Love, Undeath, & Rock ‘n’ Roll at Resumed Writers Guild First Sunday Prose

Skipping a month due to Bloomington’s annual 4th Street Arts Festival, the Bloomington Writers Guild resumed its “First Sunday Prose Reading and Open Mic” (see August 1, et al.) at a new venue, the recently re-opened Morgenstern’s Books. And unlike August’s, this month’s event pulled in a respectable audience, up to about twenty people for the featured readers, Kalynn (“K.H”) Brower, held over from August, and poet, essayist, and long and short fiction writer, etc., Amy Cornell.

Amy led off with a quartet of works: an opening poem, “Elegy for a Bookstore,” commemorating Morgenstern’s earlier time in Bloomington, and three short stories, “Quality Control,” “The Poetry Stalker,” and the recently published “The Tulip Trestle.” Then Kalynn presented the opening chapter of a solarpunk novel, the second in a series aimed at younger readers, MISSION TO BLUE GRANNUS. Offering a positive look at an interstellar future, BLUE GRANNUS is currently scheduled for release next April.

After a break, six readers came up for “open mic” with me taking the number two spot. Explaining that even though being a (mostly) horror writer I wanted to start off the fall season at Morgenstern’s on an upbeat note, I read a hopefully humorous piece, “Zombie With a Toothache,” about a zombie, a werewolf, and a guitar-playing vampiress (and friends) who start a rock group.