Writers Guild Spoken Word Series

Backspace Gallery, inside Bonne Fête, 112 West 6th Street, on the square in Bloomington IN

featuring horror writings by James Dorr, poetry & magic by Tom Hastings, and music by DREKKA

open mic to follow

FREE

Sponsored in part by the Indiana Arts Commission, Bloomington Arts Commission, and the Bloomington Urban Enterprise Association

JAMES DORR specializes in dark fantasy/horror, with forays into mystery and science fiction. His The Tears of Isis was a 2013 Bram Stoker Award® finalist for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection, with his most recent book, Tombs: A Chronicle of Latter-Day Times of Earth, a novel-in-stories from Elder Signs Press. Dorr has been a technical writer, an editor on a regional magazine, a full time non-fiction freelancer, and a semi-professional musician. He currently harbors a Goth cat named Triana, and counts among his major influences Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allan Poe, Allen Ginsberg, and Bertolt Brecht. For more information, Dorr invites readers to visit his blog at http://jamesdorrwriter.wordpress.com

THOMAS HASTINGS taught language arts and Jungian psychology at Harmony High School here in Bloomington for 36 years before retiring in 2014. He received a BA in Mythogenics from Antioch in 1973 and has taken graduate classes at the California Institute of Asian Studies, the C. G. Jung Institute in Switzerland, and classes toward a Masters in Counseling at Indiana University. He’s been a Royal Scottish Arts Council Poet in the Schools in Edinburgh, Scotland and for the Indiana Arts Commission in Zionsville and Bloomington. He created the Indianapolis Broadsheet, cofounded the Indiana Writers Center, and was poetry editor of its publication Inprint. His poems have appeared in numerous small press publications and he is the author of a dozen chapbooks. His new and collected poems, Crop Circle Secrets, were published by Muse Rules Press in 2004. He fronted the poetry performance band Coup Coup Daddy for over a decade and he was the foreign correspondent for online Zoo & Logical Times. Since 2015, he’s been teaching theatrical magic classes for the Ivy Tech Center for Lifelong Learning as well as demonstrating and performing at Rich Hill’s Magic and Fun Emporium in Nashville, Indiana.

Working under the name DREKKA since 1996, composer Mkl Anderson has toured, traveled, and collaborated extensively; collecting memories and building a personalized archive of sound that dates back to the mid-1980’s. Throughout years of performing and recording, DREKKA has explored early industrial tape culture, fragile bedroom noise-folk, and expansive cinematic textures. His work and performances touch on themes of silence, memory, and forgetfulness.