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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The Most Dada Art Exhibit Ever: The Time I Wrote About Dog Shit on the Walls of the Rockford Art Museum

In 2017 I spent two days writing children's poems by hand on the walls of the Rockford Art Museum. All twenty-six of them.

I had a large box of expensive art markers supplied by the museum, and I tried to choose a color for each poem that worked visually with the illustration beside it. Sometimes this involved careful consideration of color, balance, and the relationship between text and image. Sometimes the decision was easier. “D is for Dog Poop” was written in brown. “U is for Urination” was written in yellow.

Nobody threw me out. I had permission.

In fact, this was part of Bittersweet Observations, a perfectly legitimate exhibition at a respected American art museum. There were framed illustrations by Jenny Mathews, other artists exhibiting serious work, museum staff, visitors, children, programming, a curator, and all the usual machinery of an actual museum exhibition. And right in the middle of it was a grown man writing about dog shit on the wall in brown marker.

I thought it was one of the great Dada art moments of all time. I still do.

The Dadaists Had It Easier

The Dadaists announced they were doing Dada. That's cheating.

If you walk into an exhibition that announces itself as Dada, you are prepared for Dada. Someone can put a urinal in the gallery and everyone strokes their chin because Marcel Duchamp has already explained the rules. I had a better opportunity. I could sneak Dada into a straight art exhibition. For kids.

I didn't set out to mock the museum or the people involved. I genuinely admired the Dada and Surrealist traditions, and I realized there was an opportunity here to combine two things that, as far as I knew, had not often been combined: children's literature and Dada.

The idea of writing the poems directly onto the museum walls was mine from beginning to end. I realized that if I could get them to say yes, the gates were open. They said yes. I'm not entirely convinced they thought through the implications.

I had.

The Monster Dictionary

The story actually began almost forty years earlier at Mary Morgan Grade School in Byron, Illinois, where in fifth grade we were assigned to write and illustrate a children's book. One might assume that a future poet and publisher would have attacked this assignment with enthusiasm. One would be wrong.

I procrastinated until two days before the deadline. At that point, having few interests that didn't involve baseball or monster movies, I decided an alphabet book would be the easiest possible solution. Twenty-six letters. Fill in the blanks. Draw some pictures. Turn it in. I called it The Monster Dictionary.

My teacher gave me a B and wrote:

“Not colored. Excellent ideas! if you would have put more effort into this project; the school could have sent this idea on to the Library of Congress.”

 

I found someone to color it. 

I later preserved her questionable semicolon for historical authenticity.

That note bothered me for decades. Not enough to become industrious, necessarily, but enough that the unfinished business remained.

Around age forty I was the general manager of Castaways, a dive bar underneath a bridge on the Rock River in Rockford. Among the people I met there was Jenny Mathews, one of the early members of the Rockford Rage Roller Derby. I asked Jenny if she'd be interested in illustrating a children's alphabet book about all the things kids hate. The working title was Atrocities From A to Z.

She said yes. I sent her the first poem, and she sent back an illustration. It was perfect.

Then she moved to Texas. We made another children's book long-distance while Atrocities went onto the back burner. Jenny eventually came back from Texas, we became a couple, and a scant eight years later the book was finished.

By then it was called Atrocious Poems A to Z. The finished book was written by me, illustrated by Jenny Mathews, published by Zombie Logic Press, and printed in Michigan by Edwards Brothers Malloy. It was a real children's book, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.

Things Kids Love to Hate

The premise was simple: children experience atrocities every day. Adults don't recognize most of them as atrocities because we've forgotten what it feels like to be a child. Vegetables, haircuts, inoculations, bullies, sharing, liver, monsters, having siblings, stepping in dog poop, needing to pee at an inconvenient time. These things are ordinary to adults. To children they can temporarily assume the proportions of Greek tragedy.

That was the joke, but we took the premise seriously. The poems were intended to give children and adults a funny way into conversations about anxiety, bullying, sharing, fear, embarrassment, and the various indignities involved in being small and having larger people control much of your existence. I also worked lessons about poetry into the book: haiku, limerick, rhetorical questions, visual poetry, personification, oxymoron, portmanteau, and other literary forms and devices.

It was silly. It wasn't unserious. That distinction matters.

