Is It Time to Start Considering Thomas L. Vaultonburg One of the Greatest Haiku Poets Ever?

By Haruki Nishimura
Seishin Institute for Literary Studies, Kyoto

The title of this essay embarrasses me, which is perhaps a useful place to begin. Anyone who has spent a life reading haiku learns to distrust greatness. Haiku itself distrusts greatness. The form has traditionally been hospitable to frogs, crows, cicadas, weeds, cold rain, worn sandals, summer grasses, old ponds. It possesses very little natural sympathy for the monumental. Even Bashō, whom we have made monumental, repeatedly directs our attention away from himself and toward something small. So when I am asked whether Thomas L. Vaultonburg should be considered one of the great haiku poets, my first response is resistance. Then I read the poems again, and the question becomes less ridiculous.

Haiku poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Consider first a poem of almost unreasonable economy:

fog
borrows
the bridge

Three words. There is scarcely a poem here in the conventional sense. Yet the poem performs an operation fundamental to haiku: it changes the ownership of the visible world. A bridge belongs to human beings. We design it, engineer it, name it, maintain it. It is one of our declarations of permanence. Fog possesses nothing. It has no architecture and leaves no monument. For several minutes, however, fog takes the bridge. The verb “borrows” is crucial. “Covers” would merely report weather. “Hides” would impose a little drama. “Swallows” would impose too much. “Borrows” establishes an unexpectedly gentle relationship between the permanent and impermanent. The bridge will be returned. This is very close to the deepest temporal intelligence of haiku: everything we believe we possess is merely on loan. Vaultonburg accomplishes this without announcing the thought. The philosophy exists because the image exists; remove the image and there is no philosophy.

That distinction is important because many contemporary short poems are aphorisms wearing the clothing of haiku. Vaultonburg’s strongest poems behave differently. They allow perception to generate thought. Consider another:

night pasture—
a horse shifting weight
thins the silence

Here we encounter one of Vaultonburg’s characteristic techniques. He makes an abstract condition behave as though it were physical matter. Silence can be broken. This is familiar language and therefore nearly dead language. But silence being thinned is different. Suddenly silence possesses density. The almost imperceptible movement of a horse does not destroy the night; it changes its viscosity. This is extraordinarily difficult to do well, and the poem also understands scale. Nothing “happens.” A horse does not gallop. It does not whinny. It merely shifts its weight. The poet notices the smallest possible disturbance and discovers that the entire acoustic architecture of the pasture has changed. A lesser poet would make the horse more dramatic. Vaultonburg makes the horse less dramatic, and the world consequently becomes more mysterious.

This ability appears repeatedly in his work:

marsh fog—
a heron
assembled from gray

Again, the poem depends upon a verb. The heron does not emerge from the fog. It is “assembled” from it. We watch matter organize itself into life. The poem therefore occupies a strange border between observation and creation myth. Anyone who has watched a great blue heron become visible through marsh fog recognizes the accuracy of the perception. Yet the poem also suggests, very quietly, that perhaps this is how a heron actually comes into existence: the morning collects sufficient grayness and constructs a bird. This is one of Vaultonburg’s most distinctive gifts. His surrealism frequently arrives through literal observation. The world becomes strange because he has looked at it long enough.

There is another excellent example:

blackwater creek—
a turtle sinks
until air forgets it

What does it mean for air to forget a turtle? Logically, nothing. Poetically, almost everything. The turtle passes from one medium into another. At first it remains conceptually attached to the surface. Then it descends farther. Eventually the world above closes. “Air forgets it” transforms disappearance into a relationship between elements. Air and water momentarily become two territories of consciousness. Notice also the patience of the poem. The important word may actually be “until.” We are required to remain beside the creek and watch the turtle continue downward. The poem takes perhaps three seconds to read and considerably longer to finish happening. That is one measure of successful haiku: the best examples possess an unusual ratio between textual size and experiential duration. A few words may continue unfolding in consciousness for minutes, years, sometimes decades.

Vaultonburg’s strongest poems also demonstrate another characteristic worth examining: the final line does not explain the first two lines but destabilizes them.

mud puddle—
the crow leaves behind
less sky

The first line gives us something almost contemptibly small: a mud puddle. The final line gives us the sky. Between them stands a crow. The optical event is simple. Sky is reflected in water, and the movement of the crow changes what is visible. But Vaultonburg converts this tiny phenomenon into a problem of subtraction. Can a crow remove sky? For the duration of the poem, yes. This movement between the immense and insignificant is deeply congenial to haiku. A puddle contains the heavens; a bird alters them. Vaultonburg returns to this vertical relationship elsewhere:

noon sun—
the stars
somewhere inside blue

The stars have not disappeared merely because daylight prevents us from seeing them. Everyone knows this. Almost nobody experiences the knowledge. The haiku restores the experience. That distinction—between knowing something and suddenly perceiving what one already knows—is central to the form. Haiku at its best does not necessarily provide information. It produces recognition.

One feels this even more strongly in another poem:

power outage
the stars resume
their old jobs

This poem could easily have become sentimental. Instead, its humor saves it. The stars have apparently been unemployed by electricity; when human illumination fails, they return to work. The joke contains an ecological criticism, but the poem wisely refuses to state it. The hierarchy between human civilization and the natural world is reversed through eight ordinary words. Vaultonburg’s humor deserves greater attention because it protects his poetry from solemnity, and the most obvious example may be:

the undertaker
waves from his bicycle—
mulberry season

I admire this poem enormously. The undertaker carries the unavoidable association of death. The bicycle introduces almost comic lightness. Mulberry season introduces abundance, sweetness and summer. Death rides through ripeness and waves. Nothing is resolved, and that refusal to resolve the contradiction is precisely what gives the poem life. The undertaker is not transformed into a symbol; he remains an undertaker riding a bicycle. Mulberries remain mulberries. Yet the juxtaposition generates something larger than either fact.

