Thursday, March 2,
2006
Vibe Coffee House, Cedar Falls
Featured Reader: Ron Sandvik
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FINAL THURSDAY READING SERIES ***DATE CHANGE: ONE WEEK LATER THAN USUAL*** |
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Thursday, March 2,
2006 Featured Reader: Ron Sandvik |
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Before the reading, join the Cedar Valley’s longest running creative writing open mic. Signup for the open mic begins @ 7 p.m. on a first come, first served basis. Limited slots are available, so readers are encouraged to sign up early and read your best five minutes of poetry, fiction, or creative non-fiction. Singer-songwriters are also welcome. The open mic begins at 7:30 p.m. The featured reader takes the stage between 8:00 and 8:30 (depending on how many open mic readers there are). After the reading, there will be a brief question and answer session.
Ron Sandvik is a native Cedar Falls, a graduate of UNI, and the Managing Editor of the North American Review. He is currently working on an MFA in fiction and nonfiction at Vermont College. His prose has appeared in publications including War, Literature and the Arts, Cafe Irreal, Lyrical Iowa, and the recent collection Prairie Weather (Ice Cube Press). |
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Read Work by Past Featured Readers
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from "Recipes for
Thunder" by Ron Sandvik WE BROKE ACROSS THE CITY limits at eighty-five, the husky voice of the big V-8 engine bellowed, for air and fuel from the front of my father’s 1967 Ford station wagon. Billy Thorpe’s "Children of the Sun" played on the AM radio. The Ford’s steering was tight and the two-lane blacktop was smooth. Freshly painted yellow and white lines stood stark on the ribbon of black. Green walls of corn and small oceans of soybeans hemmed us into a sort of tunnel vision. Residences became sparser, and the green was only broken up by the odd disintegrating farmstead. The recent rains, seasonal flooding, and the overcast skies left every overgrown slough in the state teeming with mosquitoes, deer flies, water bugs, and dragonflies. Northeast, low in the sky, the beginnings of a puffy white anvil-head was rising up out of a blue gray mass of clouds. As the progeny of generations of peasants from across Europe, then American immigrant farmers, and working people, most Iowans have the gift of feeling the weather. Maybe it’s not a gift, but an innate survival skill where one can tell almost everything they need to know about the weather with one step outside and letting the air of the moment come up against their face. Iowans can remain oblivious to the atomic level violence overhead. That billions of electrons are being stripped from larger molecules, creating a plasma field ripe for lightning is not something we think about, we just feel it. Even at this eye-squinting speed, our hands loosely held and resting on the vinyl seat where my sister usually sat, I could feel the cool, wet downdraft, the reversal of air, and the smell of rain.
Now Available from Final Thursday Press
Kyrie Poetry by Jonathan Stull
Ghost Wars Poetry by Vince Gotera ***Winner of the 2004 Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry***
Laugh. Damnit. Poetry by Ahkos
Bad Men Microfiction by Jim O'Loughlin
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| updated February 10, 2006 by Jim O'Loughlin |
Vibe
is located at 909 W. 23rd St. in Cedar Falls on the second floor of
Bought again Books.