Nope, you can’t bet on the races at Frogtown Bookmaker. Keeneland has a drive-in window for that. I just make the most beautiful and exacting books, graphics and marketing materials I can. Frogtown is an old name for a place near the headwaters of West Hickman Creek in the Kentucky Blue Grass where I grew up. It’s easy to guess how it got this name. The racket of the frogs at night was magnificent when I was a child. It could sing you to the soundest sleep and the strangest dreams. Even now, the frogs are plentiful and noisy there. Much of this landscape is now obliterated by urban “development” and now you have to look for Frogtown, but parts of it keep their magic and maybe someday there will be more of it again.
Who is the Frogtown Bookmaker?
Beth Tashery Shannon, author of speculative fiction about a Kentucky of the distant future: Tanglevine (2012), The Heron (forthcoming), Frogtown Race Meet (might the name of her business even be an in-joke? Forthcoming later), and Windland’s War (forthcoming eventually). I’ve published short fiction in Pushcart Prize III and IX, Pleasures: Women Write Erotica (Doubleday), The Long Meanwhile (Weighed Words), Chicago Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Under the name Elizabeth Adair I’m also the author of a mystery series set in Tudor England, The Sun and Stars (2012), With Bold Pretense (forthcoming), and more are planned.