Spooky Prose “Zooms” at Writers Guild First Wednesday Spoken Word
A trip back in time, of sorts, for the Bloomington Writers Guild’s “First Wednesday Spoken Word” (see March 4 2020, and before). It went on hiatus because of Covid, and hasn’t come back yet as a live event — but it has had an electronic rebirth through the “magic” of Zoom. It’s still not been reported here, there’s something about Zoom that, for me, is still off-putting and so I haven’t sought to attend these new sessions. Though admittedly there are advantages too, one being that since participants don’t have to be physically present, readers don’t have to be local or near-local, but can be recruited from anyplace, technically, in the world.
But comes Halloween and, as a local horror writer, I was invited to be one of three readers at an all-prose (well, plus musical interludes which are, traditionally, a part as well) spook-fest, joining with Louisville, Kentucky writer and Jefferson Community and Technical College English instructor Josh Conrad and San Francisco-based Dodie Bellamy, the former with a story culminating with Halloween and the latter with memoirs including a recollected viewing of the movie of Stephen King’s CHRISTINE. And between them, me with a tale in the far-future “Tombs” universe but not in the TOMBS novel, “Crow and Rat,” originally published in HUMANAGERIE (Eibonvale Press, 2018), and interspersed throughout electronic music via Ed Pettersen, weird and spooky in its own way.
The First Wednesday Series is sponsored in part by the Indiana Arts Commission, Bloomington Arts Commission, and the Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association, and was fun in a new sort of way, though I’m probably unlikely to re-become a regular quite yet — there’s something about the electronic format that, for me, still seems lacking. But there is still one more advantage, and that is these sessions are being live-streamed and, for tonight’s, by probably about the end of the week it should be on You Tube.
To see for yourself, and enjoy some pretty good stories, et al., too, in a few days press here.
