The King Did Not Hang

My second humor piece in Esquire landed in this month’s (Nov. 2010) edition. If you didn’t catch the first one, it’s here.

Here are the ones included in the magazine - followed by a few that didn’t make the cut.

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Why Print Still Matters

A sampling from our new catalog of hard-to-find titles. 

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• Barbara Eden
  My Story, 1989
  First edition, first printing of Eden’s classic take on the challenges of being a television genie in love with an astronaut in the 1960s. Boldly inscribed: To Willie von Straat, who has changed the coagulant-membrane-filtration industry, by Eden’s coauthor, Guy Erikson. $6.95

• C. Fortenz Milloy
  It Is So Interesting, 1837
  “Behold in the light borne of the Lord, that which we find, shall be left unfound in time immutable when the night flees daybreak. It is in this morning light when Truth will shout, shout, shout.” Fine three-volume edition of Milloy’s landmark nonsense work, handsomely bound in nineteenth-century iguana. With engraved portrait. $9.50

• Trish St. Hammerapple
  What We Talk About When We Talk About Talking So Much All the Time, 2007
  One of only four copies printed on the Xerox machine at S&A Metal Forming Machinery, Inc., in New Brunswick, New Jersey, by St. Hammerapple. Late example of the most controversial and important masterwork by this winner of the Constantin Pudârma-Dresleaba Prize for Moldovan-American Violent Science Fiction. One of St. Hammerapple’s only known signatures. On anything. Folio. $5.69

• Reginald Kipple
  The Works of Reginald Kipple, 1999
  Only copy of Kipple’s 894-page spiral-bound thoughts about everything from the trash-collection districts of unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia, to why women are allowed to wear pants these days. A seminal turn-of-the-century volume, recently found by his son Roland under some sheets near a fondue set in Kipple’s basement. $2.50

• Ben Vereen
  I Was Tenspeed, 1986
  Important contribution to the Vereen canon. The best, most complete volume, which also includes “I Was Pippin” and “I Hate Jeff Goldblum.” First edition, one of only twenty-nine copies, illustrated and signed by Robert Guillaume. Includes thirteen copper-engraved folding plates. $12.49

• Wilhelm von Straat
  Coagulant Membrane Filtration & Me, 1989
  If there’s one name most people think of when they think of coagulant-membrane filtration, it’s Kyle Sommersheld. This book, by Sommersheld’s onetime assistant, tells the “true story,” in von Straat’s words, of the coagulant-membrane-filtration wars of 1982. In the scarce original first-issue dust jacket, warmly inscribed by him: Hagman, you seriously have to give me Barbara’s number. $0.99

• Aleksei Alekshaskin
  The Horrid, Immoral Life and Grisly Butchering of Pyotr Petrovin, 1956
  A children’s classic; first trade edition, among the earliest issues of Alekshaskin’s lovely first book, with color illustrations by him. A beautiful copy in the bright original dust jacket. $11

• Ron Toofhart
  Make Cheese in Your Shoe TODAY! 1994
  A title perennially at the top of the American Cheese Society’s “must buy” list, this lavishly illustrated volume remains an influential statement on making cheese in your shoe. $2.95

• Greta Schurrd
  The End of Books, 2009
  First edition of the first volume of Schurrd’s dystopian fantasy, set in a frighteningly realistic - and eerily immediate - future when the written word has been completely digitized. In Schurrd’s darkly comic telling, all information is conveyed through a personal screen called the Pad. As the author’s towering devil figure, Jobs, tells his slaves: “All that you need, the Pad will give you. Trust the Pad. The Pad knows you. The Pad loves you.” Extremely rare presentation copy; full Moroccan-gilt binding with woodcut illustrations. $1.29

• Scads McMartin
  She’s a Hag, Man, 1977
  “In so many ways, she was joyous, and in so many others, she might as well have been a gimp.” So begins the title essay in McMartin’s Fapper Prize - winning collection. Exceptionally fine first edition with striking sepia-toned photographic plates. Includes “You Didn’t Hear It from Me but Eden’s Got Scabies,” “If You’re Really Giving Me a Choice, I’ll Have a Shasta Lite,” and the surprising “Low-Concentration Phage Ms2 Flocculation Pumps and You” (regarded by some as the “greatest piece of membrane-filtration literature in existence” - Lawrence Hagman), none of which appeared in subsequent editions. $4.99

