Callie Collins is a queer writer and editor from Texas. She has an MFA from the University of Michigan and received a Zell Postgraduate Fellowship and a Fiction Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She lives in Austin. Her debut novel is Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine.
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Callie Collins
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Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine: A Novel
Austin, Texas is a town in the throes of social upheaval and the Rush Creek Saloon, five miles on its outskirts, is a bar without a crowd. Until a strange new house band transforms it from moribund honky-tonk to thriving blues bar. But are the throngs of people and the rowdy music worth the chaos that comes with them?
"Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine" is told through three perspectives, each of whom is in some ways responsible for the rebirth of Rush Creek and for the violence that follows in the afterbirth. Doug Moser, a country-and-blues guitarist from San Antonio, is seizing his long-awaited chance at fame but cannot turn away from the easy booze and drugs that come with the life. Deanna Teague owns Rush Creek. Her marriage is rocky and so is her sense of herself, but she sees a crack of light if she can just hold it all together. And Steven Francis is a boy who loves too fiercely. He grapples with his sexuality, his God, and his place in a town where he badly wants to belong.
In her heartfelt, electrifying rockabilly ode to a place in a permanent state of becoming, Collins has captured the roughhousing mood and paradoxical longings of the American psyche. The embrace of both inertia and danger, the longing for freedom and anarchy even as we crave a place to belong. "Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine" is a time capsule stuffed with heat and booze, electric guitar riffs and big, empty spaces. It’s about the cost of fame—the real price of attention—and what it can do to a person, to a community, to a whole damn town.
