Long-time Dallas visual artist Tim Coursey discusses his debut novel, Driving Lessons, with Ben Fountain and David Searcy in a special event at The Wild Detectives.

About the book

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.

About the presenters

Tim Coursey is a sculptor, graphic artist and one-time bronze founder with a failed fine art career. Once sought after as a faker of all sorts of antiques, he is best known at present for fine furniture design and manufacture, as a maker of church furnishings in wood and metal, and as a jeweler making one-off commissions, ecclesiastical bling and the like.

Meanwhile, Coursey writes. His somewhat dark debut novel Driving Lessons, with his illustrations, was published by Deep Vellum in June 2022. He lives in Dallas, Texas, currently working obsessively on a second novel.

Ben Fountain's work has received the PEN/Hemingway Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Fiction, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in Dallas.