A few that didn’t make the cut…

• Hal Sork
  How to Manage a CiCi’s Pizza Buffet Restaurant, 2004.
  “It sounds bad, but honestly? First thing you do is hire hot teenage girls.” A timeless management classic with Sork’s signature tipped in. Finely bound and inscribed by Sork while he served two years of an eight year prison term for arson to Cindee for all your support and also for all your top(less)ings. $3.75

• Cassandra Bolinpuck
  Lithographs, 1967.
  First edition of the first volume of the catalogue raisonné of Bolinpuck’s lithographs. Earliest obtainable edition richly illustrated with 12 original lithographs, signed and inscribed by Bolinpuck during a time when she was going through some serious shit with White Crunch meth (”respect”). With folding maps. $14.95

• Chester Arthur
  Beans to the Pendleton Act, 1883.
  The 21st president supported the Pendelton Act, which established a bipartisan Civil Service Commission, forbade levying of political assessments against officeholders, and provided….Who’s asleep? Everyone? Yes. This timeless tract by Arthur shows heartfelt frustration with his incredibly boring presidency. Extremely rare presentation copy; includes full 15-line text of “Chinamen and Lunatics Get Out,” Arthur’s poem detailing his immigration stance. $16.00

For O’Callaghan Awards, another group of…ummm…iconoclasts?

By Sage Warlockheart
Herald Staff Writer

NEW YORK - A chef who whimsically combines scraps of used latex yoga mats with benzocaine to feed out-of-work circus podiatrists; an Austrian poet based in Brazil who uses dental floss to suspend live bullfrogs over pools of ketchup; and Lucy from “Peanuts” are among the 14 recipients of the $385 “abstruse grants” to be announced Tuesday by the Lochlan P. and Marta P. O’Callaghan Foundation.

     While no one has ever heard of most of the fellows, a few are so obscure it was difficult to confirm whether they were even real people. They include Pishel Hoal, a 66-year-old former gemologist who lives underground near Coober Pedy, Australia, and who occasionally surfaces from his hole to wander about.

     “Four of the kings have been beheaded and the rest have followed me here,” Hoal said in an interview conducted via Skype from the Opal Blossom Hunan Buffet in Coober Pedy. “If I tell them we have the goats, they’ll be still. They’ll be still.”

     This year’s O’Callaghan fellows range in age from 6 to 93 and are evenly divided between men and women. As in past years, most either have struggled with emotional problems or have been in prison. This year’s judges stuck to the O’Callaghan awards tradition of naming fellows whose accomplishments square with the foundation’s stated mission to “shine a light upon work that seems unimportant to the rest of the world, only because it is unimportant.”

     All 14 fellows will receive $27.50 a year for five years, and must use the grant to purchase either playing cards or cat food. Since the inception of the program in 2007, 18 people have been named Lochlan P. and Marta P. O’Callaghan fellows.

     Besides Mr. Hoal, other winners this year include retired lepidopterist Belinda Pandoe-Crapht, 56, whose study of the Common Blue Morpho, the Red Admiral and the Camberwell Beauty butterfly species has informed and influenced her music as lead singer of the punk-metal outfit Ass Typhoon; Trisha Bloorkie, 23, a Sacramento prostitute who also serves on the board of the Santa Clara Valley Water District; Robert Simpote, 44, who enjoys US Weekly and is thinking of subscribing; Maladraiga Hernandez-Mushi, 78, a pioneer in the Electric Boogaloo, Popping and Crazy Legs movements of the 1970s; Maxim Dityatev, 49, a mixed-media artist who works mainly with Sour Apple Berry Bubble Yum, ejaculate and chicken skin; Jennifer “Zothecula” Miller, 15, a Goth teenager known for cranking up The Sisters of Mercy and wearing eyeliner to bed; and Herbert Rae-Boney, 48, a protégé of Dutch physicist Gerardus ‘t Hooft, whose theoretical work on gauge theories, quantum gravity and black holes earned him the Nobel Prize in 1999.

