First 2022 First Sunday Brings Vampire Regret

As it happens I missed December’s Bloomington Writers Guild “First Sunday Prose Reading and Open Mic” (see November 7, October 3, et al.). But today is the first Sunday of a new year and, while having had its own hiatus up to last fall, “First Sunday” remains as a still-in-person live program, at Morgenstern Books, with me back as well.

Both featured readers this outing were Writers Guild stalwarts, local poet Eric Rensberger and Guild Chair as well as First Sundays coordinator Joan Hawkins. Eric led off with one in a series of prose pieces centered on old books, many going back a century or more and of often a personal nature, in this case including notebooks and letters on, as he put it, “19th Century heterosexual relations culminating in marriage” (although not excluding period digressions, in this case one on the symptoms and attempted cures of “prairie itch,” a.k.a. “Texas mange,” “swamp itch,” and other assorted local and/or descriptive sobriquets). Joan followed with a creative essay — with “trigger warning” — about an autumn she’d spent in the course of a college program in Sweden, including intervening in a suicide attempt by one of her Swedish fellow students, but with other more uplifting aspects as well.

In all about fifteen people attended, remaining for the post-break open reading well. In this I was fourth of seven participants (the last in absentia for Tonia Matthew, read by Joan Hawkins) with a tale I’d initially planned for December, “Dead Winter,” about a vampiress’s losing her temper on Christmas Eve.