C. Riley Snorton opened his March 5, 2025 talk, “Swamp Tales, Trans Ghosts, and Nonbinary (magical) Realism,” with 1970s media accounts of the so-called “Wildman” of Florida’s Green Swamp — who, when captured, identified himself, to a translator, as Wu Ching Pong, a 39‐year‐old Taiwanese father of seven.

Snorton is Class of 1932 Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of English for spring 2025.

He took the audience through characterizations and speculations in accounts from when Pong had been seen but not identified. The “wild man” had been “said by witnesses to be able to run very fast, and walk upright, and has also been seen to amble along on all fours,” a Tampa Tribune article reported, and cited witness reports of hearing the man “grunt and make other animal noises.”

"Does Green Swamp Monster Exist?" one headline read.

Maxine Hong Kingston’s recounting of the story in “The Wild Man of the Green Swamp” in her 1980 collection China Men doesn’t provide a name for the wild man. Snorton brought onscreen the concluding turn the story takes, away from the wild man of Green Swamp:

There was a Wild Man in our slough too, only he was a black man. He wore a shirt and no pants, and some mornings when we walked to school, we saw him asleep under the bridge. The police came and took him away. The newspaper said he was crazy; it said the police had been on the lookout for him for a long time, but we had seen him every day.

— Maxine Hong Kingston

Snorton showed 19th-century depictions of fish camps built on pilings sunk into marsh channels that mirrored the grasses and camps beside them, and a placid selection of sailboats and boats. From there, he took the audience into the marshes of Lafcadio Hearn's novel Chita:

Ever from river or from lakelet the steamer glides again into canal or bayou, — from bayou or canal once more into lake or bay; and sometimes the swamp-forest visibly thins away from these shores into wastes of reedy morass where, even of breathless nights, the quaggy soil trembles to a sound like thunder of breakers on a coast: the storm-roar of billions of reptile voices chanting in cadence […] diminuendo — a monstrous and appalling chorus of frogs!

— Lafcadio Hearn

And who might one have met there in the 1850s? Snorton noted the selective specificity in Hearn’s galloping list (emphasis Snorton’s):

And swift in the wake of gull and frigate-bird the Wreckers come, the Spoilers of the dead —  savage skimmers of the sea — hurricane-riders wont to spread their canvas-pinions in the face of storms; Sicilian and Corsican outlaws, Manila-men from the marshes, deserters from many navies, Lascars, marooners, refugees of a hundred nationalities — fishers and shrimpers by name, smugglers by opportunity — wild channel-finders from obscure bayous and unfamiliar chenieres, all skilled in the mysteries of these mysterious waters beyond the comprehension of the oldest licensed pilot …

There is plunder for all — birds and men.

— Lafcadio Hearn

From highlighting the “the monstrosity of fugitivity” in swamp tales that brought the 18th and 19th centuries into the contemporary moment, Snorton concluded with a meditation on Juliana Curi’s 2022 documentary, Uýra: The Rising Forest, in which Uýra Sodoma's dance, poetry, and characterization perform into being, as Snorton writes, “alternative frameworks for reading matters of gender and the environment among Black and Indigenous queer, trans and nonbinary artists and activists.”