Twenty-Six Poems and One Very Cold Museum

Installing the exhibition was considerably less whimsical than looking at the finished wall might suggest. It was around 100 degrees outside. Inside the museum it was cold. Museums have to maintain conditions suitable for preserving artwork, which does not necessarily mean conditions suitable for a middle-aged poet spending two days handwriting an entire book vertically on a wall.

I had badly underestimated how long it would take. All twenty-six poems had to be written by hand beside Jenny's illustrations. My hands and arms became exhausted. I did yoga on the museum floor to keep myself loose enough to continue.

Meanwhile, people were working around me because the total installation involved creating a small forest inside the museum. I would periodically stop writing and help with other parts of the installation, partly because they needed help and partly because my body needed a break from writing on the wall.

I knew the exhibition would remain up for approximately three months. Potentially tens of thousands of people were going to walk past these words, which adds a certain pressure to penmanship. But living with a visual artist had taught me one of the great truths of art: anything can be painted over.

I believe I did make a mistake somewhere and part of the wall had to be repainted so I could do it again. I no longer remember which letter or what I screwed up. Nothing is permanent. Especially in a museum.

Brown

The museum held art classes, so there was an impressive assortment of markers available. I didn't simply alternate colors mechanically. I tried to look at Jenny's illustration, consider the neighboring pieces, stand back from the wall, and choose something that made the installation work visually as a whole.

Some choices were intuitive. Some were literal. “O is for Orange” presented few conceptual difficulties. Neither did Dog Poop. Brown. Urination? Yellow.

There was no manifesto explaining this. No wall text announced that the use of brown interrogated bourgeois assumptions regarding canine waste. I picked brown because dog poop is brown. I picked yellow because pee is yellow. Then I continued working.

This, to me, is the crucial difference between what happened at Bittersweet Observations and a deliberately advertised Dada exhibition.

Nobody had been warned.

The Kids Got It

The children seemed to understand the work immediately. Of course they did. They didn't require anyone to explain the premise that stepping in dog poop could constitute a catastrophe. They were still close enough to childhood for the scale of these events to make intuitive sense.

Some older visitors seemed to need permission. You could almost see the process occurring: Am I supposed to take this seriously? Is this allowed in an art museum?

Yes and no. That was part of the fun.

These were trivial things and these were enormous things. Both propositions could be true at the same time. Children already knew that.

Atrocious Poems A To Z by Vaultonburg and Matthews from Zombie Logic Press

Please Don't List Me

There is another strange part of the story. I asked not to be listed as one of the exhibiting artists.

This wasn't a conceptual gesture. I wasn't making some grand statement about authorship or institutional recognition. I was tired. At that point Jenny and I seemed to be doing three, four, sometimes five public events a week. We were in shows constantly. We were everywhere. I had reached the limit of how much public exposure I wanted. I couldn't find enough corners to hide in.

By the time Bittersweet Observations came around, I wanted to do the work and be left out of the rest. So I asked to be left off the artist listing.

In retrospect, this was a mistake. How many times in your life does a respected American museum invite you to write juvenile thoughts directly onto its walls?

My bad.

The absurdity becomes more apparent in photographs from the exhibition. There I am standing beneath an enormous version of my name mounted over the installation. So I managed the nearly impossible feat of having my name displayed prominently across an entire museum wall while simultaneously not being officially listed as one of the artists.

A photo of Thomas L. Vaultonburg (duh)me in front of the wall with my 26 handwritten poems at the Bittersweet Observations Show at Rockford Art Museum 2017. Photo by Ryan Davis. 

Dada could hardly have improved upon this.

I Thought I'd Gotten Away With Something

When I finished the installation, I knew exactly what I thought I'd accomplished. I thought I'd gotten one over on them.

Nearly forty years earlier, my fifth-grade teacher had looked at The Monster Dictionary and told me that if I'd put more effort into it, the school might have sent the idea to the Library of Congress. Now I had taken the descendant of that lazy fifth-grade alphabet book and written the whole thing on the walls of a respected American museum.

I thought that was magnificent. I still think it's pretty good.

But at 57, I see something else. I was so interested in completing my private argument that I didn't fully recognize the public opportunity I'd been given. That was a recurring problem for me. I wasn't failing to make things. I was making things constantly: books, poems, publishing projects, collaborations, blogs, fictional leagues, and private worlds.