This is classical haiku machinery operating in a distinctly American landscape, and the distinction matters. Vaultonburg does not attempt to write Japanese haiku in English. He does something more difficult: he accepts the perceptual discipline of haiku while allowing his actual world to enter the form. Quarries appear. Underpasses appear. Estate auctions appear. Canadian wildfire smoke enters an American city. Abandoned infrastructure exists beside birds and weather.

underpass puddle—
the city skyline
shaken by sparrows

This could not have been written by Bashō, nor should it have been. Its world is infrastructural, urban, damaged and ordinary. Yet its mechanism would be immediately recognizable to an older haiku consciousness: large and small encounter one another, permanence is exposed as temporary, and the human world is altered by creatures that do not acknowledge its importance. The skyline appears monumental until sparrows shake it. There is something almost democratic about Vaultonburg’s imagination. Nothing remains safely above anything else.

A similar transformation occurs in one of his most ambitious poems:

old mineshaft—
a wheel of bats
rebuilds the darkness

The verb “rebuilds” is audacious. Darkness is normally understood as absence, and one does not build absence. But the circling bats appear to manufacture darkness through motion. The abandoned mine—the remnant of human extraction—has been repossessed by animal life. Yet “rebuilds” complicates the easy ecological reading. The bats are not merely inhabitants. They have become laborers of darkness. A human industrial site has acquired a new industry. The poem contains history without discussing history.

That ability becomes even clearer in:

estate auction—
the quilts
open to another winter

Here the human story is almost entirely missing, and because it is missing we feel it more strongly. Whose quilts? Whose house? Why are they being auctioned? Death, debt, relocation, the dissolution of a family? Vaultonburg refuses to tell us. Instead the quilts open. “Another winter” may belong to another household, another generation, another life. The physical object continues after the circumstances that gathered it into one particular home have disappeared. This is an exceptionally mature haiku because its emotion resides largely in what the poet declines to say.

There are places where Vaultonburg approaches lyricism more directly:

early lilacs—
grief caught
without its coat

Here the personification is unmistakable. Grief has become a figure surprised by spring. Normally I would distrust such a maneuver in haiku because it risks converting the observed world into a vehicle for the poet’s feelings. But “without its coat” rescues the poem. The phrase is slightly comic, slightly domestic and physically imaginable. Grief has dressed for winter and suddenly discovers lilacs. The season has changed before sorrow was prepared for it. This is not the claim that spring cures grief. Something more convincing happens: grief finds itself temporarily overdressed.

Vaultonburg is particularly effective when his poems hover at precisely this boundary between sincerity and play. “berry thicket— / my hands / stained with wanting” begins with the literal stain of fruit and becomes desire without ceasing to be berry juice. In “ripe figs— / my mouth learns / another prayer,” taste becomes devotion without the poem ever specifying a deity. And in “deer at dusk— / her stillness / rearranges mine,” the animal does not become an emblem for some preexisting human idea. Instead, attention to the animal changes the observer’s physical state.

This last point may be the key to understanding Vaultonburg. His best haiku are not descriptions of nature so much as records of recalibration. Something enters perception—a horse, heron, turtle, crow, spider, deer—and the human observer’s relationship to the world changes by several degrees. Sometimes the transformation is almost microscopic:

fog drift—
a spider tests the air
with one leg

There is almost no metaphor here, and none is necessary. The spider becomes nearly scientific in its delicacy. “Tests” is exactly the right verb because the extended leg appears simultaneously tentative and knowledgeable. The creature knows something about the air that the human observer does not. The hierarchy of perception reverses again: the poet watches the spider, but the spider reads the world. This humility before nonhuman intelligence connects Vaultonburg to an important current running through the history of haiku. Nature is not scenery surrounding the human subject. Human consciousness is only one local event occurring among many others.

This is why one of his simplest poems may ultimately be among his most revealing:

empty basket—
carrying home
the birdsong

Nothing has been gathered, and everything has been gathered. The basket is empty according to one economy and full according to another. It would be easy to dismiss this as charming, but one should resist doing so. The poem quietly asks what constitutes possession, harvest and value, and more importantly, it answers without argument. The person simply walks home.

There is also a regional dimension to Vaultonburg’s work that I suspect will become increasingly important. Haiku has always depended upon particularity of place. Yet American practitioners sometimes inherit the vocabulary of Japanese haiku without sufficiently transforming it, resulting in an imported landscape of moons, ponds, blossoms and temple bells. Vaultonburg’s landscape feels inhabited rather than inherited. Prairie, quarry, underpass, mulberry, pawpaw, smoke, mine, bicycle and estate auction coexist naturally with herons, spiders and plum blossoms because they belong to the same perceptual world.

Perhaps the most beautiful expression of this regional sensibility is:

across the prairie—
rain arriving
on horseback

The image risks extravagance, yet anyone who has stood beneath a Midwestern sky and watched a storm advance across open land understands its physical accuracy. Rain possesses distance, speed and a visible front. “On horseback” activates the historical imagination of the prairie without turning the poem into historical reenactment. Weather becomes rider; landscape becomes duration. The same rootedness appears more quietly in:

pawpaw season—
the road home
sweet on our hands

This poem has almost nothing to prove, which may be why I trust it. The sweetness is literal before it becomes emotional. Fruit remains on the hands. The road becomes associated with the taste. Home is therefore not defined geographically but sensually. The poem understands memory before memory has happened.

I have deliberately avoided one question until now: What would it actually mean to call someone “one of the greatest haiku poets ever”? There can be no objective measurement. Bashō transformed the form. Buson brought extraordinary visual precision. Issa expanded its emotional and creaturely universe. Shiki altered its modern conception. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have produced many extraordinary Japanese and international practitioners working under radically different linguistic conditions. To place an American poet casually among such figures would be unserious.

But there is another way to understand the question. Greatness in poetry is sometimes recognized not through historical rank but through the accumulation of individual poems that become difficult to imagine having been written any other way. That is the test I would apply to Vaultonburg. Could another poet have written “fog / borrows / the bridge”? Perhaps. But after reading it, “borrows” begins to feel inevitable. Could another poet have written of a heron “assembled from gray”? Perhaps. But afterward it becomes difficult to watch a heron emerge from fog without remembering the phrase. Could another poet have discovered that a horse shifting its weight “thins the silence”? Perhaps. But the language alters the experience it describes. And could another poet have watched a turtle descend until “air forgets it”? Perhaps. But once the poem exists, the world contains a possibility it did not quite contain before.

