Aaron Burch sent me a couple of contributor copies of this beautiful book in the mail a few weeks ago.

The cover and drawings throughout the book are done my Adam Haynes; he has a knack for making detritus look sublime. I’ve got a comic in there and so does Lydia Conklin (which is cool because she’s a good friend and we draw comics together in the same comics group – we also had stuff in the same issue of Beeswax earlier this year). My comic is called “The Gift of the Lumberjacks.” It began as a prose piece that I wrote after reading Zizek’s take on the role of television in creating our idea of September 11, but it eventually evolved into this comic. Lydia’s stories are selections from her book Camp Interesting, which she just finished and is pretty amazing to read as a whole.

One story that stuck out was Mike Young‘s “Stay Awhile If You Can.” It had this sad, beautiful, meandering feel – it conjured the Pacific Northwest as I imagine it, but I’ve never been there. Awesome stories in there from Blake Butler, B.J. Hollars, Amy L. Clark, and many others.

Aaron has also put together this page of web extras. Ben “Guy” Brookshire did three more of his creepy collages in response to Blake’s “Smoke House.” Lydia and I collaborated on a comic, imagining that one of her campers wandered into the woods and found my lumberjacks. See it here (if the link is working).