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For more than four decades, I have made a living as a writer, editor and photographer. Prior training for this career included working as a dogcatcher, sweeping up severed chicken feet at a processing plant, showing Black exploitation films as a movie projectionist, operating a bottle washer at a soda factory, delivering pizzas and slinging steaks. I am adaptable.

I made a decent living in the newspaper business for a long time, but that chapter is partially closed. I write the Capital Highlights column for Texas Press Association, which runs in about 100 small Texas newspapers, and still freelance here and there. But I don’t plan to put out any more newspapers, leaving that worthy endeavor to younger folks. Besides the work you see on this site, I have written several pieces for World Wildlife magazine in the past several years on climate change and sustainable forestry and currently freelance for Texas Highways magazine. Past work includes a piece on the space shuttle Columbia’s tragic disaster for Texas Monthly and a piece on coal-fired plants for Texas Observer.  And I wrote for Airstream Life for a time. Really.

I have published five books, four of which are for sale on this site under the “books” button. My fifth book was a collaboration with photographer O. Rufus Lovett, published in April 2021: @longviewtx150 is a profile of 150 of Longview’s citizens from all walks of life in celebration of the city’s sesquicentennial. An exhibit was held at the Longview Museum of Fine Arts, also in 2021. VeraBank kindly underwrote publishing the book, with all proceeds going to the Women’s Center of East Texas. You can buy a copy at longviewtx150.com.

For the past five years, I have worked as a reference librarian at Estes Library at LeTourneau University, which has truly been a blessing. And I teach photography there each fall.

When I’m not working, I piddle on our 57-acre timber farm about 8 miles north of Longview. We have a donkey named Pancho, two dogs and two cats. That’s this week. Who knows what next week might bring?

Email me at garyborders@gmail.com  if you want to chat or have a question. I will continue to indulge in a weekly column posted here every Friday, a bad habit I picked up more than 40years ago. I haven’t missed a week since. Wish I could say the same about my church attendance. I have started working on a third collection of columns, with plans to publish in the spring of 2023.

You can also catch me on Red River Radio, the NPR network for Western Louisiana, East Texas and southern Arkansas at 7:45 a.m. every Friday, (89.9 FM in the Longview area, and 88.9 in Lufkin-Nacogdoches) or 24/7 at redriverradio.org. And I’m on Twitter, though not as often as I should be: @garyborders.

See y’all in the funny papers, and please visit often.

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