My Absolutely True Alice's Restaurant Story

I grew up with Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Massacree." I knew the song. I knew the movie. I knew about Alice and Ray living in the old church and Arlo getting himself into trouble because of a large quantity of garbage.

This becomes relevant.

I met Jenny at Castaways, a dive bar in Rockford that my brother and I owned. She came in with a group of women who were organizing the Rockford Rage Roller Derby, and I believe she was something like the fifth woman to join the league. Castaways became their unofficial headquarters for a while, and Jenny was one of the people who started turning up regularly.

I didn't know it then, but our orbits were on a collision course for the next fourteen years.

After Castaways closed its doors, I was between lives. Jenny had done some posters for the Rage, and I remembered liking them, so one day I contacted her on MySpace.

This was when contacting someone on MySpace was a perfectly reasonable thing for an adult to do.

I told her I was working on a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z and asked if she might be interested in illustrating it. "Working on" is probably generous. I had an idea for a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z, which is not exactly the same thing as having a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z.

Less than a week later, Jenny sent me an illustration for the first poem.

"A is for Asparagus."

It was perfect.

This presented me with an immediate problem because now I actually had to write the book.

So I did.

Jenny and I began spending more time together, and eventually I learned that she and her husband Dan lived in an old Lutheran church in Pecatonica, Illinois.

The first time I walked into the place, I knew immediately that I had entered Alice's Restaurant.

Not metaphorically. I mean there was the church.

It still had its stained-glass windows. It still had a stage at the front where sermons, performances, announcements and whatever else Lutheran congregations do from stages had once emanated. The building was enormous, but Jenny and Dan essentially lived in only two areas of it. Most of the rest of the building was still just this cavernous old church surrounding the relatively small portion where two people were actually conducting their lives.

And I had seen this movie.

I knew where this kind of thing could lead.

At first the similarities were amusing. Arlo had Alice and Ray living in a church. I had Jenny and Dan living in a church. There were artists and unconventional people involved. There was a general feeling that ordinary residential architecture had somehow been rejected as insufficient for the situation.

Then I learned another little detail.

Arlo Guthrie and Alice Brock had written a children's book together, Mooses Come Walking.

Jenny and I were writing a children's book together.

Now, I am willing to tolerate a certain amount of coincidence from the universe. You have to. Otherwise you start becoming the kind of person who finds messages intended specifically for you in the license plates of passing automobiles.

So I let that one go.

Eventually Jenny invited me over to mow the lawn.

This is one of those sentences that doesn't sound particularly important when you say it, but in retrospect there aren't that many people in your life whose lawn you begin mowing at an abandoned Lutheran church.

Shortly after Jenny and I had become very close, Dan, who had been the city manager of Pecatonica, got a job in the oil industry in Houston. They were moving to Texas, and they were moving fast.

So fast, in fact, that they hired me to clean out the church.

This is where anyone familiar with "Alice's Restaurant" should begin experiencing some concern on my behalf.

There was a lot of stuff in that church.

Some of it had apparently been sitting in the basement for decades. There were books. There was paperwork. There was glassware. There were assorted objects whose usefulness had expired so long ago that nobody was quite sure what their usefulness had originally been. Much of it was already moldy and unpleasant before I ever touched it.

I hauled it out.

And hauled it out.

And hauled it out.

Eventually I had everything that needed to go outside, bagged and ready for the city to collect.

Jenny and Dan were headed for Houston. The church was cleaned out. My work was finished.

Except it wasn't.

Because a thunderstorm came through.

The rain soaked the garbage.

Now, garbage that has been sitting in the basement of an old Lutheran church for several decades is not improved by the addition of water. Nobody has ever opened a bag containing moldy paperwork, old books and miscellaneous church debris, poured several gallons of rainwater into it and said, "There. Much better."

The city of Pecatonica took one look at the situation and declined to take the garbage.

It would have to be rebagged.

And this was the moment when the universe stopped being subtle.

