Thursday, August 31,
2006
Vibe Coffee House, Cedar Falls
Featured Reader (and Artist):
Kim Shott
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FINAL THURSDAY READING SERIES |
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Thursday, August 31,
2006
Featured Reader (and Artist):
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Welcome to year six of 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. This season begins with a reading and visual art display by Kim Shott, a graduate student at University of Northern Iowa in the English Language and Literature Department specializing in creative writing. Art on display in Vibe Coffee House and poetry that Shott will be reading both come from her interdisciplinary thesis, Art in Parkinson's Disease: Laments and Praise. Shott’s literary work has previously appeared in Goliard’s Literary Magazine, Muse of the Heart, and in Beyond the Universe: The Bill Pearl Story. Samples of Shott's poetry and visual art can be found below: |
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Read Work by Past Featured Readers
Now Available from Final Thursday Press
Lamentations on the Rwandan Genocide by Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure
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 |
“Prognosticating” from Art in Parkinson's Disease: Laments and Praise
"Ten years." He couldn't have known; I tell everyone--but doctors. "Give or take." Give or take. Ten years. I've roamed alone since that afternoon, that springtime of knowing time as nothing and everything wrapped into a breath like steaks wrapped in bacon. The timer counts them out-- 5 minutes: Five strips.
Five years: five minutes. I've sizzled beneath peppered steak, wraping round him as tightly as I could, rubbing my MSG into his skin, to preserve him. Ten years-- "Give or take." Our son, only eight, watched. Dad twitched two years since the doctor's prescription for Sinemet. Eight years--then, our son will learn driving a car from me; what can I tell him about being a man? --8 years--give or take. "Take a few seconds." a few breaths, a few tears Give me a few years! I don't want to wrap my arms around my son, as tight as bacon spun into ropes lowering his father's coffin into an earth-kiln listening to the timer tick, tick, tick until he's baked into cakes; an entree for bacteria and morel mushrooms. Please let me hold him tight, once more, so I can whisper, into a corspe-ear "I will never let you be as meaningless as bacon-charred flesh."
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| updated August 22, 2006 by Jim O'Loughlin |
Vibe
is located at 909 W. 23rd St. in Cedar Falls on the second floor of
Bought again Books.