     Mr. Rae-Boney left Mr. ‘t Hooft’s laboratory ten years ago to study circumplanetary dust physics, but instead has spent much of the last decade managing Ron’s Do-Nuts at the corner of Vineland and Conroy in Orlando with his wife, Cathy Rae-Boney.

     Another fellow who failed to live up to his promise, Gillie St. Warche - an entrepreneur whose idea of putting “a professional water polo player in every home” has yet to pan out - said he would use the money to buy either playing cards or cat food. “I don’t have a cat, so I guess I’ll buy some playing cards,” said Mr. St. Warche, who was named a fellow because of his “extraordinary ability to read Proust while simultaneously lighting squirrels afire,” according to the judges’ notes. “Or I guess I might buy some cat food, because I have a friend who has a cat. And she could give the cat food to her cat.”

     While all of the fellows do pointless, inexplicable or boring things with their time, the O’Callaghan grants are distinctive because they reward the truly inane. “I think it’s real fun,” Teague O’Callaghan, the foundation’s president, and grandson of Lochlan P. and Marta P. O’Callaghan, said of discovering and naming the fellows. “It’s fun, and it’s also funny. Both.”

     As examples, Mr. O’Callaghan cited Sharon Haavish, 93, who has a different colored track suit for every airport she visits, and Kyle Ballantone, 28, a liquid helium salesman from Alfalfa County, Okla., whose cross-stitch embroidery designs of Grand Duke Leopold I and other members of the House of Baden-Durlach have captured the hearts of Swedish people everywhere, though mostly in Sweden.

     Mark Sixypotch, who, at the age of 19 has already translated several seminal herpetological books into English - including (from the original Marathi) “The Snakes of India and Pakistan,” by K.G. Gharpurey; “Japanese Venomous Snakes,” by Seiichi Takahashi; and (from the original Azeri) “Amphibians and Reptiles of Azerbaijan” by A.M. Alekperov - is so gay.

     “I have no idea what to think about winning this award because I’ve never heard of it and I’m quite sure no one else has either,” said Mary von Pahrtenfur, a junior at SUNY New Paltz who is well known on campus for her notion that a new pan-global alphabet could bring about world peace and get people to finally realize that Alan Thicke is the devil.

     Wayne X. Hashago, 55, a familiar figure in journeyman tool and die making circles, called the award a “piece of shit.” Hashago has six fingers.

     Similarities can be seen in the work of three fellows: Annette Fordol, 42, who has walked in circles around her own house in Lapeer, Mich. continuously for four years; Jaishree Dhurvasula, 29, whose musical compositions transcend classification, but range somewhere between Cambodian trip hop and traditional oom-pah; and Sebastian Pelicago, 81 who fashioned a popular line of pre-school toys out of used tattoo needles, carbolic acid, shards of glass and meat.

PHOTO: Maxim Dityatev: Mixed-media artist

First Lady Michelle Obama recently outlined her initiative to eliminate childhood obesity within a generation. In her kickoff speech for what the Obama administration is calling the “Let’s Move” campaign, Mrs. Obama said “the physical and emotional health of an entire generation and the economic health and security of our nation is at stake.”

“This isn’t the kind of problem that can be solved overnight,” she continued. “But with everyone working together, it can be solved. So, let’s move.”

The administration has been putting the “Let’s Move” campaign together for over a year, and dismissed several other possible projects for Mrs. Obama along the way, including “Let’s Dance,” an appeal to resurrect post-disco, synthesizer-driven dance music from the early-to-mid 1980s; “Let’s Seriously Get Way Baked,” which was deemed too close in substance to Nancy Regan’s “Just Say No” appeal, and “Let’s Get It On,” a challenge to elderly Americas to don their rain coats more speedily.

Mrs. Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative continues a long tradition of U.S. presidents’ wives taking up a social or political cause. Some of those efforts were either rejected by administration officials, or have simply been lost in the annals of presidential history.

