Pig Boy's Wicked Bird: A Memoir

Doug Crandell

Jan. 2004 · Chicago Review Press

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This gritty tragicomic memoir is set in one memorable year--1976, the Bicentennial, when Jimmy Carter ran for president and seven-year-old Doug Crandell lost two fingers in a farming accident. More than anything, Doug wants to shed his nickname, Pig Boy, and grow up to be a hog man like his father. His older brother Derrick reads pulp novels to him each night as he soaks his remaining fingers in Epsom salts. His brothers urge him to "flip the Wicked Bird" any time another child makes fun of his "lobster-red hand." Doug shares his summer of healing in Wabash, Indiana, with humans and animals who've suffered life-changing traumas: a brutal grandfather gentled by stroke, a deaf dog with a deadly taste for pig's ears, a tough-love mother coping with depression, a bevy of runt piglets saved from extermination. This is a story of love, loss, healing, and a family's relation with the land they love and know that they will lose.

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Doug Crandell is a widely published writer whose stories have appeared in the Evansville Literary Review, the Sherwood Anderson Review, and forthcoming in Smithsonian Magazine. He is the recipient of a Sherwood Anderson Writers Grant and a winner of the Night Train Firebox, Pig Iron Malt, River City, and other fiction contests. He is the author of Man Vs. Nature.