Fifth Book, Finally

Tim Murphy · #1 02-26-2010, 02:53 PM

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.

Catherine Chandler · #2 02-26-2010, 09:33 PM

Tim,

Let me be the first to congratulate you on this news. An illustrated book of hunting poems will surely be a unique and interesting publication. Maybe now we'll all get to see the legendary Feeney!

Kudos!

Cathy

Michael Juster · #3 02-27-2010, 05:07 AM

The grouse will be grousing with all those people you'll inspire to head out for the prairie with a rifle.

Congrats, Big Red!

Tim Murphy · #4 02-27-2010, 06:20 AM

Thanks Cathy, thanks Mike. This brings long frustration to a close. My first four books were accepted by the first four publishers I sent them to. Now it's been eight years since Very Far North, I have four collections unpublished, and I've been rejected everywhere I turn. I assume the combination of homosexuality, hard-core Catholicism, passionate bloodsport and confessional alcoholism, all in strictly rhymed measures, is enough to offend both right- and left-wing editors. So here is a book of verse on cynegetics, the art of hunting with dogs, targeted to a very specific and enormous audience. It is full of joy, of high elegiac sentiment, fieldcrafty beyond reproach. A theme last treated in 2100 hexameters, skillfully written by one who didn't know jackshit about his subject during the late Hellenistic Age. Maybe I have to do the same with the devotional verse. Whatever. I am very grateful to Alex for rolling the dice on this one, and I hope I can help him hit the jackpot.

Andrew Frisardi · #5 02-27-2010, 07:04 AM

This is great news, Tim. Congratulations on putting together such a unique collection -- and thanks also to Alex for providing the platform for it. A refreshing change to the usual proceedings in po-biz. Oh, and big kudos to Feeney too, famous poem-hound gone literary glam-dog and all . . .

Andrew