[Tim Murphy]

Eldridge Hardie is the dean of America's sporting illustrators, and about a year ago he agreed to furnish line drawings for Hunter's Log, Field Notes 1988-2010, an eighty page manuscript of hunting poems. Despite Eldridge's immense popularity, and my high profile in Gray's, the top hunting publishers turned me down flat, unwilling to touch poetry with a ten foot pole. Yesterday I sent it to Alex Pepple for his new Able Muse trade press, along with a detailed marketing plan and pro-forma profit and loss projection, and he accepted overnight. It will be supported by a generous grant from the North Dakota Endowment for the Humanities, and it will boast an introduction by James Babb, editor of Gray's Sporting Journal, who has more clout with rich, literate hunters than all the other editors in the country combined. This will not be a print on demand affair. There are 62 million licensed hunters in the US, and that's our audience. The podcast at Distinguished Performances above contains the major poems from the fifth and final section of the book. My thanks to all of you nonhunters who have patiently borne with and massaged my drafts since the inception of the Deep End.