…at the Parlor in Wicker Park is one of my favorite reading series in Chicago, and I’m not just saying that because I helped to co-found it. Olivia Lilley and Timothy Moore are fabulous hosts, and the line-ups of readers and performers that the two of them bring in are always diverse and interesting, and the pieces people read always seem to have unexpected resonances with each other. For instance, today, Angela Narciso Torres read from her book Blood Orange……and then I read a salacious excerpt of O, Democracy! because I was doing a preview reading in advance of the novel’s official April 22 publication date; I also wore a patriotic owing to the book’s political subject matter:
Then Josh Young read from his play-in-poems The Holy Ghost People…
…and David Stuart McLean read from his memoir The Answer to the Riddle is Me…
…and last but far from least, Ladan Osman read from her forthcoming chapbook Ordinary Heaven…
Thanks so much to Tim and Olivia, and to everyone who came out to hear literature on a rainy Sunday afternoon.