Field Report: Cross Plains, TX 2025
Robert E. Howard Days is an annual fan gathering, organized around June 11th and held in the city of Cross Plains, Texas, co-sponsored by Project Pride, Cross Plains’ own civic improvement organization, and the Robert E. Howard Foundation. I’ve been going since 1996, when I accidentally ran across it during a visit to my parents’ home, then located in Brownwood, Texas. My first full visit was the following year, and I’ve only missed two since then due to illness and death.

Why? Because reading Robert E. Howard is what drove me to become a writer. He’s the reason you’re reading this right now instead of me asking you if that shoe is too tight and would you like a half-size larger. My first story was about a sword and sorcery fan who finds himself transported to the world of his hero, only to end up as cannon fodder as the barbarian mows him and everyone else down. It was one of those twisty-Twilight Zone kind of stories one writes when first starting out, and it failed to predict where I would end up in 2025.

I never thought that would be a thing that needed consideration, but here we are. It started back in 1996, when I’d missed all of the scheduled festivities, but managed to make my way to the Cross Plains Library where a number of Howard’s typescripts were laid out for people to look through…with their bare hands. I was very careful not to sweat nor cry while holding “The Destiny Gorilla,” my favorite REH boxing story. After putting it back down on the table, I told Joan, the librarian, “These really need to be in Mylar envelopes. And gloves. You need gloves.”

“You know, you’re not the first person to tell us that,” she replied.

I’m pleased to report that the following year, everything was under Mylar, and you could only leaf through the pages with white gloves on.

That’s one of the things about Robert E. Howard Days: it’s not like other fan events. We tend to call it a “Fan Gathering” because, 39 years later, it’s still being run by the senior citizens of Project Pride and the fans and scholars from the REH Foundation. The energy behind the scenes is one of “Spanky’s got a barn, Darla’s got some costumes, let’s put on a show!” And we are all well aware that none of us are getting any younger. Membership recruitment is ongoing and constant.

As a Fan Gathering, it’s somewhat contained by the size of the venue and the relative isolation of Cross Plains, thirty minutes from larger cities in any direction, but not having the full infrastructure to accommodate 200 guests. There’s a lot of driving and travel, just to get to the gig. What we might lack in elbow room, we make up for in hospitality.

The other thing we call the annual gathering is “the Family Reunion.” I mean, you’re sitting outside in the shade, drinking an adult beverage, and there’s hot dogs grilling, an older aunt asking you if you want a piece of cake, and you’re talking to some of your favorite people that you only see once a year. In epochs past, we even had a drunk uncle who’d overdo it and pass out. What’s more “family reunion” than that?

Like any good family reunion, once you show up, you’re in real danger of (a) being roped into moving tables or stacking chairs or carrying water to the cooler; and (b) you’re told “y’all come back.” We can spot noobs and first-timers a mile away, and when we do, we tend to send over a welcome wagon in the form of one or more of our sociable people to greet them, show them the lay of the land, and tell them who’s who and what’s what.

It’s the Who’s Who part of this that is worth a deeper dive. It’s been such a pleasure to get to know these people over the years, both the citizens of Cross Plains, and all of the various members of REH fandom.

I first met Rusty Burke in Cross Plains, who was the series editor of Robert E. Howard’s Fight Stories Magazine at the time. He was gracious, and patient with me as I peppered him with questions. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to meet people like Roy Thomas, Gary Gianni, Thomas Gianni, Mark Schultz, Fred Blosser, Tim Truman, David C. Smith, Marcelo Anciano, the guy who kicked modern-day REH publishing into high gear, and of course, Glenn Lord. These names should be familiar to anyone who’s been reading REH’s work (or Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian comics) in the last 35 years or so.

I also had the good fortune to meet a number of Texas authors who breezed through at one time or another to pay their respects: Larry D. Thomas, the Poet Laureate of Texas, Carlton Stowers, James Reasoner, Elmer Kelton, Joe Lansdale, Michael Scott Myers, the screenwriter for The Whole Wide World, and many others.

Let’s not forget the friends I made within the ranks of the Behind-the-Scenes movers and shakers (the quirky term for which is “SMOF” or, the “Secret Masters of Fandom”), including Patrice Louinet, Rob Roehm, Frank Coffman, Bobby Derie, Paul Herman, Ben Friberg, Al Harron, Will Oliver (who’s new biography of REH is worth tracking down), Jeff Shanks, Chris Gruber, Bill “Indy” Cavalier, Dennis McHaney and many, many others over the years; people I initially met online and have since become close friends with. The people of Cross Plains, too, have opened their hearts and I’ve come to know the members of Project Pride well.

For years, I was always excited to meet whoever the guest of honor was, shake their hand and have a conversation with them about Our Favorite Author. I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but sometime around 2008, I became one of the people whom other attendees were excited to meet. I started volunteering at REH Days in 2002, but I didn’t become one of the programming participants until 2005, talking about REH’s boxing stories on a panel at the high school library. By 2006, I’d written the first full-length biography of REH since 1982; Blood and Thunder was a much-needed corrective that answered and refuted claims and unfounded assertions made in the last biography that went unchallenged for decades.  I was the Robert E. Howard Guest of Honor in 2008, one of the coolest things I ever got to do.

I’ve been active in Howard Studies since 2000, when the erstwhile Clockwork Storybook published a special Robert E. Howard issue that included a reproduction of a typescript and a short essay from Rusty Burke discussing the story. That merited a rare trip to Cross Plains when the weather was cold, so we could carefully and gently scan the typescript in, one page at a time.

