One Year Done Gone
Red Clay Bestiary merch has arrived!
Bought a quart of muscadines from Publix a couple days ago and ate the whole mess in one go, as is my custom. Muscadine season, of course, means it’s been one year since I started writing these little (not so little) fortnightly missives. Given there are fifty-two weeks in a year that should mean twenty-six essays, which, not counting this one, is right on the money. The longest was just a hair short of 3,700 words; the shortest was a svelte 615, though it was accompanied by an hour-long interview in which were crammed a whole passel of bon mots. My grand total, in print, is about 62,000 words. A book, more or less.
If it’s all the same to you I’m going to take my foot off the gas this week. I’ve had some other things cooking and they’re ready to plate, as the restauranteurs say. I hope you find ‘em succulent and mouthwatering.
To wit: as of today I’m offering paid subscriptions to Red Clay Bestiary! I know many of you will read that sentence and think, I can’t keep up as it is, and you’re asking me to give you my filthy lucre in exchange for more writing? Well, no. You can’t read any more and I can’t write any more. So what’s the deal here?
Well, I’m going to give you something to keep you warm: a beautiful Red Clay Bestiary t-shirt, hand-printed by my sister. The shirts are tri-blend—soft as marshmallows—and feature James Palmer’s brilliant logo design. You’ll be the smartest-dressed kid on the block.
Beyond that you’ll receive, each month for one year or until I have a nervous breakdown, a hand-made silkscreened portrait on high-quality watercolor paper, suitable for framing or wrapping fish or whatever the hell you choose to do with it. Each portrait is penned by a different illustrator and features a personage of some significance either historical, artistic, literary, musical, or just plain weird, along with a brief personal reflection by yours truly (more words, ha ha). At some distant future date these will provide the bones for the first print edition of the Red Clay Bestiary coffee-table book and home reliquary kit, but the prints are, in the argot of the merchandising world, a limited edition thing.
Pictured below is the first of these—illustrated by my good friend Eric Huffman—the late great Kurt Vonnegut, whose influence on my writing and psyche cannot be understated. Subscribe to get Kurt and eleven more mystery subjects!
All of this can be yours for the unusual price of $88.88. Buy one for yourself! Buy one for your mom! Buy one for your lawyer! Just head on over to the subscription page, plop down your doubloons, and we’re off to the races. Note there’s also a monthly subscription option, which will get you a shirt and one print (whichever is current when you sign up), and a founding member option which allows you to give me more money for absolutely no good reason other than that you like me and want to see me in pants that are not stained with motor oil.
Now, back in the olden days I sold hand-made zines through Factsheet Five and that’s pretty much the length and breadth of what I know about “business.” I am aware, however, of how awkwardly these offerings have been shoehorned into Substack’s subscription model, which assumes that I will in fact be writing more words, but we’ll just ignore all that and do our own thing. I’ll contact you after you sign up to get your shirt size and postal address.
As for the actual Red Clay Bestiary, the essay factory you know and love, we’ll be getting the production line up and running again in two weeks, with fresh words and phrases and clauses, hooked up with—you guessed it—conjunctions of all description. I have it in mind to slim these pieces down a bit and I have some ideas for doing so without compromising the essentially anti-Internet mode of my writing style, so that you’ll get to keep reading long and winding sentences without having to dedicate your life to it. Or who knows, maybe I’ll get all excited telling you about the time I beat a fish to death on a parking block and before you know it 4,000 words will have passed between us and we’ll be back doing that thing we do, and have done, lo this past year.
Whatever happens, thank you all so much for reading. Many—very many—of you are close friends and family, and your support is my bedrock. Y’all truly make a life worth living. The rest of you have been a big surprise and joy, and frankly, you should all be my close friends as well. Let’s work on that this year.
All the best,
Fletch