The Tale of the Traveling Chicken
JAMES P. BLAYLOCK, one of the pioneers of the steampunk genre, is the author of more than twenty-five books, most recently the novel River’s Edge and the novella collection The Further Adventures of Langdon St. Ives, both published by Subterranean Press. Blaylock has taught literature and writing since 1976, and was a recent winner of the U.S. Presidential Scholars Program Teacher Recognition Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Chapman University in Orange, California.
I FIRST heard the ubiquitous chicken joke when I was about six years old. I have a fairly clear memory of my father telling it to me and of my own bafflement ten seconds later when the salient question had been answered. The interesting thing (and this occurred to me only fifty years later) is the mere fact that I was baffled by it. This struck me as evidence that even as a six-year-old I had a fairly developed sense of story and that my expectations in regard to the chicken had not been fulfilled. I was hungry for a good story then, just like I am now. It may have taken a while, but in the many years that have passed since then (during which time I started writing and eventually publishing stories and novels of my own, and have built a career teaching literature and writing that has spanned more than four decades) I began to understand the connection that the timeless joke—and its funny but disappointing punch line—might have to writing fiction. In what might have been a fit of madness, I decided to write it down.
