Fishtrap—the old literary non-profit that kept me going for over 20 years, is back with another National Endowment for the Arts sponsored “Big Read” this month. The book is Charles Portis’s True Grit—the tale of a 14 year-old girl named Mattie Ross avenging her father’s murder with the help of a Federal Marshall/gunman named Rooster Cogburn in a chase that begins in Arkansas and ends in Indian Territory.
I’d never read the book, and have only vague memories of John Wayne/Rooster and the girl traipsing across hard ground in a series of shoot-‘em-ups, gradually coming to terms with each other and eventually gaining some revenge. I have not seen the new film, so the movie picture poster of John Wayne was stuck in my mind as I began to read.
And then the book took over, the story carried me along. And the text didn’t send me back to the
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