Such an immaterial, placeless thing as a webzine on the World Wide Web dedicated to place and limits must, by necessity, partake of a healthy measure of black comedy.  So too, the self-fashioned “bios” of its bodyless, phantasmal “contributors” which cannot help but become artifacts disguising what Walker Percy named our “naught-selves” (present bio not excepted). Rather than wondering who they are, it may be more informative to ask where they are.

Caleb Stegall is on the Kansas prairie.  Specifically, he is within the watershed of the Delaware River, a northern tributary of the Kaw sixty miles upriver from its confluence on the Missouri.   He is proud of the fact that he has passed nearly all of his thirty-seven years within a twenty-mile radius of his birth. The history of his place is replete with references to its near Biblical stature as a promised land and all that implies: a land of milk and honey, enormous crops and near Edenic fertility; a land swarming with prophets, zealots and gunslingers; crackpots and crooks; cranks and kooks.  The Kansas praire once held out the promise of riches and destitution, fresh starts and bad ends, boom or bust, plague and famine and pestilence, flood and drought, cyclones, blizzards, rolling prairie fire and the hand of God.

It is a vast inland prairie sea that still drives men mad with longing for the horizon, the future, and always, endless possibility—a tabula rasa writ large on which men with gumption might scratch themselves into history or be swallowed up trying; a place where well-water is said to boil and the sun is blotted out with clouds of insects and John Brown, Carrie Nation, Bat Masterson, Sockless Jerry, Susan Anthony, Wild Bill, Wyatt Earp, Mary Ellen Lease, the Dalton Gang and Harry Kemp the tramp poet of Kansas stride the landscape with hot blood pounding their ears and wild, googly eyes.  A place where at one time the only two required beliefs were in free silver and a hot hereafter, and the only three sure resources were said to be sunshine, sunflowers and sons-of-bitches.  Reactionaries and radicals and eternal optimism; Bleeding Kansas and blowing dirt; red and black—the apocryphal state.

Caleb is a son of the prairie. Keeping faith with his place, he is a country lawyer, writer, pamphleteer, failing farmer, and political agitator. Caleb and his wife Ann have added five more sons to the prairie and he currently serves—until his fellow citizens throw him and the rest of the bums out—as the District Attorney of Jefferson County, named for the singular statesman of the American creed.  He uses a pitchfork daily at chore time, but thus far has limited himself to the use of an electric torch. He founded and edited a once much remarked upon and now largely forgotten web journal called The New Pantagruel.

He agrees with that journal’s seriocomic alter-ego, Fr. Gassalasca Jape, that blogging kills, and he expects his purgatorial stay to be greatly increased by his participation here, however, he says that the company kept makes it worthwhile. He agrees with the Greek tragedians that all things pass away and that this is what makes life sweet. He agrees with the Christian comedians that all things will be made new and that this is what makes life bearable.

See books written and recommended by Caleb Stegall.
See posts written by Caleb Stegall.