Casket Suite, Other Remaining Ryder Stories Round Out April’s Second Thurs. Spoken Word

April 11, 2024 in Short Fiction, Writing
Tags: Backspace Gallery, Bloomington Writers Guild, Brendan Keller-Tuberg, First Sunday Prose and Open Mic, History, James Dorr, Laura Lasuertmer, Paula W. Sunderman, Second Thursday Spoken Word, The Ryder, The Writing Life, Tony Brewer

Be that as it may, it was also a special session with the featured readers presenting selections from the December/January THE RYDER’s “Short Stories from Bloomington Writers” issue (in which this April, in a newly named Second Thursday Spoken Word, the other three tales from that issue, including my own “Casket Suite,” will be featured as well). This from “New Year’s First Sunday Brings Two Ryder Stories” from January 7 this year. For the publication of the RYDER Fiction Edition itself, cf. December 12 2023. And now, on a rainy Thursday, and yes, the second for April, the other three stories have been presented.

But the rain, alas, may have been what made for an overly small audience at downtown Bloomington’s Backspace Gallery for a session (even if I say so myself) that really deserved better. Also even if time constraints caused the stories themselves to be excerpted or otherwise slightly shortened in their presentations. The authors, in order of reading, were Paula W. Sunderman with “Day of the Dead,” Laura Lasuertmer with “A Light in the Woods,” and (ahem) me with “Casket Suite” — or, as I jokingly announced it, “Casket Suite Minus One,” with just four of its printed five “movements” read. For those present, however, MC Tony Brewer had brought a sheaf of RYDER December-January issues so those who wished could peruse the original tales as well.

For the musical part, the session began and closed with bass guitar solos by Brendan Keller-Tuberg from Canberra, Australia, who also played for a brief interlude between the formal readings and an also sparse two-participant Open Mic segment. But, small numbers or not, a program as a whole that should not have been missed.

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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