First Sunday Prose Reading and Open Mic

First Sunday Prose Reading and Open Mic

Presented by the Writers Guild at Bloomington

The featured readers are: Bill Breeden and Wendy Teller

Come early to sign up for Open Mic

Bill Breeden: B.A., M.Div.

            It seems I have to write new bio sketches every time I do something because I have lived so many different lives without dying in between, that it’s hard for me to keep up. It’s easier for me to do it in the first person.  I’ll try to make this one as brief as possible.  If anyone feels that I have left out something of significance, feel free to add on, or simply make something up.

            I was born in ’49, one half of the third set of twins that my courageous mother birthed along with three singles, or “spares,” as Pappy called them.  I’m not sure why they didn’t ask to change their name after the second set.  I would have traded “Breeden” for something like Smith or Jones, but they evidently enjoyed breedin’.  We lived on a forty acre tract of land which, for all practical purposes, bordered the largest inland naval installation in the world, now known as Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center, just about five miles east of Odon, Indiana.  It is 67,000 acres of beautiful land, some of which was supposed to be a State Park until the Pentagon decided they wanted a naval base.  It was condemned, and many folks were forcibly removed from the land.  As Vonnegut said, “And so it goes.”  (Presently I remain constrained by a lifetime “Ban and Bar Order” that threatens a felony charge if I go on the property because of carrying peace signs with my family in the Open House Parade, on the base, on Armed Forces Day, some forty years ago.  I reckon the words of Jesus didn’t fit in well with missiles and such.  We were charged with “Egregious Behavior,” which Webster defines as, “Outside the herd.”  Well played I guess.)

              We were a holiness family.  Pappy was a self taught machinist and maintenance foreman for the National Gypsum plant in Shoals.  Mom worked at U.S. Rubber in Washington.  At night we went to revivals, some in tents, some in churches, and Pappy would sing and folks would run the aisles praisin’ Jesus and getting saved, sanctified and satisfied.  Mom decided I was called by God to be a preacher, so I started preaching at the age of fifteen and never stopped, although the theology radically changed. In 1969, I married Glenda, a brilliant, beautiful, holiness girl whom I met when I preached for a revival in her church at the age of seventeen. I graduated from college and seminary, and later enrolled in graduate studies at IU serving as an AI in Criminal Justice.

            Glenda and I have two adult children who have graced our lives with more happiness than anyone deserves.  They survived living in a tipi for a few years with Glenda and me during our “after-market hippy” phase.  My twin brother said we were “Latter Day Hippies.”  We also have a grandson at IU who helps us stay “woke.”

            I am fortunate to have been mentored by the likes of Howard Zinn, Phil Berrigan, Helen Prejean and many other great souls who fought for peace and justice.  I have been arrested a few times for “Good Trouble.” I am  honored to be mentioned in Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States.”

            I served as Co-Minister at the UU Church of Bloomington for 13 years, retiring with Emeritus status in 2014. I also serve as Minister of Record for a man on Federal Death Row, and in 2021, I accompanied Corey Johnson in the death chamber, one of the murder victims of the Trump/Barr killing spree.  I continue to work sporadically on my memoirs, entitled, Billy Pilgrim and the Black Female Jesus.  Living gets in the way of writing, but I hope to get it done before I die.  Peace—bill

Wendy Teller writes fiction, memoir, and history. Her stories have appeared in Chicken Soup for the Soul, The Naperville Sun, and Rivulets. Her story Dusting the Towels received the Richard Eastman Prose Award. Wendy’s novels include Becoming Mia, a story of coming of age in the turbulent 1960s, and Hungarian Rhapsody, about a young woman who wants to follow her own dreams in the repressive culture of 1905 Hungary. The sequel to Hungarian Rhapsody, Hungarian Lament, was published in 2022 and she is working on the final book of her Hungarian Trilogy, Hungarian Legacy, which she hopes will be done real soon.
Wendy and her husband, science fiction writer Richard F. Weyand, live on a cliff in the woods near Bloomington, Indiana.

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