WEDDINS AND OTHER EVENTS
If you caught a little sense of radio silence from the website it was not your imagination. I was off getting married deep in the woods of the Ozarks with as many of my friends and family as we could arrange. The business of weddings is often stressful and definitely busy, but boy is it worth it for those moments of the ceremony. For those of you engaged or -soon to be- trying to put together a large wedding on a budget, my advice to you? Look at it like a production. Theatrical, concert, or otherwise. It will be a million moving pieces that you can’t imagine coming together before that curtain rises, but once it does, the audience locks in and the performance begins. There it becomes a whole different, and much more beautiful, animal. Every question of what goes where in the frantic moments before the ceremony immediately dissipates into a romantic awe. And like a good production, everyone is there to put on the show, and a couple are on the stage for a catharsis.
Also my wife made her own wedding dress, and I think this is the coolest thing in the world.
and those other events...
The thing about marriage is that it gets you ready for a lot of attention. While I’ve never run away from public speaking, I also never always took naturally it either. Something about being as vulnerable as you can be in front of most every one you’ve ever known takes a lot of pressures of talking about goblins in front of strangers. So here’s some public speaking gigs to follow.
Last year I was invited by Dr. Gregory Hansen to speak on Arkansas Monsters and Cryptids for the 30th Annual Delta Symposium at Arkansas State University. ASU has been always pretty welcoming to my whole thing, their Bradbury Museum included me in the Legends exhibit among some comic talent I’m frankly honored to have shared wall space with. So it’s a joy to come back and warble on about some of my favorite creatures, as well as draw those said creatures. It won’t be terribly unlike the panel I did at Spa-Con 2024. So unlike in fact that it will share a name!
You can find me April 11th in the Mockingbird Room at 11am for my panel These Ghost Towns Are Full: Drawing the Haints and Monsters of Arkansas. It’s free and open to the public and should be a blast. I also think a lot of the panels on their schedule sound incredible and hope to sit in on a few!
...but wait there's more.
The very next day, Saturday April 12, I’ll be back in Northwest Arkansas for a similar presentation at the Fayetteville Public Library, in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Ozark Folklorist, writer, and practitioner of a great amount of traditional folk traditions, Brandon Weston invited me to join in on a panel on some of our monsters and creatures.
If you have any interest in the folkloric traditions of the Ozarks, I’m sure you’ve encountered Brandon’s work. Brandon’s bibliography ever grows, and is probably accounting for one of the best contemporary corners of writing on the subject of Ozarks folklore.
We’re gunna go through a bunch of our favorites, from Ozark fairy stories to our own giant lizard, the GowRow. Maybe sneak some other favorites like the Snawfus or Sallybally in.
It’s also a free event and open to the public! I even drew a flyer for it that you can see to the left.
You can find more information at the Fayetteville Public Website Calendar!