What I often neglected was making sure there would be a durable public record that I had made them. I had confused being seen with seeking attention.

They're not the same thing.

Not Colored

There is one detail from my fifth-grade teacher's note that seems considerably funnier now than it did in 1979.

“Not colored.”

That was one of her complaints.

Nearly forty years later I stood inside the Rockford Art Museum with a box full of expensive colored art markers and spent two days correcting the deficiency. I colored it. Dog poop was brown. Urination was yellow. The other twenty-four required varying degrees of aesthetic judgment.

Eventually Bittersweet Observations ended. The exhibition came down. I'm sure the museum was delighted to paint over my poems. Another exhibition went up. I believe it involved motorcycles. I wasn't bothered. I've never had many illusions about permanence in my work. Museums change exhibitions. Walls get painted. One thing disappears so another can occupy the space.

Of course I went to the next show. I was required to be everywhere.

What survives now are photographs, the book, old blog posts, museum records, and memories. One of my contemporary posts about Atrocious Poems A to Z spends considerable time telling the story of my fifth-grade teacher, Jenny, the eight years we worked on the book, the Library of Congress, and the purpose of the poems.

Then, at the very end, I added an update:

“Oh, here's the part I forgot to say: my book ended up on the walls of a major American museum.”

I forgot to mention the museum.

That tells you almost everything you need to know about me at the time.

The Most Dada Art Exhibit Ever

So here is the part I don't intend to forget this time.

In 2017, as part of Bittersweet Observations at the Rockford Art Museum, I spent two days handwriting all twenty-six poems from Atrocious Poems A to Z directly onto the museum walls beside illustrations by Jenny Mathews. It hurt. I did yoga on the museum floor. I made at least one mistake and had to do part of it over. Children understood what we were doing better than some adults did.

I wrote a poem about dog shit in brown marker and a poem about urination in yellow marker. My enormous name appeared above the installation, spelled incorrectly, while I had specifically requested that I not be listed as an exhibiting artist.

I thought I had successfully smuggled Dada into a respectable museum disguised as children's literature.

Maybe I had.

But here's the part my fifth-grade teacher would appreciate. She told me the problem with my first book was that I hadn't put enough effort into it. She told me it wasn't colored.

Nearly forty years later, I spent two exhausting days writing the whole damn thing again on the walls of an American art museum.

In color.

There, Mrs. Liggett. I finished it.

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Tea With the Tigress: Ten Years Inside the Strange Machinery of a Life

I don't think Tea With the Tigress is primarily a book of love poems, although love is everywhere in it.

I don't think it's primarily a book about sex, although there is plenty of that too.

And despite the number of poems involving death, loneliness, aging, memory, physical vulnerability, poetry, absurdity, wolves, celestial bodies, Richard Brautigan, used clothing, zombies, alcohol, buses and people behaving badly, it isn't really a book about any of those things either.

I think Tea With the Tigress is a book about being returned to the world.

That is much easier for me to see now than it was when the book appeared in 2023.

The subtitle is Poems 2010–2020, which makes the collection something of an accidental autobiography. The poems weren't written to document a decade. They accumulated while a decade was happening. When gathered together, however, they preserve something a deliberately written memoir probably couldn't: the strange proportions by which a life is actually experienced.

Huge things sometimes occupy three lines.

A ridiculous thing can occupy a page.

Sex becomes astrophysics. A trip becomes a joke. A flower becomes an existential event. The human heart becomes machinery. An answering machine becomes an excuse to make jokes about dead composers.

And somehow all of it belongs together.

The opening poem, "Tigress," contains the proposition upon which much of the book operates:

when a wise man meets
Tigress in the jungle, he
says, thank you, my love

It is funny, but it isn't merely funny. The tiger isn't defeated. The tiger isn't domesticated. The supposedly wise man recognizes what has arrived and gives thanks for it.

That's a pretty good introduction to the next eighty pages.

The World Comes Back

Reading the old Zombie Logic Blog alongside these poems makes the decade feel much less abstract.