Along the way, I’ve also seen a lot of changes from the earliest days of our annual Fan Gathering. One of the best onramps for discovering Robert E. Howard’s life and works was the movie, The Whole Wide World. If you haven’t seen it, you should put that on the list. We first noticed its influence when people we didn’t know started showing up, wanting to talk about Howard’s poetry. This is where Barbara Barrett and Aurelia Wilder first came in, and organized the annual porchlight poetry readings. I’ve lost count of the number of people over the years who cited The Whole Wide World as their catalyst to reading REH.

And while this isn’t my greatest triumph, it’s still an amazing and fascinating situation: we had a woman join REHUPA, the Amateur Press Association for REH (google it, if you like reading about 20th century fan activity), and she joined after reading Waterfront Fists and Others, a collection of Howard’s boxing stories that I’d written the introduction to. Not Conan, but Steve Costigan. My work here is done. Well, not really. Now we have Fists of Iron volumes I-IV coming out, and that’s what we are recommending you check out instead.

In addition to the number of International travelers who have come from literally all over the globe (Australia, China, Canada, Sweden, France, Italy, Spain, Scotland, England, Germany, Mexico, and so many other places I’m forgetting), we saw an uptick in academics like Justin Everett and Deidre Pettipiece, Tracy Henley and Ben Garstad, Dan and Laura Look, Jonas Prida, and Jason and Nicole Emmelhainz-Carney, who would go on to take over editorial chores on The Dark Man, the Journal of Robert E. Howard Studies.

I got to watch Howard Days turn into something greater than the sum of its parts. Along the way, I wrote a lot of things: introductions to books and comics, comic book scripts, lectures and talks, presenting academic papers at conferences, moderating panels at conventions, articles and essays, public performances of Howard’s boxing stories, bus tours, walking tours, house tours, interviews in print and on film, a documentary, a second edition of Blood and Thunder, small press publishing, role-playing game design, book reviews, poems written and read, and OH JAYSIS, WHAT ELSE?

This was partially just happenstance and partially by design. I wanted to be in that rarefied air, behind the scenes, looking at new finds, talking about books, doing research, and all the rest of it. It’s a small group of people; always has been, and while we’ve made a lot of effort over the years to bring new blood in, it’s always in drips and drabs, rather than pints and buckets. But every year we see newcomers, and not just graybeards; new fans created by comics, video games, movies, and social media, all flock to the middle of Texas in June (!) just to get a little closer to understanding this talented and tragic man.

When I started coming to Howard Days, it was as a fan, but I realized that I could do more to extoll the virtues of Our Favorite Author. There were things I wanted to see addressed. At the time, my intentions were simple: I wanted to see all of Robert E. Howard’s fiction and poetry in print, not just Conan and Solomon Kane. I also wanted Howard to have a measure of respect in his home state, an accolade that has thus far eluded him. Finally, I wanted to change the narrative around him and his decision to take his own life at the age of 30. He was pilloried for fifty years following his death, even as people were making bags of money selling (some would say “exploiting”) his work. With over two decades of service under my belt, how are those goals looking?

All of Robert E. Howard’s fiction and poetry is now available. This didn’t happen until just a few years ago. From 1998 to 2019, a massive effort was made to locate, sort, organize and codify, and reassemble Howard’s full body of work. Now it’s all available from Del Rey and the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, who is publishing affordable trade paperbacks of the collected works. I’d call that one Done and Done.

Respect for REH is growing slowly, bolstered by the annual event in Cross Plains and its promotion across social media. Texans love to be tourists in their own state, and this brings many folks to town, as the trip is driving distance for them. Howard is slowly climbing out of the fantasy and science fiction ghetto he was sorted into back in the 60s. Due to the nature of his stories, it’s a tough row to hoe for some folks who only consider Texas literature in terms of oil or cattle. On the other hand, show me another Texas author as widely read, translated into over two dozen languages, and I’ll eat your ten-gallon hat. Other writers and academics are now acknowledging the influence of Texas and Southwestern humorists on his writing, and there’s a forthcoming collection from A&M University Press that I and others wrote chapters for, so let’s consider that a Work in Progress.

There have been four biographies written about REH since 2000, to say nothing of the various essay collections and treatises that have been published. There’s some lingering vestiges of the old slights, like calling REH “maladjusted to the point of psychosis,” but it’s in stray pockets of fandom, rather than part of the ongoing narrative. I’d like to humbly suggest that my book was a part of where we are now in terms of contextualizing Howard’s suicide, but there were many others before and after me, some going back as far as the mid-1970s who defended Howard’s memory from posthumous amateur psychoanalysis. So, then, Mostly Done.

Next year marks the 40th anniversary of Robert E. Howard days, and from the preliminary rumblings I’ve heard, I may well be co-hosting the event next year, along with the current ringleaders and my partner in literary crime, Jeff Shanks. This may well become a new gig for me, in the ensuing years, but we’ll have to wait and see about that. I mean, I’ve got my lifetime achievement award, what’s left but serving on various boards of directors and puttering around in the garage, muttering about the kids who keep stealing my pecans off of the front lawn.

Over the years, I’ve gotten tips, encouragement, and lots of support from so many people, many of whom are mentioned above, so much so that it would be counter-productive and a little tedious to list everyone. I’ve gotten better about telling people how much they mean to me before it’s too late, so I’m going to continue to do that, while I look at my upcoming projects and note that no, I’m not done with Robert E. Howard studies, not by a damn sight. Still more to do. What the hell, it’s the least I can do for the guy who set me on the path to my writing career. Thanks, Bob. And thanks to all of you who have read and liked my stuff over the years. Every note, every email and PM, every letter, every signature and autograph, all of the applause and the laughs, and even a few tears over the years—I have truly loved and appreciated it all. Thank you.