I had grown up listening to "Alice's Restaurant." I knew exactly what happened when Arlo Guthrie had to get rid of the garbage from Alice's church. I had been aware of the parallels from the first time I walked into Jenny's church.

But up until this point, they had been cute.

Now I was being sent back to a church to deal with a municipal garbage problem.

There are billions of people on Earth. Most of them will live their entire lives without having this experience.

I drove back to Pecatonica.

I bought industrial garbage bags.

And I spent about half a day taking decades worth of rain-soaked, moldy Lutheran garbage and putting it into new bags so the city would agree to haul it away.

No police officers arrived.

I was not arrested.

There were no aerial photographs.

There were no twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows.

Nobody asked me whether I had rehabilitated myself.

I just rebagged the garbage.

Eventually the city took it away.

As far as I know, this leaves Arlo Guthrie and me as two of the very few people in American history who have found themselves involved in a complicated garbage-disposal situation arising from an old church occupied by unconventional people, with the added coincidence that both situations somehow involved children's books.

Arlo got a song and a movie out of his.

I got Atrocious Poems A to Z.

Jenny spent the next two years in Houston. When she returned, we began our life together. So unlike the movie, this wasn't the end of anything. It was the beginning.

But before any of that could happen, the garbage had to be picked up.

And apparently, if you live in an old church, there's only one kind of person you should call when that happens.

Arlo Guthrie wasn't available. 

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Vanished Roads By Thomas L. Vaultonburg Definitive Bibliography

 

Vanished Roads: The Haiku of Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Vanished Roads is a collection of 104 haiku and short poems by Thomas L. Vaultonburg, published in 2026 by Wolf Twin Books, with cover and interior illustrations by Tré.

Written across several years, the poems move through woods, prairies, abandoned roads, small towns, grief, solitude, humor, aging, memory, and renewal. Animals wander freely through the collection—coyotes, deer, bees, wasps, dragonflies, and snakes—but the landscape of Vanished Roads is as much interior as physical. The natural world continually intersects with human experience until the distinction between the two begins to disappear.

Loss is present throughout the book, but Vanished Roads is ultimately less interested in mourning what has disappeared than in discovering what remains. A bee trapped against a window, wind passing through bamboo, an empty chapel, snow covering a trail, or a bucket reflecting the night sky can become an occasion for revelation.

The poems range from traditional haiku to senryu and extremely compressed lyric poetry. Some contain seventeen syllables. Some contain only four words. Rather than treating haiku as a rigid syllabic exercise, Vanished Roads approaches it as a way of paying attention: reducing a moment until only the essential image, movement, humor, or emotional residue remains.

Each poem occupies its own page, giving even the smallest poem room to breathe. Tré's sparse black-and-white illustrations appear throughout the book, extending the quiet, strange, and sometimes playful world of the poems without overwhelming them.

Since its publication, Vanished Roads has received five reviews and responses remarkable not only for their enthusiasm, but for the different aspects of the collection each reader discovered.

What Reviewers Have Said About Vanished Roads

Conrad Sienkiewicz

“What Vaultonburg can do with merely four words is impressive and enviable!”

“Vaultonburg's best efforts can comfortably rest alongside those of other haiku masters, such as Basho and Issa.”

Magedah Shabo

“In Vanished Roads, loss and grief are less like endings and more like thresholds to discovery.”

“Reading Vanished Roads has left me with the sense that there is still more to discover and say ‘yes’ to, both in haiku and in the world around us.”

Mark Tate

“Vaultonburg has masterful touch as well, readers will admire his succinct whisperings.”

“He not only sees, he inhabits the object along his journey.”

Melanie Medved

“This is truly some of the most recent memorable poetry I’ve experienced in years.”

“40 years and thousands of poems later, it’s hard to recapture the joy that I felt in that classroom of my first favorite poem, and yet, Thomas Vaultonburg has handed me that joy again with Vanished Roads.”

