Essays and Vampires Rule at 1st Sunday Prose; 2nd Vamp Released for Reading
Not necessarily because of a temporary 7-8:30 p.m. evening time at Morgenstern Books, but because I had the flu (so you get your fall shot, a new kind comes along . . . lucky me!) I missed February’s Bloomington Writers Guild’s “First Sunday Prose and Open Mic” (cf. January 7 2024, et al.). So today was this year’s first, excepting January’s which in some ways seemed more a holdover from last year, and at an all new, hopefully more or less permanent time and place, from 2-3:30 p.m. at the Juniper Gallery on West Kirkwood Avenue just off downtown. A small gallery this, it was more or less packed at maybe a tad over 20 attendees (including some at snack bar tables, a sort of holdover from the original Morgenstern’s ambience as well), and enjoyed, it seemed, by all.
The first featured reader was IU Professor Emerita, storyteller, actor, researcher, writer, and theatrical producer Gladys DeVane, with a moving passage from her book COME SIT WITH ME: MY LIFE IN POETRY, PROSE, AND PLAYS, in part in the voice of major champion for the right to vote for Blacks in 1960s Mississippi — as well as survivor of beatings and worse — Fannie Lou Hamer, and ending on a note for present-day America, a “country still in need of spiritual healing.” She was followed by retired art-museum worker and IU education teacher and present-day tour guide for the Exotic Feline Rescue Center, whose “writing has gotten quite free-wheeling since she’s no longer writing for professional journals,” Beau Vallance, with three short essays: the first “kind of serious,” “Reading for the Incarcerated”; a self-described “lighter” second, “Prom Dresses”; and a “silly” third, a eulogy for a “Yellow Fit,” a much-loved Honda sub-compact that, victim of a crash, had finally had to be given up as being too far damaged to be repaired.
After the break, seven readers lined up for the “open mic” session, with me number six with a piece just published in FEMME FATALE FLASHES (see February 24), “Dinner Date,” about one of the shyer of the New Orleanian vampiresses, the Casket Girls, and how she was able to find a way, when the chips were down, to act as her idol, Aimée, would.
Then, speaking of vampires, harking back to the post just below, February 29, METASTELLAR has officially published the non-Casket Girl Christmas story, “Naughty or Nice,” today as promised. To read it, press here.
