November 1 Brings First Sunday Prose, Including Featured Reader James Dorr

As the Halloween Holiday Weekend winds down, Sunday brought, also, November’s First Sunday Prose Readings (see October 4, et al.) sponsored by the Bloomington Writers Guild in conjunction with local bookstore Boxcar Books.  This time, in part because of its proximity to Halloween, I was the second of three featured readers, the others being memoir writer and burgeoning novelist Claire Arbogast and novelist, attorney, and nonfiction writer Karen A. Wyle, the first of these reading a chapter from her Indiana University Press published LEAVE THE DOGS AT HOME and the last a borderline “afterlife fantasy” as well as brief sections from her recent writers’ guide to law and lawyers on the topics of criminal defense and divorce.  Sandwiched between, I read “In the Octopus’s Garden,” lead story from THE TEARS OF ISIS, prefacing it by noting it was inspired by a section of DEATH TO DUST, a book on the things that can happen to a corpse after one has died, as well as my poem “La Méduse” — which also comes just before “In the Octopus’s Garden” in THE TEARS OF ISIS – to help ease listeners into the right mood.*

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*One might also note that, as written by me, MC Joan Hawkins’s introduction to my part of the reading included a disclaimer that listeners should “expect a PG Rating, including such items as Violence, Graphic Decomposition, Overly Fond Memories, Corpse-Eating, Eating of Corpse-Eaters, Semi-Nudity, and Excessively Grotesque Revenge.”  Interested?  Click on THE TEARS OF ISIS’s  picture in the center column.