For Beto O’Rourke, writing a book is like swimming across a lake.
“Sometimes it feels like you will never get there,” O’Rourke said. “If you’ve ever swum across a lake, there’s a period in the middle of the crossing where the farther shore doesn’t seem to be getting any closer no matter how much effort you’re putting in, no matter how long you’ve been swimming.”
O’Rourke will share insights about writing his second book, “We’ve Got To Try: How the Fight for Voting Rights Makes Everything Else Possible,” at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 20, at the ASNMSU Center for the Arts at New Mexico State University. The event is free and open to the public as part of the Nelson-Boswell Reading Series.
"The Nelson-Boswell Reading Series was inspired by former NMSU professors Antonya Nelson and Robert Boswell,” said Rus Bradburd, NMSU creative writing professor who is coordinating the series in the College of Arts and Sciences. “For decades, this free event has brought internationally recognized fiction writers, poets and memoirists to Las Cruces for free readings.”
O’Rourke is well known, having served as the U.S. representative for Texas’ 16th congressional district for six years, run for a Texas U.S. Senate seat in 2018, a candidate for the U.S. presidential nomination in 2020 and the Democratic Party’s nominee for the 2022 Texas gubernatorial election.
It took a year for O’Rourke to write his second book, which explores an imminent threat to U.S. democracy.
“I wrote this book to understand why our democracy and the right to vote is under such serious attack and what we can do to prevail in what I believe to be the fight of our lives,” O’Rourke said. “In the research and writing, I discovered truly inspiring stories of people who've been in this fight before, people like Lawrence Nixon, a Black doctor who lived in El Paso and spent 20 years of his life fighting and ultimately defeating the ‘white primary’ in Texas and laying the groundwork for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Not only can we overcome the challenges in front of us, we've overcome them before against much greater odds.”
O’Rourke joins past authors in the Nelson-Boswell Reader Series such as David Foster Wallace, U.S. Poet Laureates Robert Pinsky and Juan Felipe Herrera, Denise Chavez, Richard Russo, and MacArthur winner Don Mee Choi.
When asked what advice he would give to budding writers, O’Rourke went back to his lake analogy. “Keep swimming!” he said.
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CUTLINE: Beto O’Rourke, author of “We’ve Got To Try: How the Fight for Voting Rights Makes Everything Else Possible,” will give a reading at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 20, at the ASNMSU Center for the Arts at New Mexico State University. The event is part of the Nelson-Boswell Reading Series. (Image courtesy Anna Snider)