Halloween Reading

Last night my writing program hosted a Halloween reading at the Fischer art gallery at USC. Tracy did a really nice job getting everything set up — there was wine, cheese & crackers, and chocolate laid out on a table in the courtyard, and the seats in the gallery were draped with cobwebs. I kicked things off by reading my Harry Potter poem and a short-short about an escaped prisoner who finds himself chained to a corpse. It’s hard to create a scary atmosphere in just two pages (which was the limit for this event), so most readers elected to do funny rather than scary. The funniest was Andy’s “The Cock-Blocking Ghost,” about a young man who finds himself living in an apartment haunted by the vengeful spirit of a male virgin. This ghost stymies all the narrator’s attempts to get laid, frightening away girls by moaning things like, “Gonnnorrrheeeaaa.”