Dead Girls Reading Set for This Friday, 6 p.m.
That’s the reading for the “Vonnegut @ 100: A Century of Stories” closing reception originally scheduled for July 1, but since re-set for this Friday, the 8th, from 5 to 8 p.m. as noted below (June 29, 25). But why the dancing bear pictures on those posts? For that you’ll just have to read the story — or else, if you’re local, drop by the Cook Center for Public Arts & Humanities in Maxwell Hall at the appointed time.
The reason for the rescheduling is that this is part of a monthly “Bloomington Gallery Walk” — a multiple open house for several art galleries downtown and, in this case, on the near-downtown Indiana University campus — normally scheduled on first Fridays but, due to the Independence Day weekend, put back this month to the second. My part in this is to present a Vonnegut-inspired story, “Dead Girls, Dying Girls” (originally published in SO IT GOES: A TRIBUTE TO KURT VONNEGUT by Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, 2013, and reprinted in CAT’S BREAKFAST: KURT VONNEGUT TRIBUTE, Third Flatiron Anthologies, Summer 2017), the tale of a very clever young girl but, other than a knack for manipulation, with tragically little feeling for social relations.
Be it known, however, I do write horror and — with a hat tip to Vonnegut’s own delicious sense of the absurd — my humor may sometimes be black (which is to say, let the story’s title also stand as its “trigger warning,” or does that even make sense in a Vonnegut context).
In any event, the e-word came today from Coordinator Natalia Almanza, I having noted before that I might have to leave around 7: I’ll have you scheduled to read at 6pm if that’s alright with you? It’ll be fairly informal, community members interested in participating will sign-up as they arrive!
My rough timeline will be that our director will read first around 5:30pm, then you at 6pm and our staff and community members will go after.
And thus, so it goes. I’ve sent back my OK, and my story should take up only about ten minutes, so plenty of time for others who’d like to sign up too — sort of like “open mic” at Bloomington Writers Guild events, it would seem (I being actually scheduled mainly, I suspect, because I may have been the only one to respond to an invitation forwarded specifically to Writers Guild members, cf. June 25). So the more the merrier — and I will try to stay myself until maybe just past 7 (assuming, that is, they don’t throw me out when they hear my story).
