Published in 2025
222 pages
Callie Collins is a queer writer and editor from Texas. She has an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was also a 2018-2019 Zell Postgraduate Fellow. She held a Fiction Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts from 2019-2020. She lives in Austin.
What is this book about?
Against the vibrant, bluesy backdrop of 1970s Austin, Texas, this electrifying debut charts the scorching chaos of perpetual change.
It’s 1975 in Austin, and the Rush Creek Saloon, five miles west of town, is a bar without a crowd. But when a strange new house band takes the stage, the hippies roll in and the good ole boys find their way back. Told in a trio of voices—a guitarist chasing what may be his last shot at success; a bar owner trying to see a future in her lifeless marriage; and a young kid from East Texas desperate for kinship, or at least something to take the damn edge off—Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine delivers a riotous love song to an enigmatic city.
In her heartfelt, shimmering rockabilly ode to a place in a permanent state of becoming,Callie Collins captures the roughhousing mood and paradoxical longings of the American psyche. Just inside the doors of the Rush Creek Saloon, the old smacks into the new—and the messy desire for a good time at any cost bucks up against the profound need to belong.