There I am watching horror movies at ridiculous hours. Collecting Monster Club artifacts. Playing old computer RPGs. Writing about Hot Wheels, Queen albums, Hamm's beer signs, pennies, fantasy football, poetry feuds, Richard Brautigan, bad jokes and things I found on my hard drive. I invent Dr. Millard Rausch's post-zombie-apocalypse biography. I create imaginary Outsider Poetry organizations. I remember motel rooms. I make jokes about Presidential Physical Fitness Awards.

And I keep writing poems.

It would be easy to dismiss all of that as clutter. I don't anymore.

It's the material of the life.

One of the smallest poems in Tea With the Tigress is "Avocation":

since you never
had time
to behold
this particular
downspout
I went ahead
and did it
for you.

That little poem may explain a surprisingly large portion of my work.

Someone has to look at the downspout.

Someone has to remember the forgotten movie, the weird sign, the motel, the bus station, the ridiculous conversation, the object nobody else thought worth saving. Someone has to look at all the supposedly insignificant things while everyone else is busy looking at the significant ones.

That was what Zombie Logic Blog was doing during these years, too.

And apparently so was I.

Jenny Enters the Poems

But there is another enormous presence in Tea With the Tigress: Jenny.

Not simply Jenny as subject, but Jenny as an alternative way of encountering the world.

One of my favorite examples now is "May." The speaker is in his laboratory "pissing away April" while she is in her studio preparing the colors of the coming month. He wants to interrupt her but fears that doing so will cause "Garbageman Green / Peonies" and "Poopsicle Lilies" to erupt from him.

Having recently revisited the old Zombie Logic posts, that poem suddenly looks almost documentary.

Again and again in those entries, I wander into a room and Jenny has made something.

Sometimes I understand it.

Sometimes I don't.

Sometimes it takes me four paintings to figure out what she's doing.

The domestic world of these poems isn't presented as retreat from the larger world. It is where the larger world keeps appearing. Tea, paintings, dresses, desks, flowers, food, bodies and jokes continually open trapdoors into something enormous.

"Waiting" may be the clearest early statement of it. Love is compared first to an apple harvested too early, then startlingly to a heart awaiting a surgeon's scalpel, and finally to tea being prepared for afternoons of conversation at a shared desk. The poem ends with two people occupying the same room separately, waiting for their love "to steep."

That double desk may be one of the most important locations in the book.

Not Paris.

Not Greenwich Village.

Not some mythical poet's garret.

A double desk.

Two people making things.

The Body Becomes Strange

The body in Tea With the Tigress is never entirely dependable.

Sometimes it is erotic. Sometimes comic. Sometimes cosmic. Sometimes it is essentially a machine whose warranty has become questionable.

In "What Makes Me Tick," the speaker's mechanical aortic valve becomes something simultaneously industrial and alive:

My St. Jude 27 vavgj-515
Mechanical aortic valve
Thuds like a war bird's wings
In a hummingbird feeder.

That's one of the central transformations of the collection.

The machinery doesn't destroy the poetry.

It becomes poetry.

Later, in "Changing Lanes On an Empty Highway At 3:22 A.M.," the speaker takes inventory of medications, operations, age and diminishing speed, then cautiously moves into the passing lane anyway. He knows something "younger, faster, / More capable" will eventually overtake him.

But for a moment he accelerates.

That strikes me now as one of the key poems in the collection.

There is no grand declaration of triumph.

The car changes lanes.

That's enough.

And Then There Is Sex

There is a lot of sex in this book.

Some of it is tender. Some is ridiculous. Some becomes astronomy, geography, classical music, wine criticism or military history because apparently simply describing sex would have been too straightforward.

"The Yellow River" turns a drunken navigational error in bed into a disastrous military incursion and concludes, perfectly, "War is hell."

"Sunday" sets up an elaborate sexual encounter before revealing in its final joke that the activity under discussion is apparently doing the taxes.

"Astrophysics" calculates a kiss along the Y axis of a shoulder as though intimacy were celestial navigation.

This is important because the erotic poems aren't really interruptions of the more serious material.

They are the same material.

The body that can break is also the body that desires.

The body that ages still reaches for another body.

The body that contains machinery still wants to dance.

Mortality doesn't negate appetite in this book. Mortality makes appetite urgent.

The Poet as Fool

There is also an argument about poetry running through Tea With the Tigress, and the poet generally loses it.

