Jim

James Magnuson 1941-2026

For months now I’ve been trying to write something about my dear friend Jim Magnuson, who died in January. He has felt hard for me to sum up, even as his friends and students have written beautiful things about him on social media; even as I sat this past Saturday, midnight Bath time, and watched a lovely memorial to him, livestreamed from the University of Texas campus. It is a strange life, when you can attend a memorial at midnight in your kitchen, but I was grateful.

Jim was the director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin, and he was—as everyone has always said about him, in life and since his passing—astonishingly generous and kind and also (this is one of the things I’ve been thinking about this week) just lovable. Lovable because he was loving. That rarest thing: a writer who loved people. Not just specific people, though those, too, but classrooms and auditoriums full.

Jim was the first person I met at the University of Texas. When I came off the plane for my interview, I recognized him from his author photo, a big white-haired bearded guy, smiling broadly. When he saw me, he brandished a copy of my first novel, just in case I didn’t know who I was looking for. As it happened, I had read his most recent book, The Hounds of Winter, on the plane, so I reached into my bag to get it. That is how we met, waving our books at each other.

We worked together closely at the MCW, doing the usual work of colleagues in an MFA program, thesis defenses and admissions and meetings, but some of my happiest hours of my years in Austin were spent talking to Jim in his office at the Dobie House after I finished teaching my graduate fiction workshop. Every week, I would walk down the hall and stop in his office and we would gab, about students, and books we’d read, about colleagues and other writers. We were, I am not sorry to say, terrible gossips. Jim was full of contagious joy and mischief. We could be petty, but we were laughing so hard it felt like the work of angels. I know I was far from his only gossip partner. He was good at it.

In my long and varied career at institutions of higher learning, Jim is the only colleague who ever made academia fun. I have had colleagues beloved to me with whom I have had hellacious fun despite the churning institution all around us; I really loved my years of teaching and working with students. But with Jim there was a lot of mishegas that was just fun and funny.

And he worked. Before Jim, I had never met other teacher of creative writing who balanced his own writing with the work of teaching so well, who had an ego calibrated to both. He wrote in the morning. He had a carrel somewhere in the main UT library which he went to every morning. The exact location was secret, as far as I know, but the practice was not. Everyone knew that Jim worked mornings on his own work, and they respected it, and this is one of the most important things a teaching writer needs to learn how to do: establish boundaries. Not moment by moment, but week to week and year to year. His work was wonderful and various, nine novels, including a hysterical satire on an MFA program called Famous Writers I Have Known and a beautiful young adult book about Santa Claus’s youth called Young Claus. (Any large man with a big white beard will be conflated with Santa Claus; my father particularly hated parents in public pointing him out as a threat to make their children behave.) Jim had recently finished a book about a young man caught up with a domestic terrorist called The Accomplice and was at work on another, and had collaborated with our colleague Cindy McCreery on a TV pilot based on Jim’s experiences writing for Knott’s Landing. They called the series Soapy.

He was, simply, always working, always looking for the next book to write, not wanting to do the same thing over and over. Both work and human beings enlivened him. He exulted in his students’ successes, in every success attached to the Michener Center.

He was also one of the most literary people I have ever known: he read as much as he wrote, classics and the published work of students and contemporary fiction. Many of the teaching writers I know read new fiction in order to feed their teaching. There might have been some of that for Jim, but he also just wanted to know what was going on, who was being read and talked about: he liked being at the center of things.

Was there ever so extroverted a writer? At parties when he saw somebody he wanted to talk to—most people—his shoulders would come up towards his ears as though he were about to run across the room affectionately tackle the object of his affection. He loved parties; he was an excellent host. He was a hugger, a slapper of backs, a shaker of hands, and employed a particular fond shoving maneuver. I once outran him at an event at the LBJ Library because he was intent on introducing me to J. M. Coetzee, and I, an awkward person, do my best to avoid talking to writers I admire, a fact which confounded Jim. He finally found me talking instead to the animatronic figure of LBJ.

He was particularly brilliant at that most difficult genre, the literary reading introduction. He might be the only person in the world who has ever been good at it: he had always read the work and talked about it with intelligence and admiration and above all ease. He didn’t show off or fawn, which made his praise that much deeper; he never made it about himself in any way; if he knew the person he spoke of their character as seriously as the work; he never, ever, went too long.

After Jim retired in 2017 and we were no longer university colleagues, we became even better friends. We gossiped in new locations. We furrowed our brows, trying to remember juicy details. Jim had been uncomplainingly dealing with a host of medical problems, and he was pretty sick with a lot of things and eventually was diagnosed with ALS. I scoured the literary world for gossip he might like. Nobody I haven’t given birth to or married has ever told me they loved me more often. He told everyone he loved that he loved them. He left it all on the table.

When in his last days he employed a power recliner, he required an annex for his feet in the form of an ordinary ottoman. I walked away thinking about how much I loved him, and his wife, Hester, who is, astonishingly, just as lovable. Like all legendary marriages, a comedy team, even funnier together than apart., funny, smart, kind, with an equal gift for making you feel like you were interesting—like you mattered.

Openhearted, openminded. At this particular moment in history, what do we need from our fellow humans? I’ll never be good at it as Jim—loving humanity—but I am going to try to follow his example.

When Jim called me on the phone, he would always say my first name in a particular way, equal stress on all four syllables, a double spondee. If you didn’t know him, you might think he was admonishing me, but it was merely the work of a man who could turn a given name into a sweet endearment. That way I would always know it was him on the line.

I miss that weird bird call more than I can say.