When a seventeen-year-old track star turns up mangled and dead on the switchback road by the Crescent Hotel, his poker crew grows suspicious of one another. Ebur, a retired cowboy, finds himself in the middle of a once-trustworthy group who all knew and loved Brady. Or did they?And can he trust them if they think he killed the boy?When a seventeen-year-old track star turns up mangled and dead on the switchback road by the Crescent Hotel, his poker crew grows suspicious of one another. Ebur, a retired cowboy, finds himself in the middle of a once-trustworthy group who all knew and loved Brady. Or did they?And can he trust them if they think he killed the boy?Covering the broad swatch of lifestyles and struggles in off-peak Eureka Springs, Wilderness asks hard questions about retired men and those who try to tame them.:: PRAISE FOR LANCELOT SCHAUBERT ::“Schaubert’s words have an immediacy, a potency, an intimacy that grab the reader by the collar and say ‘Listen, this is important!’ Probing the bones and gristle of humanity, his subjects challenge, but also offer insights into redemption if only we will stop and pay attention.”— Erika Robuck, National Bestselling Author of Hemingway’s Girl“Loved this story because Lance wrote about people who don't get written about enough and he did it with humor, compassion, and heart.”— Brian Slatterly, author of Lost Everything and editor of The New Haven Review“I’m such a fan of Lance Schaubert's work. His unique view of things and his life-wisdom enriches all he does. We're lucky to count him among our contributors.”— Therese Walsh, author of The Moon Sisters and Editorial Director of Writer Unboxed"Lancelot Schaubert exhibits his talents in many forms from poetic verse to lyrical prose to musical compositions, all the while infusing them with charisma, passion, and wit. A true creative, Schaubert is one to watch in the literary world."—Heather Webb, author of Rodin's Lover & Becoming Josephine“Lance Schaubert writes with conviction but without the cliché and bluster of the propaganda that is so common in this age of blogs and tweets. Here is a real practitioner of the craft who has the patience to pay attention. May his tribe increase!”— Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove, author of Common Prayer and The Awakening of Hope“Lancelot was the kind of student every writing teacher hopes to have in her class: attentive, thoughtful, a bit quirky, and innovative. Since his time in my classroom, he has continued to impress me. He ‘sees,’ and his essays, poetry, and fiction are full of details that enable his audience to see. Bravo, Lance.”— Jackina Stark, author of Things Worth Remembering and Tender Grace“[He writes] characters with distinctive personalities, multi-layered, and unpredictable. [They have] natural voices, succinct and unique to each character.”— The Missouri Scriptwriting Fellowship"Schaubert's narratives are emotionally stirring with both a vulnerable sensibility and rawness to them. They take you on a journey full of open wounds, intimate successes and personal delights. His words have a calmness, a natural ease but the meaning is always commanding and dynamic."— Natalie Gee, Brooklyn Film Festival

When the æristocracy decides to withdraw their blimps from the Venusian economy and head back to an abandoned Earth, the surf-turned-æristocrat Sir Thomas begins tearing down their entire economy in order to save millions of lives. A dystopian sci-fi about class warfare THE BLIMPS OF VENUS shows us the true motives behind eugenics and other evils.When the æristocracy decides to withdraw their blimps from the Venusian economy and head back to an abandoned Earth, the surf-turned-æristocrat Sir Thomas begins tearing down their entire economy in order to save millions of lives. A dystopian sci-fi about class warfare THE BLIMPS OF VENUS shows us the true motives behind eugenics and other evils.:: PRAISE FOR LANCELOT SCHAUBERT ::“Schaubert’s words have an immediacy, a potency, an intimacy that grab the reader by the collar and say ‘Listen, this is important!’ Probing the bones and gristle of humanity, his subjects challenge, but also offer insights into redemption if only we will stop and pay attention.”— Erika Robuck, National Bestselling Author of Hemingway’s Girl“Loved this story because Lance wrote about people who don't get written about enough and he did it with humor, compassion, and heart.”— Brian Slatterly, author of Lost Everything and editor of The New Haven Review“I’m such a fan of Lance Schaubert's work. His unique view of things and his life-wisdom enriches all he does. We're lucky to count him among our contributors.”— Therese Walsh, author of The Moon Sisters and Editorial Director of Writer Unboxed"Lancelot Schaubert exhibits his talents in many forms from poetic verse to lyrical prose to musical compositions, all the while infusing them with charisma, passion, and wit. A true creative, Schaubert is one to watch in the literary world."—Heather Webb, author of Rodin's Lover & Becoming Josephine“Lance Schaubert writes with conviction but without the cliché and bluster of the propaganda that is so common in this age of blogs and tweets. Here is a real practitioner of the craft who has the patience to pay attention. May his tribe increase!”— Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove, author of Common Prayer and The Awakening of Hope“Lancelot was the kind of student every writing teacher hopes to have in her class: attentive, thoughtful, a bit quirky, and innovative. Since his time in my classroom, he has continued to impress me. He ‘sees,’ and his essays, poetry, and fiction are full of details that enable his audience to see. Bravo, Lance.”— Jackina Stark, author of Things Worth Remembering and Tender Grace“[He writes] characters with distinctive personalities, multi-layered, and unpredictable. [They have] natural voices, succinct and unique to each character.”— The Missouri Scriptwriting Fellowship"Schaubert's narratives are emotionally stirring with both a vulnerable sensibility and rawness to them. They take you on a journey full of open wounds, intimate successes and personal delights. His words have a calmness, a natural ease but the meaning is always commanding and dynamic."— Natalie Gee, Brooklyn Film Festival

You come across inconveniences -- a stone in your shoe, a raincloud over your morning walk, a flower petal in your eye, a loose baby tooth, gallstones that pass and come out in the shape of fool's gold. You have two choices -- annoyance or reverence. Those who treat inconveniences, bothers, and pains with reverence -- there lie your adventurers, your romantics, your poets.G.K. Chesterton wrote a very short piece that everyone should read entitled On Chasing After One's Hat in which he argues that an adventure is really a matter of perspective and traveling companions, not a destination or a time slot or a reason for travel. His typical one-liner from that piece goes, "An inconvenience, rightly considered, is an adventure. An adventure, wrongly considered, is an inconvenience." In that spirit, the spirit articulated above, these poems come from my adventures over the last decade. ∴ they also come from having rightly considered all of my inconveniences. That definition of adventure is also a wonderful definition of poetry. I say this as a romantic in the old sense of the word, as someone attempting to build upon Inkling and neoplatonic thought, as someone whose every contact with the world sends out further spores of mystery and chivalry, bee and his pollen, love and the court that follows after her. After all, the damsel's distress had nothing to do with needing saving and everything to do with the internal turmoil of her mind as it attempted to seek the higher in the midst of the every day. She was distressed not because she was in a tower and needed a prince, but because it's hard work to rightly consider the inconvenient. Again, Chesterton from his book on Blake:"We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapours, these are the daily weather of this world. Whatever else we have grown accustomed to, we have grown accustomed to the unaccountable. Every stone or flower is a hieroglyphic of which we have lost the key; with every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand...." At the intersection of those two Chesterton quotes lies this book of poems. In life, you come across inconveniences all the time -- a stone in your shoe, a raincloud over your morning walk (in Brooklyn, a drizzle seems a downpour when endured for thirty blocks), a flower petal in your eye, a loose baby tooth, gallstones that pass and come out in the shape of fool's gold. When these things happen, you have two choices -- annoyance or reverence. Those who treat the inconveniences of this world, the nuisances and trials, the bothers and pains with reverence -- there lie your adventurers, your romantics, your poets. Everything truly is a hieroglyphic, a prop in the midst (and mist) of this great and eternal drama we find ourselves within, something we are certain to misunderstand without the proper key. Poetry, for me, has been one of these keys to unlock the inconvenient -- even inconvenient, lesser poems that I do not like and cannot "get." Poetry's not the skeleton key, of course, but it is something like a key to the foyer. Poetry, when done well, unlocks the bothers and nuisances of everyday life, sometimes through observation, sometimes through participation, never through willful ignorance and disengagement. Poetry begs us to engage with the world around us, to discover the story and the world hidden in every little thing, to delve into that In-side which is surely deeper and higher and broader than any outside, let in The Light through that crack in everything, and call us further Up and further In.PRAISE for Lancelot Schaubert ::“Schaubert’s words have an immediacy, a potency, an intimacy that grab the reader by the collar and say ‘Listen, this is important!’ Probing the bones and gristle of humanity, his subjects challenge, but also offer insights into redemption if only we will stop and pay attention.” — Erika Robuck, National Bestselling Author of Hemingway’s Girl“Loved this story because Lance wrote about people who don't get written about enough and he did it with humor, compassion, and heart.”— Brian Slatterly, author of Lost Everything and editor of The New Haven Review