The truth, more or less

“In the past,” writes Dave Kilbourne, “I have worked as a US Forest Service fire tower operator, a rattlesnake wrangler, a swamp surveyor, a timber beast and as an alligator hunter,” not to mention for a dozen years serving as Executive Director of the Downtown Chico Business Association. He’s also something of an ex-con, having been “invited to attend the Aiken City jailhouse for a full week at the tender age of seventeen years and six months.”

Kilbourne’s South Carolina experiences are only the beginning. He takes the truth, allows it to ferment in his fertile imagination, and crafts tales that will set some folks to hootin’ and hollerin’ (politically correct this ain’t).

Speaking of craft, he took himself “down to the Sierra Nevada Pub” to find his muse. “During this period as I developed an approach to my own personal style of creative writing, my address simply became Dave, Sierra Nevada Taproom, back by the pizza oven.”

The result has been bottled as “The Blessed Conversion Of Miranda Zamora: And Other Amazing True Stories Of Human Adventure” ($14.95 in paperback from Flying Pig Press, flyingpigpress.net), available from the author at campkilbrn@aol.com or from Made In Chico (check for upcoming book signings).

By the author’s own count, the book contains “twenty-one acts of literary mischief.” Kilbourne takes the reader to “The Get Back Satan True Blood of the Lamb Abyssinian Baptist Church pulled-pork picnic, fireworks display and old time revival meeting,” and, in another piece, introduces “a fine all-American red-blooded working girl by the name of Ms. Violet Villanova” (whose “elder sister Debidoux had played the lead role in Debbie Does Dallas, which I believed was an art film of a special kind ... because I had seen it no less than four-dozen times during that theatrical period in my life when I showed this film for commercial purposes without a proper license”).

Smuggle in the Chico Roller Girls, Purple Juice, Richard Parker’s cat Jeeves, Chico Billiards, a passel of bawdy jokes, and plenty of beer, and it’s clear Kilbourne not only found his muse, but drank it.