This is the severe test. A successful haiku records perception. A very good haiku changes perception. A great haiku permanently contaminates perception: after encountering it, one can no longer see the original phenomenon innocently. Fog may borrow things. Herons may assemble themselves. Silence may possess thickness. Sparrows may shake cities. Bats may manufacture darkness. A crow may leave behind less sky. This is not merely a collection of attractive metaphors. Across the poems, we encounter a coherent imaginative system. The supposedly solid becomes temporary. The supposedly empty becomes substantial. Human structures become fragile. Animals become agents. Weather becomes animate. The enormous enters the tiny. The dead remain beside the living without requiring explanation.

Most importantly, the poet himself repeatedly diminishes. The greatest danger in asking whether someone is a great poet is that the poet becomes larger than the poems, while haiku demands almost precisely the opposite. The poet should become smaller. In Vaultonburg’s strongest work he does. He becomes the person standing beside the puddle, watching the horse, carrying the basket, noticing the spider, tasting the fruit. The world does the rest.

So, is it time to begin considering Thomas L. Vaultonburg one of the greatest haiku poets? I would phrase the conclusion more carefully. It is time to take the possibility seriously. Not because he has written hundreds or thousands of haiku; quantity proves nothing. Not because he is American, contemporary, prolific or unusual. None of these establishes artistic importance. It is because within this body of work there are already individual poems possessing the compression, perceptual originality, linguistic inevitability and afterlife that we associate with lasting haiku. Others demonstrate the same power through radical brevity, humor, ecological perception and the transformation of ordinary American places into sites of revelation.

There is finally one poem I keep returning to:

pond surface—
a fish rises
through two worlds

The fish knows nothing of our argument. It rises through the surface and for an instant occupies two elements before the water closes again. Perhaps this is what the finest haiku have always done. They discover the almost invisible boundary between worlds and permit us, very briefly, to see something passing through it. Thomas L. Vaultonburg has learned how to stand beside that boundary and, more importantly, has learned when not to speak. In haiku, this may be where greatness begins.

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SECOND NATURE: Salvaged Metal Sculpture and Haiku at Rockford Art Deli

Michael Zant + Tré + Thomas L. Vaultonburg
A benefit for Wild Roots

On October 2 and 3, Rockford Art Deli will host SECOND NATURE, an exhibition bringing together the salvaged-metal animal sculptures of Michael Zant and the haiku of Tré and Thomas L. Vaultonburg of Wolf Twin Books.

Created from reclaimed and repurposed materials, each of Michael’s sculptures will be accompanied by two original haiku—one written by Tré and one by Vaultonburg—inspired by the animal or wild creature it depicts. The exhibition celebrates the wild lives around us, the possibilities hidden within discarded things, and the idea that everything deserves a second nature.

Michael builds his animals from metal objects that have already lived one life. Chains become tentacles. Old tools become claws, wings, legs, and bones. Parts once designed for work or machinery are rearranged until they begin to resemble something living. The finished sculptures retain the history of their materials while acquiring personalities of their own.

The haiku approach the same animals from two different directions. Tré and Vaultonburg have collaborated before, most notably on Moonscape: Haiku Phase I, but SECOND NATURE gives that collaboration a new structure. Each poet responds independently to the same sculpture, creating a small conversation beside it. Sometimes the two poems occupy the same landscape. Sometimes they wander into entirely different worlds.

For Michael’s bear sculpture, Vaultonburg imagines a mother recording her family in the forest:

with one paw Mama Bear
carves in pine the names of
all five of her cubs

—Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Tré finds another bear who has become perhaps a little too comfortable around people:

veteran camper—
a black bear sitting
at the picnic table

—Tré

A sculpture with chains for tentacles inspired a pairing that moves from the history of the material into the strange physical presence of an octopus:

old chains
remembering how
to be tentacles

—Thomas L. Vaultonburg

tasting the shape
of my face
all eight arms

—Tré

These poems will not be presented as conventional framed pieces hanging at a safe distance from the art. They will appear on small, simple displays beside the sculptures. The presentation is intentionally modest and low-tech, allowing the salvaged metal, the animals, and the words to remain the center of attention.

The project grew naturally from the shared interests of the three artists. Michael Zant transforms discarded materials into representations of living creatures. Tré and Vaultonburg write poems grounded in animals, seasons, observation, and the Midwestern landscape. Together, the sculptures and haiku ask viewers to look again—not only at things that have been thrown away, but at the wild lives that continue around us whether we notice them or not.

SECOND NATURE is also a benefit for Wild Roots. Copies of Vaultonburg’s 2026 haiku collection, Vanished Roads, will be available at Rockford Art Deli, with $10 from every copy sold there donated to Wild Roots.

The exhibition is part of Rockford’s Fall ArtScene and is free to attend.

SECOND NATURE
Salvaged Metal Sculpture & Haiku
Michael Zant + Tré + Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Friday, October 2, 2026: 5–9 p.m.
Saturday, October 3, 2026: 4–9 p.m.

Rockford Art Deli
402 E. State St.
Rockford, Illinois

Admission is free.

More information: Rockford Art Deli

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Vanished Roads: Making a Haiku Collection Tell a Story

One thing that mattered to us from the beginning with Vanished Roads was that it become a whole book, not simply a stack of haiku that happened to have the same author's name on them.

                    

That distinction might seem small, especially with haiku. A haiku is designed to survive on its own. It has its own little weather system, its own moment, its own beginning and ending. You can open a collection almost anywhere, read one poem, close the book, and theoretically you have experienced something complete. There is nothing wrong with making a collection that way. But that wasn't what I wanted Vanished Roads to be.

The poems had accumulated over a long and difficult period of my life, and when I began looking at them together I realized they weren't actually separate. Certain things kept returning: abandoned places, animals, roads, weather, objects people had discarded, small signs of persistence, and moments when the natural world seemed to be quietly reclaiming whatever human beings had left behind. More importantly, the emotional atmosphere of the poems changed. There was movement in them.

Once I saw that, sequencing became part of the writing.

The book begins in a darker and more enclosed place and gradually moves outward. It doesn't suddenly announce that everything is better. I wouldn't have believed a book that did that, and I certainly couldn't have written one. Instead, little openings begin appearing. The world becomes visible again. Animals arrive. Light changes. Humor returns. The landscape starts becoming something other than a backdrop for loss.

That same movement became important visually.

