Howdy. I’m Dave Dalton Thomas. I am a Texas writer.

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What do I consider Texan? Well, Billy Joe Shaver told me a story one time backstage at Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnic at the Stockyards in Fort Worth. That’s probably the most Texas thing that ever happened to me, or anyone for that matter. Heck, a dozen wild bull riders could kick down my door in their cowboy boots tonight and beat my ass to death with armadillos and my dying words would be “you call that Texan?”

 

I’ve traveled to just about every county in Texas (230+ and counting) and interviewed all sorts of characters. I’ve eaten barbecue from Silsbee to El Paso and found every bar and bad place to be along the way. I’m partial to dust and rust and taxidermy and West Texas emptiness in a way that confuses most folks.

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If you’re looking for scandal, I was actually born in Heidelberg, Germany. My dad was in the Army and that was how it happened. I’m still the only one in my family, as far back as memory goes, who wasn’t born in Texas. At some point I might be done getting over it.

 

If you’re looking for analysis, my mother was a children’s librarian from a tight-lipped family of secrets who sought her escape in reading. My dad was a hard-working drinking man who didn’t like being told what to do and spent most of his life fearless and bulletproof. Or at least that’s what it looked like from the outside. It was only a few years ago that I realized how much their two influences fought to shape my personality.

 

How much? Well, I followed my dad to Texas A&M University, joined the Corps of Cadets, then became a philosophy major. After failing a philosophy class out of pure laziness, I ended up with a degree in journalism in 1993.

 

The words won out, I guess. I worked for newspapers in San Angelo, Victoria, Beaumont and Austin. I was never a reporter, just a copy editor with a writing problem. I could go on about how I was a designer, too. About how I really wasn’t much of an editor, I never liked editing other people’s writing, but I was a hell of a newspaper production specialist. If it needed to be done to put a newspaper out, I could do it. I could tell you all about it, but it’d be like writing about hunting passenger pigeons and wooly mammoths. There ain’t nothing like I experienced in my 20s that exists today and it’s damn sad to think about.

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I landed on my feet, I guess. Since 2019, I’ve been a professional writer, something I’ve wanted to be all my life. My day job is working for the State of Texas, telling stories and doing other communications work. I’ve written a book, “Picnic: Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Tradition,” for Texas A&M University Press and I do occasional freelance work for magazines, newspapers and websites.

 

I’m married to a good-hearted woman and we have three kids, an anxious dog and a one-eyed black cat.