1st Sunday Prose Back to Two Features, Walk-Ons

This month’s Bloomington Writers Guild sponsored “First Sunday Prose and Open Mic” (see April 7, et al.), at Bloomington’s Juniper Gallery, returned to its classical pattern of two featured readers and, after a break, brief closing readings from audience members — in this case three.

Thus, Bloomington-raised and current Evanston, Illinois resident Freda Love Smith, author of the memoir I QUIT EVERYTHING and full-length book RED VELVET UNDERGROUND, opened the session explaining how, in Bloomington for her niece who graduated yesterday from the university, she had also stopped by and chatted with students at the pro-Palestinian encampment in Dunn Meadow and, for today, had decided instead of reading from her book, to read excerpts from a just-written essay scheduled to appear this fall in INDIANA REVIEW on 1970s activist/Symbionese Liberation Army member — and herself an Indiana University graduate (class of 1970) — Angela DeAngelis.

She was followed by IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology PhD candidate, and production volunteer and past Lotus Education and Arts Foundation staff member Jeremy Reed with excerpts from his dissertation, with sections on public space, rumors, and limits on permitted and non-permitted speech centered, in this case, on the Jaresh Festival of Culture and Arts, an annual summer celebration in Jordan.

Then after the break, there were three volunteer readers of which I was last, following humorous segments by Writers Guild member Tonia Matthew and First Sunday Moderator Molly Gleeson, bringing us back to the possibly more somber mood of the opening essays with a flash story, “The Third Prisoner” (no, no, my position in the lineup is pure coincidence), on a sort of South/Central American activism . . . with zombies.