LITERATURE + LECTURES

Join DiverseWorks as we gather at Big Star Bar for the first night of a new series called Slinging Ink. Four readers have been selected to read their own short-form writing on a single theme. This round’s theme is I was looking for a job, and then I found a job, and Heaven knows I’m miserable now.

Slinging Ink promotes not just creative writing, but also short forms like memories, reports, notes, letters, recommendations, lesson plans, proposals, complaints and confessions.

Submissions included fiction and real-life stories about quitting, getting fired, or holding on for dear life to an awful job just to pay the bills. Writers focused on first days, workplace injuries, questionable judgments, and ordinary tedium. A blind panel selected four readers for the competition. We are please to have John Wayne Comunale, Wanda Harding, Dean Liscum, and John Pluecker to read their works.

The audience at Slinging Ink will decide who wins a $100 cash prize by the volume and enthusiasm of applause at the end of the night.

John Wayne Comunale spends his time playing guitar and singing in local Houston rock/experimental acts Letters to Voltron and Harem Festival while helping run Omega Prophet Promotions. He is also a co-host of the weekly comedy podcast, Never Buy a Stripper a Drink, where they give what for to ‘The Man’ for sticking it to us until they devolve into some random topic made up of depraved and unintelligible tangents. He writes primarily in the ‘bizarro’ genre of fiction with stories ranging from: the creation of the ‘Public Execution Industry’ to, sex, metal, magic prostitutes, hell, and the corruption of pretty much everything.

Wanda Harding is a reformed computer programmer and is happy exploring many art forms – photography, painting, poetry and essay writing. She lives inside the loop with her husband, seven-year old daughter and tabby cat. She’s always hoping for the possible.

Dean Liscum works in the marketing department of a large, multi-national company. When he’s not pimping his metaphors out for pennies, he writes for Robert Boyd’s local arts blog. He’s been published in Arts Houston magazine, The PanHandler, and possibly other now defunct periodicals, zines, websites/webholes that he’s too lazy to look up or too unambitious to fake.

John Pluecker is a writer, interpreter, educator and translator. His work is informed by experimental poetics, radical aesthetics and cross-border cultural production and has appeared in journals and magazines in the U.S. and Mexico, including the Rio Grande Review, Picnic, Third Text, Animal Shelter, HTMLGiant and Literal. He has published more than five books in translation from the Spanish, including essays by a leading Mexican feminist, short stories from Ciudad Juárez and a police detective novel. There are two chapbooks of his work, Routes into Texas (DIY, 2010) and Undone (Dusie Kollektiv, 2011).