HeyJaredFictions, Fragments, and False Starts
An incognito Bigfoot PI's observations on human folly--and his author's ideas on books, history, letterpress printing, and the delight of bringing things together.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 5
- Latest publication
- Sep 25, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 26, 2026
Latest issues
The Mothman’s Daughter (opens the original)
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I’ve been think a lot recently about the moment in “Ghost in the Machine” (the story published on the WVU Press Booktimist blog last December), in which the Mothman confesses that he has a daughter that Big Jim has never met. <div
August Storms (opens the original)
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My Big Jim character is a student of humanity, and a lot of the Big Jim/Kenny Hetrick stories I write are at least partly about how Ken plays the role of a native guide or interpreter for Jim’s explorations of the human world.So it’s natural, I suppose, that when I observe strange human behaviors in the wild, some of them make it into my stories. The only problem is that, when I’m out in the world observing strange human behaviors, am I more like Big Jim Foote, or more like Kenny Hetrick? Am I a
After the Gold Rush (opens the original)
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I have long thought that the following line from Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush”: “I was thinking about what a friend had said; I was hoping it was a lie,” is one of the saddest lines I know in all of music. When you are so low that you have to hope your friends are lying to you, you must be low indeed.<a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jPbh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpub
State Fair and Medieval Bigfoot (opens the original)
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Bigfoot UpdateWe went to the Ohio State Fair earlier in the week for the first time in many years; bigfoot seemed to be everywhere, including in the large section of the Fair that’s run by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.<img alt="" class="s
So Many Projects (opens the original)
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The Clean Plate ClubI have never had as many writing projects on my plate at one time as I have had this summer. It’s all entirely my fault, of course. I had intended to spend the summer revising an academic book, a project combining two things I love: Old English poetry and manuscript binding fragments. Since the Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo in May, I have written a catalogue of seventeen fragments and manuscripts for sale (completed last week); I also wrote a new seven-thousand-word Big Jim
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