I’m in the midst of a big, big move across the country, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t post this video (excuse its anti-Teutonic nature), about the making of a 55% alcohol-content beer that comes bottled inside a taxidermized animal.

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297 pages. 92,874 words. 81 footnotes. Thanks for your patience.

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I like to listen to music when I write. I used to hate this, but now that I write first thing in the morning, it helps get me going. I like also not to have to worry about what sort of music I want to listen to. Usually when working on a short story, I [...]

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I just wrote what I think might be the last sentence of the taxidermy book, at least in this version I’m about to send to my editor: “We are not animals, we are given them.” It felt righter two minutes ago.

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Taxidermist Carl Akeley is considered by most taxidermy folks to be the father of modern taxidermy. Taxidermy. Taxidermy taxidermy. Certain words when you write a whole book become very easy to type. Taxidermy. Can’t remember the last time my fingers in that pattern didn’t hit their targets: Taxidermy. Certain words’ meanings begin to fade as [...]

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(With apologies to A. Peterson’s On Editing a Novel series.) “The home stretch” is a baseball metaphor, right? Far be it from me to be familiar with baseball metaphors, but I think this is where I am. In, on, or at least facing the home stretch here. Two-to-three thousand more words and I’m finished. Carl [...]

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Got the current issue of Tampa Review in the mail today. It’s in hardcover! There’s an essay in there taken from the opening chapter of The Authentic Animal, about a dead pet canary that becomes a museum relic. Other essays therein by Douglas Danoff, Jack E. Fernandez, and Gary Fincke. Fiction by Heather Brittain Bergstrom, [...]

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Wasn’t it inevitable? Print-on-demand pricing being as low as it is, one can sell tons of generic-messaged T-shirts just by switching around occupations. Like tourist-trap mugs or license plates: just drop “taxidermy” in the right place. Some of them seem designed solely for taxidermists, with requisite depressing (and factually inaccurate) puns. Some of them are [...]

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I think I like it because it argues for an aesthetic, kind of. Rather than just saying: Ugh, dead animals. Or: Rad, dead animals. Or: Ironic! Plus some of them are really funny.

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The delay in posting has been long. Very sorry. I’ve been waiting jumpily until I could officially announce that my book, The Authentic Animal, has been picked up for publication by St Martin’s Press. St. Martin’s Press! I’m way too excited to be able to say much about it. Mostly I don’t know what to [...]

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Artist Kent Rogowski turns plush teddy bears inside out and restuffs them. Innards become cute/frightening outards. Cute or frightening? Where’s a toddler when you need one? (Pretty sure I had that last one growing up. Winnie the Pooh, right?)

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Brooklyn-based artist Natalie Stevens takes fur scraps and sews them into new animals. Then she photographs them in natural habitats.

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Far be it from me to hawk products on this site, but these… …are a total steal.

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A few things I learned from a hunter and a taxidermist today.

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