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Daily Inspiration: Meet Heath Dollar

Today we’d like to introduce you to Heath Dollar.

Hi Heath, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
My name is Heath Dollar, and I am a Texas native. I guess I first realized that I wanted to be a writer when I was about fourteen years old. I enjoyed writing, and there was something magical about it.

Today, I honestly could not imagine a life without writing. It is how I process information and make sense of the world around me. And it is also the best way I know to articulate the way I feel.

So I had these dreams of being a writer, and one day when I was a young man, I was reading a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and I was struck by what he had to say: “How vain it is to sit down and write when you have not stood up to live.” And those words changed my life.

So the next thing I knew, I found myself living and working in Yellowstone National Park and hiking deep into the backcountry in my free time. While I was in Yellowstone, I learned about the natural world and read a great many books. And after about five years in Yellowstone’s orbit, I moved to the Czech Republic, where I stayed for the next five years.

In the Czech Republic, I lived in a little town called Rumburk, which is right on the German border. While I was there, I worked as an English teacher and was the lead singer for a rock ‘n’ roll band. Out of both interest and necessity, I learned to speak Czech, and I picked up a little German as well. I also met my wife, Martina, in the Czech Republic, and we still speak Czech every day.

My move to Europe was very much encouraged by my stepfather back in Texas, who was a fluent German speaker and wished he had spent a year or two in Europe when he was young. While I was living in the Czech Republic, he and my mother moved from Fort Worth to Fredericksburg, where they became active in the community. In Fredericksburg, my stepfather was a member of a German-speaking choir, and he and my mother both worked at Oktoberfest every year, and my mother still works that event even today. So over the years, I have had my share of exposure to the Texas German culture as well.

Not long after my wife and I established ourselves back here in Texas, where my family has lived for several generations, I handed her a poem I had written about my maternal grandfather. After she read it, she said that I needed to concentrate on writing about Texas because that was where my heart was. And so that is the direction I have taken ever since.

Both of my short story collections are set in the present day in a fictional place called Waylon County, which is in the Texas Hill Country, and some of the characters speak languages that were commonly heard in Texas in the nineteenth century.

So, in the end, I would say that much of what I have lived and learned over the years informs my fiction.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
There is a great deal of competition in the literary world, and the path to publication is not always easy.

What has helped me over the years is to write because I love to write, not because I want to receive some extrinsic reward. I also try to view my work as a product rather than an extension of myself. That makes it easier to take criticism and learn from rejection.

The road has not been smooth, but I am happy to have traveled down it.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am the author of Waylon County: Texas Stories (Sleeping Panther Press 2017) and Old Country Fiddle (Red Dirt Press 2021), which won the Texas Institute of Letters’ 2021 Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Book of Fiction.

One of the stories in the collection, which is called “Ink Upon the Furrows,” won the 2018 Texas Observer Short Story Contest and was named a finalist for the TIL’s Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story.

Both of my collections are set in a fictional county in the Texas Hill Country, and there are a number of recurring characters. One of the goals for these collections was to celebrate the many vibrant cultures within the Lone Star State, for these cultures are what makes Texas the fascinating place that it is.

One thing I believe has helped my writing is that my wife and I embrace all that we have experienced living and traveling around the world, and we sometimes find ourselves incorporating words from three different languages into a single sentence. This is by no means intentional, and I like to use elements of our “home language” in my stories, which I hope conveys a certain sense of authenticity to the reader.

What was your favorite childhood memory?
I always enjoyed going fishing with my father when I was a boy. I especially enjoyed being on the lake at night and seeing all of the stars. And it was always fun to hear my father, who is a master of the Texas vernacular, tell stories.

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Image Credits

Headshot photographed by Martina Milerova

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