Sean Wright

“Vanished Roads is an immensely satisfying collection that rewards both casual reading and close study.”

“In an era when so much short-form poetry can feel interchangeable, Vanished Roads possesses something rarer: a coherent artistic personality.”

“Highly recommended.”

Selected Haiku from Vanished Roads

say yes
to the sunlight
when it finds you

cracked birdbath—
the sparrows drinking
from several skies

fallen oak—
more places now
for mushrooms

abandoned glove—
a field mouse
renting the thumb

bucket of stars—
someone left it
under the moon

About the Book

Vanished Roads contains 104 haiku and short poems by Thomas L. Vaultonburg, with cover and interior illustrations by Tré. Published by Wolf Twin Books in 2026, the collection explores nature, solitude, grief, humor, memory, and the unexpected ways the world continues after loss.

Title: Vanished Roads
Author: Thomas L. Vaultonburg
Illustrations: Tré
Publisher: Wolf Twin Books
Publication year: 2026
Format: Paperback
Price: $15

Vanished Roads is available directly from Wolf Twin Books.

Buy Vanished Roads from Wolf Twin Books

More information about Thomas L. Vaultonburg, his books, poetry, publications, and other work is available at his author website.

Library of Congress 

Goodreads

Google Books

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Season One of Elvira's Movie Macabre

On September 26, 1981, Elvira's Movie Macabre aired for the first time on KHJ-TV in Los Angeles. The debut movie, Grave of the Vampire, might be seen as an odd choice in retrospect in that it was legitimately gory and violent, whereas many of the subsequent episode feature more tame, even campy or schlocky films with far more humor and much less violence.

Movie Macabre replaced the popular Fright Night that had been hosted by Larry Vincent, who had died six years earlier. The show was an immediate smash, resulting in a lawsuit by Maila Nurmi, who had hosted a similar show in the 1950's as the character Vampira. Although Vampira had originally been tapped to consult for the revival, she bailed out when her choice to succeed her, Lola Falana, was not hired. Cassandra Peterson was instead cast out of a cattle call of 200 applicants, and when chosen quickly began to work on her Elvira character, portraying her as a smart-alecky valley girl type who was generous with her jokes and her cleavage.

Season one of Movie Macabre spanned 46 episodes, featuring such movies as Deathdream, The Brotherhood of Satan, The Baby, Blacula, and The Devil's Rain. The series ended after 140 episodes in 1986, ending in a bang with Nightmare City. Movie Macabre originally aired on KHJ-TV channel 9 Los Angeles 8-10 PM Saturday and was rebroadcast 4-6 PM Sunday.

By 1985 Elvira, Mistress of the dark was a household name, and marketing force, appearing everywhere from Coors Light commercials, Wrestlemania 2, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and during the week of Halloween was virtually ubiquitous, appearing nightly at Knot's Berry Farm. Thriller Video decided to capitalize on the popularity of Elvira by releasing 24 title hosted by Elvira. These were movies not shown on Movie Macabre, and included The Monster Club, The Silent Scream, Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, and Alabama's Ghost. Many of the tapes had been fifty minute episodes of Hammer's House of Horror series, often with some deleted material not seen by the British audience.

The cancellation of Movie Macabre did nothing to hurt the popularity of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, as she has released two movies, a series of records, and Movie Macabre was revived in syndication and ran 26 public domain films in 2010-2011.

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Like the Space Age, the Zombie Apocalypse Is Far Behind Us

Like the Space Age, the Zombie Apocalypse happened long ago. It happened long before we ever started talking about it. It ended in a total rout of humanity. Long ago. You still see a few human beings walking around with confused looks on their faces, but sightings are becoming few and far between.

Working on the Humanity Abatement program was one of the more satisfying challenges of my life. I call it a challenge less because the objective was so entirely easy to achieve than the fact that the greatest resistance came from a surprising source. There were those who had been quietly feeding on humanity for several millennia and certainly didn't want to see their prize power source slowly drained of their life energy.