Tré's cover for Vanished Roads isn't simply packaging placed around the poems after the fact. The enormous tree, the narrow passage through it, the distant light and the road continuing beyond it all belong to the same journey the poems are making. Her illustrations throughout the book work the same way. We wanted the visual and poetic elements to feel as though they had grown from the same landscape.

That's why Michael Dylan Welch's description of Vanished Roads as a “well-designed haiku collection” pleased me so much. He also described the experience of reading it as one of “enjoyable patience.” Both observations get at something we were consciously trying to accomplish. The book isn't asking the reader to race toward a conclusion. Its changes happen incrementally, poem by poem, image by image.

Maybe that's appropriate for haiku. Emergence doesn't require a trumpet blast.

Sometimes it's just the next thing you notice.

Vanished Roads by Thomas L. Vaultonburg, with cover and illustrations by Tré, was published by Wolf Twin Books in 2026.

Vanished Roads at Wolf Twin Books

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Vanished Roads: A Review by Pippa Phillips, Editor of Prune Juice Journal

 Vanished Roads

A Review by Pippa Phillips, Editor of Prune Juice Journal

Thomas L. Vaultonburg’s Vanished Roads, a collection of haiku (and, to my mind, senryu), is a pleasure to read, possessing a satisfying variety united by thematic throughlines. The tone ranges from the homey to the surreal, the author's voice unobtrusive but personal. It has the feeling of a deep, light night conversation with an old friend: intimate, unforced, occasionally funny, and capable of sudden profundity.

Buy Vanished Roads

The volume features a number of stand-out poems, several of which I will examine. What strikes me is its genuine popular appeal: these poems have a muscular simplicity without sacrificing depth.

Vaultonburg demonstrates a highly developed sense of the possibilities of the micropoem. The poems drift from outside to inside, through the seasons, from lightness to grief, even in the same poem:

spin fast enough

and the wound

becomes a door

Here, strange logic brings the poem to a surreal conclusion. The imperative casts an immediate spell, pulling you into the orbit of the grotesque before abruptly opening a way out– or is it in? Vaultonburg makes use of the double meaning of ‘wound’– perhaps (because of the spinning) it’s the past participle of ‘wind’, like a watch. More likely, it’s an injury. Implication likens the latter to something else that both opens and serves as a barrier. If the body is a house, trauma is an unwelcome guest.

Grief lurks in the domestic– furniture, a coat, in a woodpile, in a door: Vaultonburg grounds regret, perseverance, transcendence, and joy in the concrete. The poems’ emotional and philosophical weight emerges through the transformation of ordinary objects and experiences.

The poems demonstrate effective use of Western literary techniques, while also displaying a wonderful sense of many Japanese aesthetics. Here, Vaultonburg’s use of personification has a plausible deniability– perhaps the author is not talking to a storm, but the reader.

storm clearing—

you too

are allowed to arrive

Below, the poet cultivates an atmosphere of holy mystery in just a few strokes. This haiku initiates the reader by calling attention to lapsed attention. Already we are focused on what is missing– the deer. Only, it hasn’t departed. It has transformed into something else, something that remains. This is yūgen, the grace that works beyond human ken.

not watching

the moment the deer

becomes the woods again

Vaultonburg’s poems are artless in the best sense– they don’t wear their artistry on their sleeve. They are accessible without becoming simple, sophisticated without becoming complicated. Again and again, things shift into other things: a wound becomes a door, a deer becomes the woods, a hat becomes a pilgrim. There is a weight that the artist refuses to succumb to, a tempered joy. A solid and satisfactory collection.

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Creature Features: The Definitive History of a Horror Television Institution

Creature Features: The Definitive History of a Horror Television Institution

There was a time when watching a horror movie at home required considerably more commitment than clicking on a thumbnail. Before streaming, before DVDs, and for most people before even VHS, discovering old horror and science-fiction movies meant being in the right place at the right time. Somewhere late on a Friday or Saturday night, after respectable television had largely gone to bed, a local station might open the crypt and let the monsters out. Dracula, Frankenstein, giant insects, radioactive mutants, aliens, Japanese monsters, Roger Corman pictures, Hammer horror—movies that were genuinely great, movies that were magnificently terrible, and movies whose primary accomplishment was filling ninety minutes of television between commercials.

Standing between the viewer and these movies was one of American television's strangest inventions: the horror host. For viewers in Northern California, no horror show became more beloved than Creature Features. Its history stretches from the deadpan brilliance of Bob Wilkins in the 1970s, through John Stanley's more encyclopedic approach in the 1980s, to the resurrection of the name in 2016 by Vincent Van Dahl, Tangella and Mr. Livingston. More than half a century after Bob Wilkins first sat down in front of a camera and advised viewers that the movie they were about to watch probably wasn't very good, Creature Features is somehow still shambling around.

Before Creature Features: The Birth of the Horror Host

The story begins before Creature Features. In 1957, Screen Gems released a syndicated package of classic Universal horror movies to television stations under the title Shock!. Suddenly local television had access to Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man and other movies that had frightened theater audiences a generation earlier. Stations quickly discovered there was another way to sell these aging films. Rather than simply showing the movie, they could have somebody introduce it.

Thus began the golden age of the local television horror host. Some dressed as vampires, undertakers, witches or mad scientists. Some performed comedy sketches. Some emerged from coffins. Others populated their sets with rubber bats, laboratory equipment and dime-store cobwebs. The formula spread across America, producing a bizarre regional ecosystem of characters who often became more beloved than the movies they presented. The name Creature Features itself was not exclusive to one program. Versions of Creature Feature or Creature Features appeared in numerous American television markets, including Chicago and the Quad Cities. But in Northern California something slightly different happened. A guy sat in a chair.

Bob Wilkins Before Creature Features

Bob Wilkins did not look much like a horror host, and that was part of the joke. Wilkins began hosting horror movies at KCRA in Sacramento in 1966. Rather than dress like Dracula, he appeared essentially as himself: glasses, neat clothes, dry expression and eventually the trademarks viewers would remember most vividly, a rocking chair and cigar. His humor was understated and frequently devastating. Instead of insisting that the night's movie was terrifying, Wilkins might warn the audience that it was terrible and suggest they check what was playing on the other channels.

