The last thing I expected to hear from the mouth of John Erickson, author of the Hank the Cowdog series, was this question: “Do you know the music of Morten Lauridsen?”

Morten Lauridsen? The award-winning American composer whose radiant choral works have been described as serene, probing, and almost mystical? Did I hear Erickson right?

Yes, this was his second utterance when we met last week at the national conference of the Association of Christian Classical Schools in Texas (ACCS). Erickson was headlining that day’s events, presenting an afternoon talk on story-writing and offering a festive reading of beloved scenes from various Hank the Cowdog books that evening.

Since I had promised his biggest fan, my daughter Helen, to get a signed copy of the classic first book, I resolved to hit the exhibit hall early, unsure whether or not I’d find him. Yet, like the seasoned rancher he is, Erickson was “up and at’em,” tending a table laden with all 76 of the Hank the Cowdog volumes. Next to them were audio versions of his book, other titles he has authored, and a sprinkling of ancillary items including plush versions of the series’ two main characters: Hank and his doggie-sidekick Drover.

Soliciting his attention, I introduced myself a bit shyly. He looked straight at me and said something like “So why are you here?” Deciding he was a one-sentence type of guy, I stumbled out words like “Professor Carol . . . creating courses on music, history, and the arts” and laid one of our brochures on the table. That’s when his question about Lauridsen popped right at me.

I confess that my mouth dropped (which is bad form). If I learned anything in ten years on a goat ranch in Bowie, Texas, it was never to assume the interests of country folks. They may have grown up slinging cattle cubes, but they could have trained as opera singers or research scientists. Or both.

Well, after Lauridsen, any musical topic was possible! Before I knew it, we were roaming across the pasture of Classical music, covering everything from the popular mid 20th-century organist Virgil Fox to Gregorian Chant (yes, it turns out that Erickson employs all kinds of stylistic models for the original songs he crafts in each audio book).

There is much more I would like to tell you about Erickson, but I’ll limit myself to the discovery of his 2009 book Story Craft. Reflections on Faith, Culture, & Writing. The book is efficiently cast, as you would expect from a cowboy author, and is both autobiographical (particularly the path to his success with Hank the Cowdog) and advisory (suggestions for would-be authors). Every page radiates with homespun wisdom and perspicacious, even scholarly, observations.

I confess: in all those hours of overhearing Audible downloads of Hank the Cowdog, it never occurred to me that the author of these stories who performs all of the voices in their audio-versions was once three credits shy of a Masters of Divinity from Harvard!

After realizing that and reading about his faith and life-long commitment to Judeo-Christian moral and spiritual values, I was no longer surprised by the success of his series. Nor was I surprised to find at the end of this book a bibliography containing works by C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, Paul Davies, and other writers who have influenced the Classical revival.

Employing self-restraint, let me cite only one passage from Story Craft, namely the explanation he gave when he curtailed his studies at Harvard Divinity School just shy of the finish line: “I began to realize that anything I could do with a master’s degree, I shouldn’t do.”

Beyond the cleverness of this statement lies a truth that cuts across the human experience. How hard (yet important) it is to recognize, even in hindsight, when an endeavor has run its course, lost its steam, or failed to fulfill the quest we were pursuing. Rarely is it easy to turn around and head back to the barn, so to speak, which, literally, Erickson did, taking up work as a professional ranch hand instead of walking across that Ivy-League platform to collect his degree.

But ranching was his foundation and the key to his creativity. Life in a ranching community had formed his character. The values of the traditional family, with intact parents and unmitigated dedication to children and the extended family, formed this man and still provide the structure for all that he writes.

Within this context, it is doubly interesting to read the terse pages detailing his negotiations with Disney officials who wished to put Hank the Cowdog into the same pantheon as Mickey Mouse and Bambi. Ultimately, Erickson walked away from a Disney contract for all of the right reasons.

Accordingly, Erickson will always lament the treatment of his beloved characters in a cartoon-version contracted to CBS. Whereas Hank’s and Drover’s outward realizations were largely true to form, the entire structure of familial and moral values upon which their world depends was either eliminated or inverted to be unrecognizable.

To be honest, thinking towards this week’s digest, I intended to save my comments about Erickson for a future essay dealing either with storytelling or the bonds of community. But my self-restraint crumbled when faced with a blank piece of digital paper. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about him and the degree to which my perceptions of this cowdog’s author were misguided and embarrassingly limited!

How easy it is to narrow our horizons when presuming the provinciality of someone’s else’s background. As Erickson says regarding the alleged sophistication of the cultural elite,

We are not provincial. They are. We read their magazines, attend their movies, and listen to their news broadcasts. We know a lot about them. They know nothing about us.

Well, I know more now about you, your mission, and your funny, maddening, endearing dog Hank now, Mr. Erickson. And I’m mighty glad of it!