Driving Lessons

In this brilliant fiction debut from a legendary visual artist, thirteen interconnected stories explore friendship and intimacy, loneliness and dislocation, and the physical contours of a dilapidated American landscape.

These stories, which first appeared as part of Coursey’s solo exhibition at The Pollock Gallery of SMU's Meadows School of the Arts, demonstrate the artist’s fascination with the broken-down and discarded relics of industry and labor. Coursey’s stories are laced with humor, conspiracy, paranoia, and compassion, exploring the ripple effects of violence, the mystery of a car found in a well, house-boat culture, Texas landscapes of machinery and dust. Objects possess a totemic importance as Coursey catalogs the detritus of American culture.

These ornate vignettes present a colorful cast of characters and vivid scenery, demonstrating the author’s eye for detail both inanimate and human. Coursey spotlights work and deeds done by hand, and the artful, sculpted sentences reveal the writer’s care and facility as a linguistic craftsman.

Tim Coursey has lived in Dallas, Texas, since 1948. He studied art under Roger Winter at Dallas College and later at SMU Meadows School of the Arts, where his teachers included Otis Dozier, Jerry Bywaters, Mary Vernon, Larry Scholder and James Surls. Coursey’s practice is influenced by his connection with fellow writers, machinists, teachers and past day jobs. These have included janitor, bus driver, professional jeweler, foundry hand pourer of enormous one-piece bronzes, antique Japanese sword fitting replicator, and producer of tiny furniture. Driving Lessons is his first work of fiction.