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• Martha Washington never lived in the White House, but some historians have claimed that her hobby - and later commercial enterprise - of crafting dental implants from cherry wood was the first cause, of sorts, promulgated by a First Lady. Owing to an unspecified, but profound childhood trauma, the taste of cherry wood, gave President Washington an intense rush that allowed him to concentrate more fully on matters of state. Mrs. Washington realized that she’d stumbled into a money maker, and was soon peddling the inexplicably popular, “Martha’s (Splinter Free!) Cherry Bomb Chompers,” in Battery Park.

• Despite the rechristening of the Red Room as the Goofy Foot Room in 1809 when the Madison’s moved into the White House, few in Washington knew about Dolley Madison’s fascination with surfing. The “Bro, That is Perilous!” campaign sought to improve surfing etiquette on the increasingly crowded east coast shoreline. “I’ve inquired about promised sick big water off New Symrna Beach, for my plans are to depart on the morrow by carriage and I don’t mind reporting to you, Brosef, that I am so amped,” Mrs. Madison wrote in an 1802 letter to her friend, Margaret Rawlson Pauling. “And yet when last I was there, I spent the better part of sunrise turning my spy-glass in every direction, watching with unwearied aggro, hoping to discover the approach of some epic crunchers. But, alas! I descried only dick draggers in all directions. When those ass clowns get worked, they can cause full on dings in my stick and - Heaven forgive me - I pray a rip the size of a Redcoat regiment will take them far to sea.”

• Elizabeth Monroe became a foodie in France where her husband James had been named U.S. Minister by President Washington in 1794. Twenty-three years later, when the Monroes moved into the White House, Mrs. Monroe had become addicted to red meat. In 1821, she discovered a sublime steak sauce created by the head chef of England’s King George IV, and secretly began importing cases of it into Washington for her own consumption, and for presidential dinner parties. When the king found out about Mrs. Monroe’s fixation with his steak sauce, he ordered her supply cut off, partly in retribution for his father’s defeat in the Revolutionary War. In response, Mrs. Monroe founded an initiative promoting American-made steak sauce and called it, “Are You Fucking Kidding Me? British ‘Food’ Is Fucking Disgusting Anyway. Go Fuck Yourself, King Whatever Fuck Your Fucking Name Is.”

• When Sarah Polk and her husband James arrived in Washington from their native Tennessee in 1845, they brought with them a style of southern charm to which the White House has since become accustomed. But Mrs. Polk was wary of big city ways, and bristled at whispered insults about rural life in the south. To combat what she considered northern ignorance, Mrs. Polk undertook an educational campaign called “My Kinfolk Is Your Kinfolk.” The campaign highlighted the achievements of backwoods cornfed yokels to sophisticates in Philadelphia and New York. A favorite of Mrs. Polk’s was a poster depicting a young hillbilly, half his overalls unbuckled, urinating in a jug while shooing away a critter, and the tagline: “See? A American Did That.”

• Abigail Fillmore - “Who Doesn’t Love a Poached Egg?”

• James Buchanan, president from 1857 to 1861, is still the only president who never married. As First Lady, he chose Harriet Lane, his favorite niece. The two had been inseparable during Buchanan’s years as minister to the Court of St. James, where Queen Victoria gave Ms. Lane the rank of ambassador’s wife. Soon after Buchanan (or “Nunc,” as Ms. Lane called him) and his niece moved into the White House, Ms. Lane became the toast of social Washington, and launched “It’s Not Weird!,” a campaign aimed at de-stigmatizing intimate uncle-niece relationships across America.

• Lucretia Garfield was First Lady for only six months before her husband James died in office after being shot in 1881. While Mrs. Garfield did not have much time for causes during her husband’s presidency, she had always had two, unrelated, joys in life - lye and sad clowns. In the middle of June, three months after moving into the White House, Mrs. Garfield asked her husband if she could embark on two social crusades as First Lady - one to be called “Lye!” and the other to be called “Sad Clowns!” “Sure,” President Garfield responded, but then it never came up again and then he got shot and died.

