Worst Christmas Walk-On at 1st Sunday Prose

Came December’s Bloomington Writers Guild First Sunday Prose (see November 6, October 2, et al.) at Morgenstern Books, with me back in the pack with the “Open Mic” readers. Featured this time were long-time Guild member and poet Eric Rensberger and IU Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies Assistant Professor Maria Hamilton Abegunde, both of whom we’ve met several times before, with Eric leading off with a group of “prose poems” (“but really just paragraphs with a title”) written during the pandemic lockdown a few years ago. Then Abegunde followed with an excerpt from a longer essay, part eulogy for a departed teacher and partly an exposition of her own development as poet and healer.

Then, after the break, eight of us offered bits of our own work to an audience of fifteen to twenty, with me in sixth spot with a dark humored Christmas tale, originally published in DARK JESTERS in 2006, “The Worst Christmas Ever,” concerning one of Santa’s elves who wasn’t, really, suited for the job.