It was anti-promotion as promotion, and the effect was remarkable. Wilkins wasn't pretending the audience was stupid. If a movie was ridiculous, everybody knew it was ridiculous, including the host. That shared understanding created a relationship between Wilkins and his viewers that was very different from conventional television. The movie might be garbage, but they were going to watch it together.

Wilkins left KCRA in 1970 and moved into Bay Area television at KTVU Channel 2. He simultaneously continued hosting horror programming in Sacramento on KTXL, meaning that for a period he was effectively maintaining horror-host careers in two markets. His Sacramento work established the persona, but what happened at KTVU turned him into an institution.

January 9, 1971: Creature Features Arrives

On Saturday, January 9, 1971, Creature Features debuted on KTVU Channel 2 with The Horror of Party Beach, a 1964 mixture of radioactive sea monsters, teenagers, music and the sort of low-budget cinematic decision-making that would prove perfectly at home on the show. Creature Features quickly became successful enough that KTVU expanded the program into a double feature, and soon Saturday night belonged to monsters.

The program showed the expected classic horror and science-fiction pictures but wandered happily through virtually every corner of fantastic cinema. There were giant monsters, alien invasions, mad scientists, cheap exploitation pictures, Hammer films and forgotten oddities. On January 1, 1972, Creature Features presented the television premiere of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, a film that was already transforming the modern horror movie. That broadcast alone would have given Creature Features a small place in horror history, but increasingly the movies were only part of the attraction.

Bob Wilkins Changes the Horror Host

Wilkins's genius was that he didn't really behave like a horror host. He behaved like an intelligent guy who happened to have been assigned to show you Billy the Kid Versus Dracula. He sat in his chair, smoked his cigar, talked about the movie and made jokes so dry that occasionally they seemed to arrive several seconds after he'd finished speaking. His famous admonition, “Don't stay up late, it's not worth it,” perfectly summarized the character of the program. He could simultaneously celebrate horror movies and acknowledge that some of them were absolutely terrible.

Yet Creature Features gradually became something more ambitious than wisecracks surrounding bad movies. Wilkins interviewed an extraordinary assortment of people connected to horror, fantasy, science fiction and popular culture. Christopher Lee, Ray Harryhausen, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, William Marshall, John Landis, Forrest J Ackerman and many others appeared during his years on television. This gave the program an unusual dual identity. One minute Wilkins could be ridiculing an atrocious monster movie; the next he might be conducting a serious conversation with one of the most important figures in science-fiction or horror cinema.

That mixture of irreverence and genuine knowledge became part of the show's DNA. Wilkins understood that loving horror didn't require pretending every horror movie was good. In fact, recognizing exactly how bad some of them were could be part of the pleasure. At the same time, he treated the filmmakers, actors, effects artists and fans seriously enough to understand that this supposedly disposable culture was worth documenting.

Watch Horror Films, Keep America Strong

The culture surrounding Creature Features became nearly as important as the program itself. Viewers sent letters, made artwork, submitted films and repeated Wilkins's jokes and slogans. His phrase “Watch Horror Films—Keep America Strong” became one of the great slogans in horror-host history. The program became a gathering place for people who loved things that mainstream culture still regarded as disposable or juvenile.

This was before horror fandom became an easily identifiable commercial demographic. There were no streaming algorithms feeding viewers endless lists of obscure horror movies, and finding information about Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Japanese monster films or low-budget science fiction required actual effort. Magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland performed part of that function in print. On television, programs like Creature Features created communities of viewers who gradually realized there were other people out there interested in exactly the same strange things.

In that sense, Creature Features functioned as something between a movie theater, clubhouse and informal film school. You watched because you wanted to see the monster, but you kept watching because somebody else understood why you wanted to see the monster.

John Stanley Takes the Chair

By the late 1970s, Bob Wilkins was ready to leave, and his successor was John Stanley, a journalist, writer and film critic who had already appeared on the program and possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of horror, fantasy and science fiction. Stanley took over in 1979. The transition could easily have killed the show because horror hosts are unusually personal figures, and replacing one is a little like replacing somebody's favorite bartender. Instead, Stanley made Creature Features his own.

Where Wilkins specialized in laconic irreverence, Stanley leaned more heavily into film history, interviews and genre knowledge. He continued the humor but also treated horror and science fiction as subjects worthy of serious discussion. His guests included an extraordinary collection of writers, actors and filmmakers, among them Ray Bradbury, Christopher Lee, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Bloch, Ray Harryhausen and Max von Sydow.

Under Stanley, the program increasingly resembled something that barely existed elsewhere on television: a serious genre interview program disguised as a late-night monster show. Stanley understood that the audience wanted more than the movies themselves. They wanted to know who made them, how they were made, where the ideas came from and what the people involved thought about their work. In an era long before DVD commentaries, podcasts and endless behind-the-scenes documentaries, that access was valuable.

1984: The Monsters Leave Television

The original KTVU Creature Features ended in 1984, and its disappearance was part of a much larger change in American television. The local horror host was becoming an endangered species. Cable television was expanding, home video allowed viewers to rent the movies they once had to wait until midnight to see, local stations changed ownership and programming strategies, and syndicated programming filled hours once occupied by locally produced oddities.

The economics that had created horror hosts were disappearing, and when those economics disappeared, something culturally important disappeared with them. Local television became less local. The strange person in your city who introduced The Brain That Wouldn't Die at midnight was gradually replaced by programming that could have been transmitted from anywhere in the country. The movies themselves became easier to obtain, but the ritual surrounding them began to vanish.

For Creature Features, the crypt closed for more than thirty years. But the audience remembered, which is one of the remarkable things about horror hosts. People don't merely remember the movies. They remember watching the movies. They remember the room, being twelve years old, trying to stay awake, and the television glowing in a dark house while everyone else was asleep. Bob Wilkins and John Stanley remained cult figures because Creature Features had become attached to those memories.

Keeping Creature Features Alive

Bob Wilkins died in 2009, but preservation of his work and the history surrounding Creature Features had already begun. Filmmakers and fans understood that the old broadcasts represented a kind of television history that could easily disappear because local programs were not always systematically archived. Tom Wyrsch and Robert Napton's documentary Watch Horror Films, Keep America Strong helped preserve the story of Bay Area horror television and the people who created and watched it.