• Epilepsy was a constant in the White House life of Ida McKinley, and her husband William. Perhaps because her own serious illness was such an obstacle to a normal, healthy life in Washington, Mrs. McKinley focused her public attention on an issue she believed would boost the spirits of Americans saddened by the plight of their First Lady. But Mrs. McKinley’s crusade promoting tiny shower caps to protect babies’ hair-dos, called “Keep Her Pretty,” was met with befuddlement rather than approval, and it was soon scuttled by President McKinley who called his wife’s idea “looney,” “batty,” “zany,” “moofie,” “shaapie,” “truggly” and “garbanzo.”

• Her years as an Army wife in a variety of posts around the world prepared Mamie Eisenhower for the many heads of state she and her husband Dwight would receive at the White House in the 1950s. But it was Mrs. Eisenhower’s concern for a domestic crisis that would lead her to declare her own personal war on the Chordettes. The songs “Mr. Sandman” and especially “that goddamned annoying ‘Lollipop’ shit,” were enough for the First Lady to create, The Whoredettes, a group of four slutty teenagers with terrible voices and worse hygiene that toured the country parodying the Chordettes and spreading rumors on stage about the original group members’ sexual dalliances with old women, donkeys and Mao Zedong.

August, 2009

Dear [client’s name],

Gambatte kudasai! That’s what our intern Keiko - whom we had to fire in June - would say to us when things looked bleakest. Keep your chin up, she’d say with a smile. And then we’d close our door.

Autumn is nearly here and as dire as things may seem out there in the publishing world, we are committed to representing your projects, at least through the rest of 2009.

The last thing we want is for you to fixate on layoffs at Simon & Schuster, salary freezes at Penguin, imprint mergers at Random House or that silly acquisition ban at Houghton. HarperCollins may have shut down a couple divisions, but they were non-fiction divisions. Remember - you make stuff up, Artist. Dismal days at publishing conglomerates can’t matter to your creative process. They matter only in that we’re going to have trouble selling your ideas.

Your representatives here at Chazz Kopplerbach Hoarb Literary Agency don’t want you to have to think about any of that. We want you to keep envisioning big, ambitious, important. Bring us your novel and we will do the rest. That’s our pledge to you. We will sell your manuscript. I swear to God we will. Seriously.

Without further adieu, The List. As our disclaimer goes each year, these are only premises to get those creative juices running. These are ideas that we Professional Literary Agents who lunch with Professional Book Editors every day (yes, these days at Gray’s Papaya), know would sell. As always, we don’t want to stifle your own mojo, but these are good plots in search of a great writer. That’s you.

So take a look at these ideas: Pick one up. Play with it. Toss it around. Bounce it off a wall. Give it a bath. Run over it with your car. Squish it into your kids’ knapsack. Take it to shul some Shabbos. Watch an episode of “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” while it sits next to you on the couch.

A quick straw poll around the office (really quick, I mean, like, in the last ten minutes) suggested a strong collective prediction that Fall 2009 is going to be the Autumn of historical fiction involving kings. Following are some royal historical plot sketches we’d love to see blown out big and bold by someone with your talent.

Good luck!

• What really happened between Suryavarman I and Jayavarman V after the death of the Khmer Empire’s King Udayadityavarman I 998 A.D.? Suryavarman I, of course, captured the Cambodian throne, but at what cost to Rithisak, the woman he and Jayavarman V both loved?

• When Queen Maria II of Portugal returned from exile in England in 1834, she knew - even at the age of 15 - that she would have to stand up to her uncle (and husband), Prince Miguel, who had pronounced himself king in her absence, and trashed the Constitution her father had composed. But her heart wasn’t in it. In fact, her heart was in Swanage, on the Dorset coast, with Jerome - Yak Boy. He had been Maria’s playmate as a child, and she had longed to stay in Swanage with Jerome and his yaks forever. But civil war was raging in Maria’s homeland and she was damned if she would let her uncle-husband turn Lisbon into Vienna.

