from East of Laughter Fb archive The way the germ of an idea becomes a published story is always interesting, and enough of the germs survive to make for a great essay on the topic on how Lafferty combined ideas, though, who would read it? Here are a few of the ideas Lafferty had that became published stories (scroll down for the titles): The Easter Island statues are of baboons not of men. Sky-divers, diving and gliding with complete nerve, come all the way to the ground — b

My working theory is that the best anchor for The Devil Is Dead  is its flat statement that “the Brunhilde sailed on November 7, a Friday morning.” Lafferty is usually vague about the year. He even writes that “the year is uncertain.” But then he does something odd: he supplies the day of the week, an only seemingly inadvertent calendrical lock. He would have remembered his doings on the day, for November 7 is R. A. Lafferty’s birthday, and it falls on a Friday in three plau

The first of a series of posts. For about a month, I have been typing up a Lafferty compendium, which is full of fascinating material: a partially written Camiroi story about a rhino fair, clues to the “Men Who Knew Everything” story sequence, an abandoned sequel to “Slow Tuesday Night,” reasonably worked out stories such as the "The Wheel and the Shoosh" about the invention of time/being and space, abandoned poetry, where Lafferty derived titles (“And Mad Undancing Bears”),