That preservation work mattered because the original Creature Features had existed in an era when television was considered disposable. Episodes aired and disappeared. Videotape was reused. Film deteriorated. Recordings survived because somebody happened to save them. What had once seemed like ephemeral late-night entertainment gradually became cultural history.

And, because monsters have an inconvenient habit of returning, Creature Features eventually did too.

2016: Creature Features Rises Again

On October 29, 2016, a new Creature Features debuted with Night of the Living Dead. The choice was beautifully appropriate. The film that Bob Wilkins's program had famously broadcast in 1972 now helped inaugurate the new incarnation, and former host John Stanley appeared in the first episode. The new show acknowledged the history it inherited without attempting to reproduce it exactly.

The host was Vincent Van Dahl, played by Jeff Bodean, presented as a retired rock star who had abandoned the music business and settled into a haunted mansion in Bodega Bay. Living with him were two people who would become equally important to the program. Mr. Livingston, played by Räven Green, was Van Dahl's extraordinarily patient and increasingly indispensable butler. Then there was Tangella, played by Ali Noel, a silent and spectacularly destructive presence who seemed to exist somewhere between feral child, homicidal Muppet, silent-film comedian and creature somebody had unwisely allowed into the house.

Tangella doesn't speak and doesn't need to. She conducts experiments, destroys things, threatens people and communicates primarily through facial expressions suggesting that whatever she is thinking should probably concern everyone nearby. Together Vincent, Livingston and Tangella recreated the fundamental horror-host arrangement while turning it into something unmistakably their own.

The Mansion and the New Mythology

The setting helped enormously. Rather than appearing against an inexpensive television backdrop, the revived Creature Features operates from the historic Poulter Mansion in Bodega Bay, California. Rooms, staircases, antique furniture, strange objects and shadowy corners became part of the program's visual language. The mansion isn't simply a set; it behaves almost like another character.

The premise is wonderfully unnecessary and therefore perfect for a horror-host program. Vincent Van Dahl has retired from rock music and lives in this peculiar mansion with his butler and whatever exactly Tangella is. Guests arrive, conversations occur, Tangella causes trouble, and everyone watches a movie. It creates enough mythology to give the show a distinct identity without allowing the premise to overwhelm the fundamental reason everyone is there.

The Old Formula in a New World

The remarkable thing about the revived Creature Features is how little the basic idea needed to change. There is a movie. There are breaks in the movie. The hosts return during those breaks. There are jokes, guests, conversations and monsters. Then everyone goes back to watching the film. The technology surrounding that simple arrangement, however, has changed completely.

The original program was ephemeral local television. If you weren't within KTVU's broadcast range, you didn't see it. If you missed Saturday night's episode, it was gone unless somebody happened to record it. The revived Creature Features could exist simultaneously as traditional television and Internet television. It appeared on KOFY TV20 and expanded into syndication while episodes became available online, eventually reaching viewers through YouTube and connected-TV platforms far beyond Northern California.

Something fascinating happened in the process. One of the most intensely local forms of American television adapted itself to a global medium. A viewer thousands of miles from Bodega Bay could now participate in essentially the same Saturday-night ritual that had once depended upon living within range of a particular television transmitter.

The Guests Return

The new show also preserved one of the smartest things Wilkins and Stanley had done: inviting people over to talk. Actors, filmmakers, writers, musicians, horror personalities, artists, scientists and assorted eccentrics have occupied the guest chair. That matters because without the interviews, Creature Features could easily become merely another service showing old movies.

The conversations preserve the feeling that someone has invited you into the house for the evening. That was always one of the secrets of horror-host television. The host wasn't simply introducing a movie. The host was keeping you company while you watched it. The movie could be found somewhere else. The particular experience of watching it with these people could not.

The Vincent Van Dahl Era Becomes an Era of Its Own

The resurrection was not a short-lived nostalgia stunt. The revived show accumulated hundreds of episodes beginning in 2016, enough that the Vincent Van Dahl, Livingston and Tangella incarnation can no longer reasonably be described merely as “the reboot.” It has become a substantial era of Creature Features history in its own right.

That longevity is important because the new program has now introduced the horror-host tradition to viewers who have no firsthand memory of Bob Wilkins or John Stanley. Some discovered the earlier programs through the revival rather than the other way around. The lineage therefore works in both directions: the original gives legitimacy and history to the revival, while the revival keeps sending new viewers backward into the archives.

Livingston Presents

The program mutated again in 2025 when Mr. Livingston began hosting his own movie program, Livingston Presents, with Tangella periodically appearing to ensure that things did not proceed too smoothly. What might initially have seemed like a side project became increasingly important as the Creature Features team prepared for something larger.

In 2026 the team announced that the regular Saturday Creature Features would take a planned hiatus following its May 30 broadcast. The reason was not cancellation. They were making a movie. Producing the weekly show—with its multiple cameras, editing, guests and all the machinery required to assemble a full episode—was consuming time needed for production of The Creature Features Movie. Livingston Presents therefore inherited the Saturday-night position while work on the film continued.

As of August 2026, filming on the movie is underway while Livingston Presents continues the Saturday-night tradition. It is another transformation in a history filled with them. Bob Wilkins gave way to John Stanley. Local broadcast television gave way to home video and cable. Decades later, television gave way to a mixture of broadcasting, streaming and online distribution. Now the current incarnation is attempting to make the jump from hosted television into a feature film.

Creature Features in 2026

That brings the story to the present. More than half a century after Creature Features debuted on KTVU, the lineage remains alive. Not unchanged, because that would miss the point. Bob Wilkins's Creature Features belonged to the age of independent local television. John Stanley's version belonged to the moment when genre fandom was becoming increasingly self-aware. Vincent Van Dahl, Tangella and Livingston belong to an era when television, streaming, YouTube and independent production have blurred together.

During the current hiatus, Livingston is essentially minding the store. Livingston Presents occupies the Saturday-night position while the creators work on bringing the inhabitants of the mansion into a feature film. There is something wonderfully appropriate about this. The program has survived by behaving exactly like the creatures it has always shown: whenever circumstances threatened it, it changed form.