• When Canute, son of Sweyn Forkbeard, was only 17 and taking part in his father’s conquest of England in 1016, he had no idea he would become the first Danish ruler of the British Isles. He also had no idea the fulsome women of Wessex would welcome him and his father’s band of tired, strapping warriors with such vigor and enterprise.

• In 454 B.C., Xerxes II, son of King Artaxerxes I, was just 16 when he was captured by his father’s enemies. The men who opposed the king’s imposition of Zoroastrianism as Persia’s state religion were ruthless, and the only light during those dark years was a little girl who came every day to the walls of Xerxes Babylonian prison and tossed a pomegranate over the fence to save him from starvation. One day, he dreamed, they would marry and make a life together - maybe in Scottsdale. Two weeks after Xerxes was freed, he refused the Persian crown and went looking for the girl who saved his life. But then he died of a staph infection he got from rubbing himself with a rotting blanket.

• Cuacuauhpitzahuac’s mother died giving birth to him in the hills of Tlatelolco in 1388. Each year on that date - his birthday - Cuacuauhpitzahuac honored his beloved mother by killing someone else’s mother. The Aztec press dubbed him Nantli Temictiloni, or the Mother Killer. Cuacuauhpitzahuac was never caught, and died of a massive stroke, just minutes after his 89th kill. How did he hide his deadly secret while carrying on his duties as Tlatelolco’s king? Did he have accomplices inside the royal palace? A thrilling tale of courtly intrigue, murder, ancient killing, baronial slaughter, deadly regal butchery and Mummenschanz.

• On the surface, Erik Bloodaxe, son of Harald Fairhair, was like every other 10th Century Norwegian king - he loved beer, he loved the ladies, he loved elf sacrifice - but he was living a lie. Though Erik had to hide it even from Queen Gunnhild, poetry was what he loved most. To whom might Bloodaxe bare his balladist soul? To whom? Whom? Who? What? Huh?

• Khan Chagatai was already 45-years-old when he and his brother Tului took over the Mongol Empire after their father Ghengis died. Which was sort of awkward since their father had been only 13 himself when he had taken over his own father’s tribe. Then Ghengis just happened to create one of the largest kingdom’s ever known to man. And now Khan would have to share power? With his idiot brother? Sure, Tului was, technically, adept at conquering vassal states. But the way he did it was so…inelegant. Who marauds an entire village, sparing all the Merkits, but raping all their pet marmots? That is seriously fucked up.

• Burma was a desperate place at the end of the 19th century. With the constant threat of a British incursion across its borders, King Thibaw Min sat in the capital of Mandalay wondering how to protect his people. A treaty with France was one option. As was a big, huge wall of fire along the country’s borders. What about torching the royal elephants and having them march in a circle around the country trunk-to-tail? What about serving the British troops really hot soup? Or some sort of mirror trick?

PHOTO: Wayne Hoarb of Chazz Kopplerbach Hoarb, LLC

My Esquire piece, “Notes on Contributors,” landed on the magazine’s website Saturday. You can also see the real, live print version in the current November issue - Halle Berry on the cover - on page 170.

The editors chose eight “Notes” but I’d submitted a bunch more. Here are the rest:

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• Paul Gaggerns and his wife live in a gully outside Houston where they raised three children and enjoy pot roast. In earlier times he trained ferrets and cats to get along better; more recently he’s made his living juggling turnips at the Houston Zoological Gardens and has taken to wandering about.

• Geoff Hachis is an editor and fisherman. His Poetry for the Shower in English (translated by Crane W. Holler and Mike Toops) is forthcoming. Hachis is the founder and managing director of the Slippery, Sweaty Bicycle Seat Foundation in central Latvia. The purpose of the Foundation is to study the entire written historical record of the bicycle seat with the goal of making them less sweaty and slippery.

• Carlotta Ixelsh co-edits the online poetry review, BloodFireTwighlightTwighlightFireBlood. Ixelsh visited Bolivia once, where she contracted typhoid. She has photos of herself, passed out drunk in the Cochabamba bus station, strangling a cat. In 2005, she organized a festival in her hometown of Jacksonville, Fla. celebrating Bolivia’s agreement to supply 2 percent of the antimony for China’s cable sheathing industry.

