Double Header Plus Poem at Fourth Street Fest

Came the next-to-last day of August, or, Labor Day weekend Saturday afternoon, and with Bloomington’s annual Fourth Streets Arts Festival of the Arts and Crafts (cf. August 31 2024). Or more to the point, on Grant Street just off Fourth, the Bloomington Writers Guild’s part in the party — the first of a two-day series of poetry and prose and occasional music in half-hour segments. And so mine of these was at one p.m. Saturday, prime time for me as the just-after-lunch slot, and so I appeared with a small bag of fiction as well as a poem.

Well, the stories were short so two would fit with just enough time to open with the poem, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” as a mood setter. It offered as well a musical theme to lead into the first tale, “The Dark Call of the Sea,” of a New England shore vacation, an eldritch violin or — more precisely — a viol, the narrator’s sister who’s also an artist, and . . . some thing powerful and dangerously attractive that lurks in the ocean. Or maybe beyond.

Then tale number two added a (ahem!) taste of the surreal, “Chocolat,” hinging on an actual European Union change in the sweet’s definition about ten years back, and a take on the adage “you are what you eat,” which ended the session, fitting just into the time allowed. A fun series, I thought, and one I’ll look forward to next year as well.