About the Author

Cort Day was born in November of 1961 to a large family of itinerant laborers who were wintering that year in Ciudad de Juarez, Mexico. When it became clear that he had no aptitude for pulling cabbages from the earth, his family had no choice but to support him in his efforts to learn Pan Flute, hoping that they could recoup their investment in his upbringing if he were to succeed in a career of playing the singular instrument. When he was twelve he made a pair of wings out of a bamboo screen and his mother’s best linens and seriously injured himself diving off a haywagon in a hayfield in Newtonia, Kansas. The fall permanently injured his larynx, bringing his musical career to an abrupt end and causing him to speak in the glottal style which has come to characterize him today. His family, unable to pay for his months of hospitalization, abandoned him, and he lived briefly in an orphanage before being adopted by a professor of bryology (the science of mosses) and his young wife, whose name he took. It was in their home that he began to read in earnest and to develop an interest in writing, which they encouraged. He lived there quite happily until the age of sixteen ,when, it seems, he began a sexual relationship with the lady of the house and was summarily evicted. During the 1980s he moved around the country, working as a bargeman on the Mississippi and as a carpenter’s apprentice in Duluth, Minnesota. He had a brief and undistinguished career as a professional boxer.

About episode 8's the loosed hounds coursed inward to the zero... Cort writes:

The cat referred to in the poem is Schrödinger's cat, a theoretical animal that, if quantum mechanics were applied to the macro world, could be perceived to be dead and alive simultaneously.