Campfire Stories returns to the Modern for it’s 11th season! Join us under the ginkgos in the Modern courtyard every second Sunday to experience this intimate storytelling event. Visit themodernbar.com/reserve now to secure a table!
Campfire Stories is produced by Christian Winn, who has invited collaborators Rebecca Evans, Allison Maier, and Tomas Baiza to curate and host Season 11! We are thrilled for the opportunity to work with this amazing team.
Sunday, July 13
Host: Tomás Baiza
Writers: London Talbot, Christy Claymore, Matt Edwards
Tomás Baiza
Tomás Baiza is originally from San José, California, but now finds himself in Boise, Idaho. He is the award-winning author of the books Delivery: A Pocho’s Accidental Guide to College, Love, and Pizza Delivery, and A Purpose to Our Savagery. Tomás’s third book, Mexican Teeth: Stories and Assorted Artifacts of an Errant Chicanidad, will appear on Inlandia Books in 2026. Tomás’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best American Short Stories, and the O. Henry Prize, and his novel, Delivery, has been accepted into the holdings of the Library of Congress Center for the Book. Sherman Alexie has called Tomás’s writing “painful, scary, hilarious, incredibly vulnerable, and powerful in equal measure.” Tomás has been stalked by wild dogs while hitchhiking in Mexico, was once escorted by security out of the Pebble Beach & Tennis Club, and had the privilege of delivering a dozen pizzas to a Klingon-themed orgy at a sci-fi convention where he earned a very generous tip.
London Talbot
London Sage Talbot is a 6th generation Idahoan who received his BFA in Narrative Arts from Boise State University. He is a self proclaimed expert in all things history, cinema, music, sports, and Idaho related. His writing attempts to understand the nuances of human psychology. What makes us human? What does it mean to be human? The imperfect, tribalistic, insatiably greedy qualities. As well as our loving, philosophical, creative, and endlessly hopeful nature. The light and the dark in each and every one of us, and the societal structures that hold it altogether. When London doesn’t have his face buried in a laptop or journal, he is hiking the foothills with his dog, fantasizing of one day living on a farm, writing his days away, never to be disturbed again by the outside world.
Christy Claymore
Christy Claymore (she/her) is a former English professor, turned itinerant worker, for better or for worse. Her most treasured role is that as a mother to two lively boys. She loves running the foothills, gathering flowers and experiencing the arts and artists of her surroundings. She misses travel, and the ocean, specifically, but hopes to get back to those once her diversified career finally brings in the big bucks. She is a poet six times published in The Cabin’s Writers in the Attic anthologies, a couple other local publications, and in the forthcoming Nostos journal by Longship Press of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Matt Edwards
Matt Edwards, author of Ways and Truths and Lives, was born and raised in Boise, Idaho, where he developed an affinity for literature: both the challenge of understanding it and the potential to be understood through it. This propelled Matt to study English at Boise State University and devote himself to teaching high school English in the Boise area since 2006. Matt now enjoys sharing his life of passions with his wife and their one and only son. In his free time, if Matt’s not training for marathons, he’s writing fiction and poetry, mostly about gods and fathers and the saviors we find for ourselves. Icarus Never Flew ‘Round Here, named one the best books of 2022 by Independent Book Review, is his second novel.
