All the Pretty Hominids

Back when The Fast Red Road wasn’t called that—this is late 1997, early 1998—the way I intended to write it was as a series of long answering machine messages left in this one guy’s trailer while he’s off gallivanting around with a carnival or something (he’s got pet jackals—this is the kind cool stuff you think of, first novel out, that you then don’t get to use until, say, you write a novel about a bunnyheaded zombie coyote/smuggler/father). The guy on the answering machine was supposed to be this guy named Golius, a thinly-veiled Vizenor character, monologging on and on about, you guessed it: hominids. Each message was going to be a different theory about why our primate selves finally stood up. And these messages were going to matter so, so much to Golius, like, they’re the tether just barely keeping him attached to the surface of the planet. They’re not so important to the guy listening. To the guy standing there deleting them. Fast-forward twenty years and twenty-plus books, and I’m finally starting to publish about hominids, some. I can’t remember all-what I’ve written and done, of course—I may very well have done other hominid/Neanderthal/etc stuff—but I’ve got a couple of them out in 2017 so far, anyway. The first is in a journal that was always one of my targets in grad school, one of my dream places, my somedays. Denver Quarterly. Story’s not online, and it would be kind of rude for me to scan it in—it’s only three pages—but, here’s the first  . . . → → →

The post All the Pretty Hominids appeared first on Stephen Graham Jones.