Why Creature Features Matters

It would be easy to describe Creature Features as a program that showed horror movies. Technically, that's true, but it doesn't explain why anyone remembers it. The real subject of Creature Features has always been watching horror movies with somebody else. Bob Wilkins understood that instinctively. The movies didn't have to be good, and sometimes their awfulness improved the evening. What mattered was the ritual. The host returned between segments, made a joke, interviewed somebody, showed something peculiar and then sent you back into the movie.

John Stanley understood the other half of the equation: the people watching these movies were genuinely interested in them. Horror wasn't merely junk to be mocked. It had history, artists, writers, filmmakers and ideas worth discussing. The current incarnation understands both lessons. Vincent can introduce the film, Livingston can regard the proceedings with profound suspicion, Tangella can attempt to kill something, and then the movie continues.

For a few hours on Saturday night, the enormous anonymous machinery of modern entertainment shrinks back down to something comprehensible: a house, a host, a guest and a monster movie. More than fifty years after Bob Wilkins first welcomed Bay Area viewers to Creature Features, the medium that created the show barely exists anymore. Independent local television has largely vanished, and the movies themselves are available almost everywhere. Nobody has to wait until Saturday night to see Night of the Living Dead.

And yet people still gather on Saturday night to watch.

Maybe that was the thing we misunderstood about horror hosts. We thought they existed because people needed somebody to show them the movies. Perhaps they existed because people wanted somebody to watch the movies with them.

Apparently we still do.

Watch horror films. Keep America strong.

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Send in the Schizoid Kid: A Life Observed From the Outside

I found out I had Schizoid Personality Disorder by accident. I was fifteen years old, sitting in the waiting room of my psychiatrist's office. His door was open, and I heard him tell his secretary, “Send in the schizoid kid.” That was me.

Like most people who hear the word schizoid, particularly a fifteen-year-old in the early 1980s, I thought it meant schizophrenia. Nobody sat me down and explained the diagnosis. Nobody gave me a pamphlet describing what it might mean for the rest of my life. There was no internet to consult when I got home. There wasn't even much of a popular vocabulary for discussing these things. The diagnosis would not be formally revealed to me until decades later, when that same psychiatrist testified during my disability hearing and confirmed that Schizoid Personality Disorder was indeed what he had diagnosed me with as a teenager. By then I had already spent most of my life living it.

Schizoid Personality Disorder is a strange diagnosis partly because its defining characteristics involve absences: little desire for close relationships, preference for solitary activities, apparent indifference to praise or criticism, emotional detachment. Years ago, when writing about my book Submerged Structure, I described it as a disorder involving something missing, complicated by the fact that the person missing it may not miss it—or may not know exactly what he is supposed to be missing.

I don't know if I would describe it exactly that way today. One of the difficulties in writing about something you've lived with for more than forty years is distinguishing the condition from the person. Which parts are symptoms? Which are adaptations? Which are simply personality? Which resulted from experiences that had nothing to do with a psychiatric diagnosis at all? After this long, I don't know where one ends and another begins.

What I do know is that much of my life has felt like an exercise in observation. When I was younger, I consciously practiced behaviors other people appeared to perform automatically. Eye contact. Smiling. Shaking hands. Even walking correctly could become something to think about rather than simply something to do. I watched people and tried to determine what was expected of me. Years later I described this process as translation. Life required continually translating myself into a persona comprehensible to people who had never needed to consider that the social language they spoke naturally might be a foreign language to somebody else.

Then, in 1987, Star Trek: The Next Generation appeared on television. My favorite character was Lieutenant Commander Data. Data was an android. He was intelligent, capable and sentient, but he lacked human emotions and was fascinated by them. He observed the people around him. He studied their behavior. He attempted humor. He tried to understand friendship, affection, grief and all the strange contradictions humans accepted without seeming to notice them. I identified with him immediately. I wasn't an android trying to become human, obviously, but emotionally the metaphor was almost embarrassingly accurate. Data was doing consciously what everyone around him did instinctively. I knew something about that.

Today there is an enormous vocabulary surrounding experiences that barely had a public vocabulary when I was fifteen. Neurodivergence. Autism spectrum disorder. Masking. Sensory processing. Social communication differences. Spend a few minutes online and you can find thousands of people discussing experiences that previous generations might never have described publicly.

I don't know exactly what to make of it. When I later went to college and studied psychology, the profession seemed considerably more confident about these categories and their prevalence. Certain disorders affected a certain percentage of the population. Diagnostic categories had boundaries. At least that was the impression presented to students. Now reported diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder have increased enormously, and people publicly identify themselves as neurodivergent in numbers that would have seemed astonishing when I was young.

Why? I don't know. Diagnostic criteria have changed. Awareness has changed. Parents and teachers know what to look for. People who once would have gone undiagnosed can now be recognized. Stigma has changed. Self-reporting has changed. Whether those explanations account for everything, or whether something else is happening as well, isn't something my own experience qualifies me to decide. Nor do I know what diagnosis I would receive if I were fifteen years old today.

That question interests me, but I don't want to rewrite my life using terminology that didn't exist when I lived it. Schizoid Personality Disorder and autism are not interchangeable diagnoses. I can't travel back forty years with today's diagnostic manuals and today's understanding of neurodevelopment and submit the fifteen-year-old version of myself for reassessment. All I can report reliably is what the experience looked like from inside.

Increasingly, though, I can see what it did to my work. For years I made a distinction between the Outlaw artist and the Outsider artist. The Outlaw understands the rules and deliberately breaks them. The Outsider may never have understood why the rules existed in the first place. I once fancied myself an Outlaw. Eventually I began to suspect I had been an Outsider all along.

That distinction changed how I understood my poetry. Much of my writing has involved looking at ordinary human behavior as though it weren't ordinary. Customs, relationships, ambitions, status, work, sex, religion, death, possessions—the peculiar machinery of being human becomes visible when you aren't completely absorbed in operating it. Eventually that same observational habit moved increasingly toward the physical world: birds, roads, weeds, rivers, abandoned buildings, animals, signs and objects people have discarded. The bicycle somebody pulled out of the Rock River. An office chair sitting strangely in a window. Things encountered while walking through Rockford that thousands of other people may have passed without needing to stop.

