First Sunday Prose Honors Students, Teachers

April 7, 2024 in Horror, Poetry, Vampires, Writing
Tags: Femme Fatales, First Sunday Prose, High School, Holiday, Juniper Gallery, Learning, Molly Gleeson, Romance, Student Poets, Students, Teachers, The Writing Life, Vampires

April’s Bloomington Writers Guild “First Sunday Prose and Open Mic” (see March 3, et al.), at the Juniper Gallery on West Kirkwood Ave., deviated from the usual pattern of two featured readers, a break, and an open session for walk-on participants. In view of a soon-ending spring school semester, coordinator Molly Gleeson opted instead for a special program honoring local students and teachers. Thus seven readers (truncated from nine, as two were unable to make it) with short presentations comprised the first part, with (as it turned out, due to limited time) a segue, sans break, to three audience readers.

Thus the program began with Writers Guild member Tonia Matthew discussing her role with Bloomington’s VITAL– Volunteers In Tutoring Adult Learners — program at the Monroe County Public Library; followed by three high school students, Percy Patterson, Maci Day, and Allister Farrell, with poetry; Guild member Erin Strole on her path to becoming a teacher at Bloomington North and on teaching in general; another high school poet, Mya Coleman; and “70-year-old Ivy Tech student” Andre Deloney on, among other things, his work with county jail staff on helping inmates improve reading skills.

This then was followed, as noted, by we three walk-ons, with me coming last with a very short story combining the theme of teaching and learning with one of darkness, the latter in view of tomorrow’s upcoming solar eclipse (participants also found eclipse glasses on their chairs when they came in, courtesy of MC Gleeson), “School Nights,” originally published in Gothic Blue Book, October 2014, on the journey of a possibly naive young girl to her realization that she was a vampire.

About Me

My latest book, AVOID SEEING A MOUSE AND OTHER TALES OF THE REAL AND SURREAL, is a January 2024 release from Alien Buddha Press, following 2017’s TOMBS: A CHRONICLE OF LATTER-DAY TIMES OF EARTH, a novel-in-stories from Elder Signs Press. I am an Indiana based short story writer and poet with three other primarily prose collections, STRANGE MISTRESSES: TALES OF WONDER AND ROMANCE and DARKER LOVES: TALES OF MYSTERY AND REGRET published by Dark Regions Press and the Bram Stoker Award(R) nominated THE TEARS OF ISIS from Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, along with an illustrated all-poetry collection, VAMPS (A RETROSPECTIVE), from Sam’s Dot Publishing/White Cat Publications. I also have a novelette, THE GARDEN from Damnation Books; electronic chapbooks VANITAS and I’M DREAMING OF A . . . and novelette PEDS from Untreed Reads Publishing; POLUDNITSA in Chamberton Publishing’s “Chimera” short fantasy series; and more than five hundred individual appearances in magazines and anthologies in the US, Canada, Britain, France, Australia, Holland, and Brazil, ranging from ABORIGINAL SCIENCE FICTION and ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE to XENOPHILIA and THE YELLOW BAT REVIEW. In the past I have worked a number of jobs including technical writer, city editor on a regional magazine, full time non-fiction freelancer, and semi-professional musician, and now reside in southern Indiana with current cat, Triana, named for the goth-styled daughter of Dr. Orpheus in the VENTURE BROS. Cartoon Channel series. As a writer, I count as major influences Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allan Poe, Allen Ginsberg, and Bertolt Brecht.

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