About Bell Hammers
PRANKS. OIL. PROTEST. JOKES BETWEEN NEWLYWEDS.
AND ONE HILARIOUS SIEGE OF A MAJOR CORPORATION.
Remmy grows up with Beth in Bellhammer, Illinois as oil and coal companies rob the land of everything that made it paradise. Under his Grandad, he learns how to properly prank his neighbors, friends, and foes. Beth tries to fix Remmy by taking him to church. Under his Daddy, Remmy starts the Bell Hammer Construction Company, which depends on contracts from Texarco Oil. And Beth argues with him about how to build a better business. Together, Remmy and Beth start to build a great neighborhood of “merry men” carpenters: a paradise of s’mores, porch furniture, newborn babies, and summer trips to Branson where their boys pop the tops of off the neighborhood’s two hundred soda bottles. Their witty banter builds a kind of castle among a growing nostalgia.
Then one of Jim Johnstone’s faulty Texarco oil derricks falls down on their house and poisons their neighborhood’s well.
Poisoned wells escalate to torched dog houses. Torched dog houses escalate to stolen carpentry tools and cancelled contracts. Cancelled contracts escalate to eminent domain. Sick of the attacks from Texaco Oil on his neighborhood, Remmy assembles his merry men:
“We need the world’s greatest prank. One grand glorious jest that’ll bloody the nose of that tyrant. Besides, pranks and jokes don’t got no consequences, right?”
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Author Bio:
Lancelot Schaubert has sold work to markets such as MacMillan (TOR.com), The New Haven Review (Yale’s Institute Library), The Anglican Theological Review, McSweeney’s, Writer’s Digest, The World Series Edition of Poker Pro, Standard Publishing, the Poet’s Market, and many, many similar markets. Spark + Echo selected him as their 2019 artist in residence, commissioning him to craft more than a dozen short fiction pieces.
He has ghostwritten and edited for NYT Bestsellers, written copy for large international nonprofit orgs and companies, and has served as an editor for bestselling fantasy authors Juliet Marillier, Kaaron Warren, and Howard Andrew Jones (for Of Gods and Globes). He also worked as a senior editor / producer for The Joplin Toad and Showbear Family Circus — the circus in its heyday published works from over 400 academics, authors, and artists.
As a producer and director-writer, he started out at fifteen in high school as a radio DJ and a regional thespian and never quite slowed down: he reinvented the photonovel through Cold Brewed with Mark Neuenschwander. That work caught the attention of the Missouri Tourism Board (as well as the Chicago Museum of Photography), who commissioned them to create a second photonovel, The Joplin Undercurrent. He also worked on films with Flying Treasure, WRKR, etc.. He helped judge the Brooklyn Film Festival and NYC Film Festival. And he wrote and produced the albums All Who Wander and H.A.L.T.S., both of which he performed in NYC venues like Rockwood Music Hall.
This all culminated in the narration of his debut novel, which Publisher’s Weekly called “a hoot.”
He’s currently on assignment in Alaska for a documentary film, in Brooklyn for a documentary film on the arts, a third in Brooklyn for a potential criminal justice story, and many other projects.
On his site, he shares his words and lend his voice to try to help people think cleverer, feel deeper, and act truer. But more importantly, the team and he have actively published the poems, essays, stories, art, interviews, and academic abstracts of others who do the same. Their work is more important than his for the very reason that deference hints at depth and wit and the good life right around the corner in someone else’s life. He is, he supposes, a virtue ethicist in that sense: the good thing is whatever the perfectly virtuous person would do. Therefore, he points to all of my mentors at their best moments.
He believes that art should not merely entertain or sell product. He believes art should cause us to change our minds, soften our hearts, and motivate our activism to be true and good. And therefore artists manual and fine alike should not seek first to be richer, smarter, sexier, cooler, more relevant, more tech savvy, or more powerful. They must seek to be better and to make things that will make others better: this — virtue — is the soul of true renown and is his one and only goal with all of my work. Starting in 2013, over 240+ patrons have made it possible for he and his wife to shepherd folks in this from Brooklyn to Alaska to London to Italy and we’ve been full time in the effort since 2016.