Haiku turned out to be particularly compatible with that way of experiencing the world. You don't have to explain everything. You notice. That is essentially the method behind Hike You!, the six-year walking and haiku project I've created with photographer Ryan Davis. We walk through the city. We encounter something. Ryan photographs it. I write about it. It sounds almost ridiculously simple. Maybe it is. But I've come to realize that observation has been one of the continuous threads running through my life. When participation isn't automatic, observation becomes unusually important.

The same contradiction appears elsewhere in my work. Someone reading the diagnostic description of Schizoid Personality Disorder might reasonably expect me to have spent my life withdrawing from other people, and certainly I've done plenty of that. Solitude isn't something I tolerate until something better comes along. It is my natural state. Yet I founded Zombie Logic Press. I edited Zombie Logic Review. I've published other writers. I've organized projects. I've participated in Rockford's literary and artistic community. I've collaborated with artists. I've spent years documenting the history and peculiarities of the city where I live. Those things require other people.

The younger version of me once wrote something that is difficult for the older version to dismiss: “I want to be with you. I want to be part of the scene. I want to be human.” I don't think I'd say it quite that way anymore. I no longer believe there is some examination in human behavior I'm required to pass. But I recognize the person who wrote it.

What I've actually done, perhaps without realizing it, is construct alternative methods of participation. Writing is one of them. Publishing is another. Collaboration is another. Walking through a city with a photographer and returning with a poem is another. They allow connection without requiring me to experience connection exactly the way someone else does.

That brings me back to Submerged Structure. There used to be a sign along Route 72 between Byron and Oregon, Illinois, beside the Rock River. I saw it repeatedly when I was young. It read SUBMERGED STRUCTURE, warning that something was underneath the water. You couldn't see it from the surface, but it was there and needed to be accounted for. I couldn't stop thinking about those words. Eventually they became the title of a book.

At the time, I thought the sign was a nearly perfect metaphor for Schizoid Personality Disorder. Something was submerged within me. Maybe it had broken away. Maybe it had never developed. Maybe it remained somewhere inaccessible beneath the surface. Other people couldn't see it, and I couldn't adequately explain it. I am less certain now that anything needs to be recovered. That's one of the things forty years can change.

I don't know whether today's explosion in the language of neurodivergence will ultimately make these experiences easier for younger people. I hope it does. I hope a fifteen-year-old sitting in a psychiatrist's waiting room today doesn't have to accidentally overhear what someone has decided is happening inside his own mind. I hope somebody explains it to him. I hope he gets to ask questions. And I hope he understands that a diagnosis may describe something important about him without necessarily providing the definitive explanation of who he is.

I don't have a program to offer people with Schizoid Personality Disorder, autism spectrum disorder or any of the other conditions we now gather beneath an expanding vocabulary of human neurological difference. I'm barely able to understand my own experience. But I have forty years of evidence: poems, books, photographs, strange little observations about human behavior, publishing projects, collaborations and walks through Rockford. There is a book called Submerged Structure. There is even an old poem called “Away Message,” in which I imagined myself in geosynchronous orbit around a lost moon of Jupiter—present, but very far away.

Maybe that's what my work has been doing all this time: sending messages from wherever I am. I don't know whether someone younger, newly diagnosed or simply struggling to understand why the world seems to operate according to rules everyone else received in advance will find anything useful in those messages. I hope so. I can't give them a map, but after forty years of wandering around out here, I can leave a few signs.

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Hike You!: The Office Chair on Broadway

There are certain streets in Rockford you only really get to know by walking them.

Broadway is one of those streets. It isn’t part of every walk we take, but when we stretch things out and make a longer circuit through the city, Broadway often becomes part of the route. Walking it is different from driving it. At thirty miles an hour, storefronts become scenery. On foot, individual windows begin to announce themselves.

One of those windows belonged to the old Zant Office Equipment building.

Inside was a unique office chair.

Not an especially dramatic discovery. Not a monument, historic building, mural, or spectacular piece of architecture. Just an unusual chair sitting behind glass in a former office-equipment store. But after passing it enough times, the chair began to seem less like inventory and more like a survivor from another era.

That is essentially how Hike You! works.

The project grew out of six years of walking Rockford and paying attention to things that would ordinarily be passed without a second thought. Ryan Davis photographs what we encounter. I write haiku from those encounters. Sometimes the subject is beautiful in the conventional sense. Sometimes it is strange, neglected, funny, accidental, or so ordinary that noticing it at all becomes the point.

The chair in the Zant window had a particularly strong personality.

Something about it immediately suggested the American office of the 1980s: fluorescent lights, beige walls, wood-grain desks, metal filing cabinets, shoulder pads, coffee that had been sitting on a burner since 7:15 in the morning. It seemed to belong to a world of interoffice memos, Rolodexes, landlines, carbon copies, and people being summoned into somebody’s office.

And once that atmosphere appeared, the haiku followed.

The typography became part of the joke. Rather than treating the poem as something floating serenely over the photograph, the lettering participates in the period. The font belongs to the same imagined office world as the chair. Image, poem, and design all lean toward the same slightly absurd memory of corporate America.

That combination is important to Hike You!. These pieces aren’t intended simply as photographs with poems printed on them. The photograph provides one way of seeing the object. The haiku provides another. Sometimes the design itself becomes a third voice.

And then, occasionally, the city adds another layer long after the walk is over.

The Zant name has recently wandered back into my life in an entirely different context. I’m currently collaborating with Michael Zant, a member of the Zant family, on a salvaged-metal opossum sculpture for another Fall ArtScene exhibition at the Rockford Public Library. Michael constructs animals from discarded and reclaimed metal; I’m contributing the accompanying haiku.

There was no grand plan connecting these things.

Years ago, we walked down Broadway. We noticed a strange office chair in the window of Zant Office Equipment. Ryan photographed it. I wrote a haiku. It became one of the pieces in Hike You!

Now I’m working with a Zant on an opossum made out of salvaged metal.

That is Rockford.

Walk around it long enough and the city begins folding back on itself. A name on an old storefront becomes a person you work with years later. An obsolete office chair becomes art. Scrap metal becomes an animal. A street you have traveled hundreds of times produces something you had never noticed before.

None of this requires going very far.

It only requires going slowly enough to see it.

Hike You!
Thomas L. Vaultonburg + Ryan Davis
Fall ArtScene 2026
Rockford, Illinois

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