Good.

"The Old Hermit Speaks of Poetry" imagines poems escaping like ducks from a broken pen. Instead of chasing them, the old poet drinks his wine and wanders into the hills, only to discover that the poems have been waiting there all along—in rocks, trees and a brook laughing at the fool searching for them.

"Discourses In Poetics" takes the solemn master-and-acolyte tradition and slowly dismantles it until the Master is apparently attempting to access someone's bank account.

That's closer to my conception of poetry than any manifesto I could write.

Poetry matters tremendously.

Poets should therefore probably not be trusted with it.

The dedication page establishes the governing philosophy before the collection properly begins, quoting my middle-school principal Joe Parks: "Mr. Vaultonburg, you amuse only yourself."

Forty years later, that seems less like criticism than permission.

The Old World Is Still There

The book isn't entirely domestic renewal and comic eroticism.

Older ghosts keep wandering through it.

"Playing the Short Stack," which we've just encountered again while rehabilitating the Zombie Logic archive, reduces an entire losing position to a poker table where the speaker can't formulate a comeback because he can't even see his opponent behind her mountain of chips.

"Pockets" imagines wearing a dead stranger's Salvation Army suit while typing poems on a Smith Corona and occasionally checking the pockets to see whether the previous owner left instructions.

"Beaten" needs four lines:

Every face
At the bus station
Is a torn
Lottery ticket.

Those poems come from the same imaginative territory as the older Zombie Logic material we've been excavating: buses, bars, thrift stores, motel rooms, people who have lost, people who are still playing anyway.

But something has changed.

The speaker isn't quite as trapped inside that world anymore.

He can look back at it.

From Tigress to Wolves

The final portion of the collection begins to sound noticeably different.

The poems become quieter.

More elemental.

Wolves appear. Trees appear. The moon appears. Solitude stops being merely isolation and starts becoming a landscape.

"Unravel" may be the hinge:

as i unravel
I become miles of new thread
to weave with again

That poem now sounds almost prophetic.

By the time we reach "Lilacs," the heart is described as a bomb shelter emerging from an "endless / Winter of discontent." The speaker remains wary of love, but the window is open.

And then comes "Full Wolf Moon 2020":

full wolf moon bays down
on grey, oily streets howling
for its lost lover

Read from the vantage point of 2026, it is difficult not to hear the poet who would eventually write Small Songs for Weary Travelers beginning to emerge.

The attention is changing.

The jokes aren't gone. The weirdness isn't gone. The city isn't gone.

But the poems have started looking outward.

Tea With the Tigress

That's why I think the title is better than I previously understood.

The Tigress isn't simply a woman.

She isn't merely love or sexuality either.

The Tigress is life when it becomes dangerous enough to be worth approaching again.

The wise man doesn't conquer her.

He doesn't explain her.

He meets her.

And says thank you.

Across Tea With the Tigress, the speaker repeatedly does exactly that. He says thank you to love, sex, absurdity, art, jokes, bodies, mechanical parts, memories, old clothes, bad decisions, flowers, wolves, buses, darkness and another day in which something strange might still happen.

The book ends near grief, but it doesn't end in defeat. "End Punctuation" imagines two people leaning into one another like parentheses around the story of their love.

That's an extraordinarily appropriate image for the collection.

Because Tea With the Tigress is itself a set of parentheses.

2010–2020.

Ten years enclosed between them.

Inside are several lives, a tremendous amount of nonsense, some darkness, quite a bit of sex, a mechanical heart, a double desk, a woman making paintings in the next room, wolves gathering at the edges, and a poet gradually discovering that surviving the world and paying attention to it may actually be the same activity.

The copyright page credits Jenny Mathews with the cover and illustrations for "Halloween 1974" and "The Perfect Crime," while Tré created the remaining artwork and provided design and editing help. That makes the physical book itself strangely appropriate: other people helped surround these poems with images and give the decade a shape.

And perhaps that's what I see most clearly now, after going back through the old blog.

I thought I was wasting an astonishing amount of time.

Watching movies. Writing jokes. Collecting things. Looking out windows. Making blogs nobody seemed to read. Falling in love. Getting older. Writing poems about downspouts.

Turns out I was living.

And fortunately, I wrote some of it down.

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