Vampires, demons, gods, governments, corporations, religions—call them whatever names make you comfortable. They had all made the same fundamental mistake. They believed human beings were valuable.

We knew better.

The problem with humanity had never been its evil. Evil is efficient. Evil gets up in the morning with a plan. Humanity's problem was the enormous amount of useless psychic debris generated by several billion creatures simultaneously believing their opinions mattered.

Once we understood this, the solution became obvious.

We didn't have to kill humanity.

We simply had to convince it to express itself.

The Internet accomplished in twenty years what plague, famine, warfare, organized religion and network television had failed to accomplish in thousands. Humanity voluntarily converted the remaining substance of its inner life into photographs of lunch, arguments with strangers, inspirational quotations and opinions about motion pictures featuring superheroes.

The old parasites panicked.

There was nothing left to feed on.

This is why you don't see many vampires anymore.

Zombies, naturally, were perfectly adapted to the new environment. We require almost nothing. A little electricity. Occasional bandwidth. Something resembling a brain every few weeks.

And patience.

Mostly patience.

There are still rumors of surviving humans somewhere beyond the shopping districts. People claim they've seen them reading books without photographing the covers. Sitting silently beside rivers. Looking at the moon without informing anyone.

I don't believe these stories.

But I have instructed the Department of Humanity Abatement to investigate.

There can be no exceptions.

The universe has spent fourteen billion years trying to achieve silence.

We are not about to let a few poets screw it up now.

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The Volume Library 1976

The Volume Library 1976

Sometime in the 1970s, my mother bought a copy of The Volume Library from a door-to-door salesman.

For nearly the next decade, that enormous book was one of my primary sources of information. Long before I could type a question into a computer and have an answer appear in seconds, if I needed to know something for school, I went to The Volume Library.

I used it for book reports. I used it for homework. I used it simply because I wanted to know things.

What I remember most clearly was its wonderful material on mythology and literature. I returned to those sections over and over again. Greek and Roman mythology, writers, stories, characters, history—the book provided a map of a world that seemed almost impossibly large to me then.

I didn't realize it at the time, of course, but much of what I learned from those pages became permanent. That old reference book still comprises part of the backbone of what I know about mythology and literature.

There is something difficult to explain now about growing up with a book like that in the house. Information had a physical location. If you wanted to know about mythology, you didn't search for mythology. You went to the shelf. You pulled down the enormous book. You found the section. And then, inevitably, while looking for the thing you wanted, you found three other things you hadn't known you wanted to know.

Years passed, and the copy we had in our house disappeared somewhere along the way.

Eventually I went looking for it again.

I found a copy on eBay—not the actual book from my childhood, but the same edition, The Volume Library from 1976. I bought it.

It's on my bookshelf now.

I suppose that's one advantage of getting older. Every once in a while, you get the chance to buy back a small piece of the world that made you.

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Say Yes To The Sunlight When It Finds You

Sometimes the sun just finds you. Sometimes you need go on a journey to get to the place where the sun finds you. Either way, say yes to the sunlight when it finds you. 

Say Yes to the Sunlight When It Finds You, acrylic painting by Thomas L. Vaultonburg, 2026. Based on an illustration by Tré from the haiku collection Vanished Roads.

My sunlight

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Prairie Zen and the World That Doesn't Need Fixing

Prairie Zen is not really interested in escape.

There is no requirement to leave the city, climb a mountain, enter a monastery, or discover some landscape human beings haven't already complicated. Prairie Zen starts wherever you happen to be: beside a road, behind an abandoned building, at the edge of an orchard, looking into a cracked birdbath.

What matters is the quality of attention brought to the place.

Much of modern life teaches us to look at the world and immediately ask what should be done with it. Land should be developed. Buildings should be occupied. Broken things should be replaced. Weeds should be removed. Problems should be solved. Even nature becomes something to manage, improve, photograph, preserve, monetize, or explain.

