Revenge of the Lawn on the free rack inside a Coos Bay community college library.
Sandwiched between a mathematics textbook, PowerPoint for Dummies and dozens of useless studies of American literature.
Contains my favorite short story about Oregon, called “A Short History of Oregon.” It’s about hunting a deer in the rain. I illegally included it my book about rain. Sue me.
Later I wrote short stories called “A Short History of an Oregon Prom Night, “A Short History of an Oregon Seventh Grade Football Season,” A Short History of Christmas in an Oregon Logging Camp,” and “A Short History of Love Inside a Culvert.”
No one’s checked this book out since President Reagan began destroying the nation.
No one reads you anymore. Certainly not community college students in Coos Bay in 2026.
A collection of your short stories from 1962-72, published in Rolling Stone, Esquire, Ramparts, Playboy and Mademoiselle.
It retailed for $1.95.
The extinction of the dinosaurs seems nearer than that era of American fiction.
The cover features a brunette sitting at a table smiling with a huge chocolate table in front of her. Why? Because you were fucking her and you always put the women you were fucking on the covers of your books.
How you sat at the counter of San Francisco bistros wearing fedora hats with feathers stuck in the bands and corduroy three-piece suits, drinking Dago red from glass goblets, trying to pick up women, reinventing a stereotype now sadly out of favor.
A book of your poetry given to me by a high school creative teacher in 1982. They’d incarcerate him for that today.
I am ashamed to say that I never introduced you to my creative writing students. Your short story form, terse, direct, one to three pages long, perfect for today’s attention span.
I’m taking you home. I can’t leave you on this Devil’s Island of a shelf, imprisoned, fading, forlorn, decomposing, soon out with the recycling, resurrected as playground balls.
