Oh hey, I didn’t see you there darkening my narthex. Come in, help yourself to bourbon and baklava.
I’m delighted you’re here and very excited to have caught your attention. You might be wondering what is a Red Clay Bestiary — if you said it was related to sex with animals you’d be wrong, but you wouldn’t be the first to make this mistake. Bestiaries were better known to medieval folks than to us moderns. In a nutshell they’re animal encyclopedias, except that the animals are often mythical, and typically entries are accompanied by a fable in which the given animal is a key character.
Now, I’ve lived in Georgia for the last sixteen years and the South for most of the rest of my time on this earth, so I know a few things about animals with seven heads and ten horns, and ten crowns, and upon their heads the name of blasphemy. This place is crawling with them.
It is upon this subject — and a few thousand others that will manifest in due time — that I wish to talk to you. In the coming weeks (fortnightly), months, years, decades, and centuries, I’ll scrimshaw a neat little literary idol, sprinkle it with whatever odds and ends strike my fancy during the intervening interval, and leave it in your inbox like a flighty young woman depositing a baby in a wicker basket on the front steps of a nunnery. It’ll be awesome.
So sign up now so you don’t miss the first issue.
In the meantime, tell your friends and enemies!
Yours,
Fletch