Prairie Zen asks a quieter question:

What if, for a moment, we didn't fix anything?

These five haiku all encounter worlds that are damaged, abandoned, imperfect, or simply beyond our control. None asks the world to become something else.

1.

cracked birdbath—
the sparrows drinking
from several skies

Illustration by Tré from Vanished Roads by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

 

The birdbath is broken. That is the human assessment of the situation.

The sparrows apparently weren't consulted.

The cracks divide the reflected sky into fragments, transforming a defect into multiplicity: not one sky, but several. Nothing about the birdbath has actually been repaired. The poem simply changes what we're capable of seeing.

That's central to Prairie Zen. Acceptance isn't pretending that broken things aren't broken. It is refusing to believe brokenness exhausts their possibilities.

The sparrows still get their water.

And somehow they get several skies with it.

2.

fallen oak—
more places now
for mushrooms

 

Again, the first line appears to announce a loss.

A mature oak has fallen. From the human perspective—and perhaps even from the perspective of someone who loved that particular tree—something important has ended.

But ecosystems don't organize themselves around our preference for keeping things as they are.

The fallen tree becomes habitat. Fungi arrive. Insects arrive. Nutrients return to the soil. Death doesn't disappear from the poem, but neither does life wait politely for our mourning to conclude.

Prairie Zen doesn't offer the comforting cliché that everything happens for a reason.

It suggests something stranger and more observable:

everything that happens becomes part of what happens next.

3.

abandoned glove—
a field mouse
renting the thumb

 

This is the Prairie Zen economy.

Someone lost a glove. Its original purpose is over. To us it has become litter.

The mouse discovers available housing.

The humor matters because Prairie Zen isn't supposed to turn every encounter with nature into a solemn spiritual ceremony. Sometimes paying attention produces wisdom. Sometimes it produces a mouse living in somebody's glove.

The larger idea is still there: usefulness depends upon who's looking.

Human beings declared the glove useless.

The mouse filed different paperwork.

4.

soybean field—
the cellar hole
full of goldenrod

This is a particularly Midwestern kind of archaeology.

A cellar hole means there was once a house. Someone lived there. There were probably meals, arguments, winters, birthdays, repairs, bills, illnesses, mornings when somebody looked out the window and saw essentially the same land.

The house is gone.

Agriculture has absorbed the surrounding landscape, but the old foundation remains—and goldenrod has moved in.

Prairie Zen is deeply interested in places where different kinds of time overlap. Human history says: someone lived here.

The goldenrod says nothing.

It grows.

Neither cancels the other.

5.

field mowing—
the tractor
going around something

This may be the quietest poem of the five.

We aren't told what the tractor avoids.

A nest? A stone? Wildflowers? A fawn? A wet patch? Something the farmer remembers? Something we're not capable of guessing?

The absence of an explanation is the point.

For a moment, efficiency yields.

The straight line bends around something.

Prairie Zen lives in that bend.

It doesn't demand that human beings disappear from the landscape. The tractor belongs here too. So does agriculture. So does work. The interesting moment occurs when the person operating the machine recognizes that something else has a claim on the field.

We never learn what that something is.

We only see the accommodation.

Going Around Something

That final image may provide a useful way of understanding Prairie Zen itself.

We spend enormous portions of our lives trying to make the world travel in straight lines. We plan. Categorize. Improve. Remove obstacles. Repair cracks. Replace broken objects. Clear fields. Fill holes. Decide which things are useful and which things should be thrown away.

And the world keeps refusing to cooperate.

Oak trees fall.

Gloves disappear.

Houses vanish.

Birdbaths crack.

Something is in the field.

Prairie Zen isn't resignation. It isn't passivity, and it isn't an instruction to stop caring about what happens.

It's an acknowledgment that we are participants in a world containing innumerable other participants, most of whom have never heard our plans.

Sometimes wisdom is fixing what is broken.

Sometimes it's recognizing that the sparrows are already drinking from it.

And sometimes it's simply going around something.

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