9/24/2011

Eschew Higgledy-Piggledy

I’ve long entertained the fancy that someday I would see all my favorite stories artfully assembled—by me, of course—in a single volume, but that pipe-dream took on new urgency when I realized that my book A Congress of Wonders—comprised of three novella-length stories including “Finch’s Song,” the story I want to be represented by when I stand before that Great Literary Panel in the Sky—had gone completely and permanently out of print. Eek!

That’s when Counterpoint—in the person of Jack Shoemaker—leaped into the breach with the opportunity to put together this collection, allowing me not only to salvage the Congress stories but also to showcase them in company with  my other personal-best choices. I Just Hitched In from the Coast: The Ed McClanahan Reader is a gathering of fourteen previously published stories, an admixture of fiction and non-fiction, memoir and imagination. The three Congress of Wonders stories—which are inter-connected, especially by the presence in all three of my favorite character, Rev./Prof./Dr. Philander Cosmo Rexroat—provide a sort of narrative backbone for this assemblage of otherwise pretty disparate pieces, written as they were over a span of more than forty years.

Read more of my Owner's Manual in the writings section, here.

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