PEOPLE OF THE EARTH AND PEOPLE OF THE SWAMP.
THE.
BURNING.
SWAMP.
READING.
SERIES.
RETURNS.
TONIGHT!
8 PM. Sugar Magnolia, where the pizza night starts at 5. Come for the delicious pizza, stay for the delicious poetry and prose. Here’s a little something to tempt your palate: our last reader for tonight, Benjamin Drevlow, who is composed of 50% awesome and 50% spectacular. You can get Benjamin’s awesome and spectacular book, Bend with the Knees and Other Love Advice from My Father, here. While you’re there, you can also get Christina Olson’s awesometacular book, Before I Came Home Naked. Actually, I hope you’ve got room on that credit card, because you should also get my co-founder Jared Yates Sexton’s brand-spanking new book of stories that will spank you senseless, An End to All Things. I’m serious about that. Go ahead and get them. I’ll wait.
…
You’re back? Good. You just made me and the US Mail system very happy. Here’s more about Benjamin Drevlow:
A Little About Benjamin Drevlow
Benjamin Drevlow, grew up in northern Wisconsin, just off the shores of Lake
This is a picture of Benjamin Drevlow with the awesome book you just bought, along with two other awesome books. Good job, you.
Superior, where he farmed, played basketball, and acquired various semi-serious, non-life-threatening injuries. He and his ten fully intact and operable fingers currently live in Statesboro, GA and teach at Georgia Southern University. His collection of short stories Bend with the Knees and Other Love Advice from My Father won the 2006 Many Voices Project and was published in fall of 2008 by New Rivers Press.
1.What’s your favorite cryptozoology creature?
This is a picture of a hodag, which is my new most favorite thing.
There was a school a little south of where I grew up in northern Wisconsin whose mascot was a Hodag—the Rhinelander Hodags. I always loved the sound of that Hoe-dÃg.
Anyway, apparently it’s a mythological creature with “the head of a frog, the grinning face of a giant elephant, thick short legs set off by huge claws, the back of a dinosaur, and a long tail with spears at the end.” And apparently it was only ever found in Rhinelander, Wisconsin.
According to Wikipedia, which means this has to be true, the hodag was “the fiercest, strangest, most frightening monster ever to set razor sharp claws on the earth. It became extinct after its main food source, all white bulldogs, became scarce in the area.”
I like that. Leave it to a bunch of cheeseheads from northern Wisconsin to come up with a creature that is part frog, part elephant, and part dinosaur and call it “the fiercest, strangest, most frightening to ever set razor sharp claws on earth”—a creature that can only be found in their town—and then they go round up a hunting party to kill it and send a picture of the whole thing to the papers.
That’s Rhinelander, Wisconsin, which isn’t far from where I grew up in more ways
This is a picture of people hodagging, which I’ve just made a verb. You’re welcome.
than one.
2. Do you believe in Swamp Primates?
Aren’t we all just a bunch of all just a bunch of sad-sap swamp primates trying to fling our feces and find love before the burning swamp fumes drive us crazy or the flames burn all the fur off our asses? Or have I been out of line in my feces flinging all this time?
3. What do you think we should do about all of the recent Swamp Primate attacks?
Two words (one hyphen): cross-breeding.
The Burning Swamp Reading Series 