• Maude Mish has finally purchased something she thinks she’ll wear more than once. Her forthcoming collection of collected collections will be collected next year by The Collections Collective (London, Mumbai). Sometimes a poet, always a dialectical behavior therapist in private practice, Mish lives in Rathdrum, Idaho with her two puffins, Ollie and Smacker.

• Sarah von Neaden, of the famous Skyler Chronicles Poets, is 88 and specializes in beading and poetry. She has earned a PORP and has taught by invitation at 11 universities and 28 writing labs. She is presently building a fiction workshop in Bisbee, Arizona with lumber donated by Bisbee High School writing students. She is also writing four books: Snails in the Copper Pot (fiction), What Do You Think Of My Toenail Polish? (poems), Rabbit Hole Roundhouse: Quantum Mechanics and Superstring Theory in the Post Cohen-Tannoudji Age (2-vol. set) and Skin Feels Freda, a memoir of her days siphoning gasoline from rental cars at the Avis off S. Garfield Ave. in Orange County.

• Bill “Wetlands” Omat received his M.F.A. a long time ago. He has served on the Mayor’s Council for Friendly, Non-Controversial Art in Charlotte since 1997. His poetry collection, Numb is Night, Feel is Day, is available at Carolina Taco Source and carolinatacosource.com.

• Ronnie Pupples teaches Dreamscapeture at Mollysapp Community College on the edge of western Vermont where he’s also maintained a watertaxi business for the last 14 years. He is a British citizen and is a regular contributor to British Writers Quarterly, British Writing Is Better and Would That We All Were British. Pupples has seen his verse published in Tapioca Review, Liver and Sue Baten’s Shorts. He lives on a radish farm where he continues his lifelong study of ponds.

• Marge Radael’s chapbook, Feel It In All The Ways won the 2001 Skooch Prize for Chapbook Brilliance from the Greater Metropolitan Fresno Chapbook Association. She teaches writing and sentence diagramming at Fresno City College. Last year, she was one of seven chapbookists chosen to read before Dwayne L. Hortense, founder of the Kaliope Stuttgart School of Chapbook Arts.

• Rory Riverlovely credits an early-career dalliance in low-cost prostitution with her ability to bring disparate interests together around a focused goal - attaining a high score in Galaga, for instance. Riverlovely’s essays and photographs have been published primarily in Skintag and The Bad Mamma Jamma Review. Besides a serious interest in kale and other kinds of cabbage, she enjoys zephyrs and a good rubbing.

• Simon Romazzle has published poems and short stories in Kiddiepool, The Delano Journal of Wheat, Shiver Me Timbers, Kyle is Wrong and Pickle Farm. As Lyman Tompazzle, he publishes and edits batpatio.com, a website for those hoping to attract more bats to - and around - their patios.

• El-Ando Sorel submitted her novel, Velvet Rattles You And Again, for a Pulitzer Prize for “distinguished fiction by an American author” in 1981. She was not a finalist - and, come to think of it, never got a return receipt confirming delivery - but the award did go to a dead person that year, so she felt better about that. One of her private journal entries, May 17, 1994, has been staged as musical theater.

• Joan Crispee Tille’s most recent CD, a compilation of curling sounds called Violate the Hog Line, was released in January 2003 to tremendous critical acclaim. Between 1974 and 1992, Tille took a notation each time she fell down. The collected notations, Down (Calf Creek Zipperman) won the 1997 Pardon Low Johnston Wonderfully Rich Notes Award.

• Cara Ulish is co-director of the Florence L. Shipplebottom Institute for Writing Excellence in Pencil at the University of Guelph-Humber. Most recent works are published in The Scaly Fish Review, Moral Voice for Californian Little People, Spaghetti: Journal of Pasta and Sauce, and Spaz’hole. Her chapterbook, Follow Me, Dear One, Into the Darkest Corners of My Chevy Lumina, was awarded third place by the National Society of Crime Writers for Peace Contest, Ontario Chapter.