Final Thursday Reading Series

FINAL THURSDAY READING SERIES

Thursday, September 26 @ 7:30

Featured Reader: Paul Hedeen

Cedar Falls' monthly open mic returns to Vibe for another year! Come to hear the readers or to take the stage yourself. Read your best five minutes or so of poetry, fiction, or creative non-fiction. Singer-songwriters are also welcome. Open mic signup begins @ 7 p.m. on a first come, first served basis. Limited slots are available, so readers are encouraged to sign up early. The open mic begins at 7:30 p.m. and runs up to one hour.

Then it's onto our featured reader, Paul Hedeen, an associate professor of literature, film, and writing at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa. He has won institutional, state, and national writing and teaching awards. His critical and creative writing have appeared in numerous magazines and journals including Rosebud, Philosophy and Literature, The Maine Scholar, Modern Fiction Studies, Language and Style, The Great Lakes Review, Southwest Review, Voices International, and Confrontation. He is the co-editor of Selves: The Self in Contexts (with Joyce E. Boss, Copley, 1998) and of the forthcoming Unrelenting Readers: The New Poet Critics (with D. G. Myers, Story Line Press, 2003). A finalist in a number of contests, his poetry manuscript, The Eyes of the Dead, searches for a home. He is currently revising a novel for eventual publication. He lives in Waverly, Iowa, with his wife Kate and two daughters, Marian and Sarah. You can read a sample of his work below.

Vibe is located at 909 W. 23rd St. in Cedar Falls on the second floor of Bought again Books. Persons needing access accommodation should call 266-7115 by the day before the event. For more information, contact Jim O'Loughlin.

Read Work by Some of Our Past Featured Readers

Elegy

by Paul M. Hedeen

(originally published in The Karenjen Review)

Death does not deserve you, Mamie,
but after nine decades
of breath what could he do
but lead you to the ferry.

Perhaps now you are, at long last,
in the gaze of your first and truest
love, Leonard, fallen in The Great War
to end all wars, lost
in France among all graves,
he never finding on this side
the good broad path
on which you walked your life.

But now you are back for the harvest
where you meet the golden season
of love side by side, the cool blessing
of the Sunday and Wednesday services,
finding finally real grace
as you return arm in arm to feel
in the glow of your stars,
in fires banked under Mars and Venus,
the years stepping away,
his once-murdered youth aging to you
or your years melting back to that day
his fingers first burn in your hair,
his eyes first fall toward
the wind-pressed gingham
on breasts and legs, the brightest light
on you, needing only you.

You two are learning steps, awkward
at first, but then graceful,
one then another, complete,
the dances forbidden by the Baptists,
your eyes as gray as the bay and moving
with young blood urging
in you, around you
the red wave of it wetting
the two of you now in highest life
as you enter together that long
moment that your fathers
had thought to refuse you, forever.

Now Available from

Final Thursday Press

Laugh. Damnit.

Poetry by Ahkos

Feeling pretentious? Walk away now. The poems in this collection target poetic self-importance with humor and a bit of an edge. Formed in (and in response to) Boston's open mic scene, "Laugh. Damnit." will make you smile, or else.

$1.00 16 pgs.

Bad Men

Microfiction by Jim O'Loughlin

Four short short stories that made their debut at the Final Thursday Reading Series. They weren't originally intended to be part of a collection; it just happened that way. Find out what happens to the lounge lizard, the ex-con, the slacker student, and the serial monogamist.

$2.00 18 pgs.

Ask for them at

Bought again Books!

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