy howdy was I ignorant!

I started researching and reading and listening. I read a hundred books, listened to a thousand songs, watch dozens of movies, listened to an increasingly diverse and undiscovered set of voices speaking out.

I know! Here I was, living in this country, and an entire set of people were rendered invisible to me.

I did a lot of listening, and started building up the idea of a world living in parallel to mine, intermixed with mine, and yet never really touching mine.

I read and read and read, all sorts of original source documents. My library went from a nearly pure-white set of authors to an incredibly diverse set of viewpoints. I read narrative and poetry and song and newspapers and magazines.

What is this thing, to be black in America?

As a straight white Evangelical man, I had no idea, and *never needed to know*.

But I started to get some insight.

One point in the black experience struck me, hard, and that was Emmett Till. I had *never heard of him*. He was murdered a few years before I was born, and as far as I could tell, his death was unnoticed by everyone around me.

And yet...every single black American I talked to or listened to knew all about him.

An ordinary boy, thought to be living "safe" in the South, murdered by crazy, racist, ordinary Americans.

His story stuck with me, because I could remember being 12 or 13 and being harum-scarum, and *knowing* I was safe being cocky and confrontative and fun-loving.

He was not safe, and what he did to deserve being beaten and tortured and drowned, at 13, was simply to use his speech therapy and his confidence to speak to a white lady in the South.

And I was in a writers' group that met weekly to talk about their writing. One of the things we did every week was to get a prompt, then write for 15 minutes, and share the flash fiction.

I got the prompt "The car ran through the STOP sign as if it wasn't there..."

That led to the gem of the idea. A car driving through the STOP sign is a sign of a man who does not obey the rules.

What would it be like to be young, and see that the rules you were taught about weren't really the real rules? How do you grow up as a boy into a man, and discover what those real rules are? How is it that STOP signs don't stop cars, admonitions of respect and love don't cause love and respect, commands to be good and true and kind from your religion don't make you *be* good and true and kind?

That prompt had me writing furiously for fifteen minutes, and the entire world of Henry Valentine fell into place.

I knew I had a story in those 1000 words.

And I started plotting out the ideas. Henry Valentine, raised to believe in law and justice, sees the impunity with which those laws and justice are ignored for expediency and revenge and the lust to destroy others. He's 13, and he must grow up to understand that the world of adults which promised him safety and order and respect was actually just a thin veneer on what *actually* happens in the world.

I fleshed out the story over the next year, and then I finished with the story of a young baseball player in a small town in East Texas. I set in in Texas rather than Mississippi so that I could avoid direct comparisons between my story and Emmett Till--I did not want to pretend I understood that story at all--and I just let the characters introduce themselves and go through their lives.

There are bumps along the way, twists and turns and betrayals, and care and love and honor. Henry learns what is in his heart, and learns that you end up doing the right thing when you let your heart tell you what to do.

I sign the copies of my book with the words of Henry, never spoken in the book: "Your life is as big as your heart is."

You won't live until you understand this. When you understand this, then all of life is before you, to bring about healing and care and love, no matter if you are a young man in 1950s racially segregated East Texas, or an old guy living in the racially segregated United States of America of 2018.

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