Vampires Mark Both Halves of Sunday Double-Header

Sunday, September 1, a new day, a new month.  But the second day of Bloomington’s 4th Street Festival of the Arts and Crafts (see below, August 31, et al.), with its Bloomington Writers Guild’s “Spoken Word Stage,” brought fourteen more half-hour sessions by local writers to add to yesterday’s sixteen, this time (with I think just one fiction presentation) almost all poetry. But there was one oddity.

I had not been scheduled to read at all this day, but came just to listen to some of the others, interspersed with a couple of stops at the Library — or at least until 4 that afternoon — but at 12:30 p.m. the posted reader apparently had been unable to make it.  Writers Guild Chair April Ridge had just taken over as MC at noon and, thinking quickly, suggested we make the now-vacant half hour a “round robin” session, with audience members coming up to read one poem each.  I, of course, had no poems with me, but I didn’t want to ignore the call either, so I remembered several three-line pieces (I hesitate to call them “haiku”) I’d had published a few years back in STAR*LINE on the subject of a notorious Mermaid Vampiress, several of which I could write down by rote. . . .

So about half way through, and after a particularly long presentation, I took my place at the front and by way of contrast offered “Gourmet Warning,” on how mermaid vampiresses produce their young, and why one might want to take an extra close look before eating their caviar.  Which, I might add, went over quite well.

But then 4 p.m. brought the day’s second event, the Writers Guild’s  regular “First Sunday Prose” on West Kirkwood Avenue’s Juniper Gallery.  This was to be a special session honoring National Literacy Month, co-sponsored with the Public Library’s VITAL — Volunteers in Tutoring Adult Learners — Program, with  featured readers from countries outside the US sharing stories and poems, often personal, written in what was to them just-learned English.  It was very impressive, especially when adding the nervousness one might normally feel in reading anything before a group of strangers.

This was followed, though, by a more normal “open mic” segment, with four local readers, of which I came last with a three-minute vampire story, “The Shackles,” loosely based on the 1936 movie DRACULA’S DAUGHTER.