Third Street Writers set a seasonal mood at the LCAD Gallery last week
By MARRIE STONE
Photos by Jeff Rovner
A good ghost story lies at the heart of every Halloween. In that spirit, Third Street Writers hosted their 5th annual Secrets and Sins open mic reading at the LCAD Gallery on Thursday, Oct. 27. Parallel Disasters, the current dystopian art exhibition on display, provided an ideal backdrop for the many unsettling stories. Surrounded by scenes of tornados, scorpions and dilapidated homes, 12 Third Street Writers – through fiction, memoir and poetry – invited the standing room-only audience inside their own nightmares.
They evoked worlds inhabited by creepy dolls and crass parrots, a sinister neighbor burying something in his backyard after dark, a succubus and incubus and a stolen dragon bracelet drawn to life. A busload of dead schoolchildren in “Into the Woodland” moaned the haunting refrain: One of us for one of them.
Apart from the swath of spooky stories, a few readers shared some hard truths and difficult memories – lost friends and painful rifts, love that got away.
Click on photo for a larger image
Third Street Writers pose for a group photo at their 5th annual “Secrets and Sins” Open Mic Night on Thursday, Oct. 27
“I think this year’s event showcased our strongest writing ever,” said Third Street President Amy Dechary. “As a group, our workshop has focused on playing with different forms (micro fiction and micro creative nonfiction). People are pushing themselves to rework their pieces so they get distilled to the essence of a story – no fluff, just the heart of the piece. This makes for strong, impactful stories like we heard last week.”
Where do strong stories come from? What forces were at work in a writer’s imagination? Turns out, inspiration can come from anywhere, but the hard work of crafting a good story takes time, skill and lots of revisions. That’s how Third Street plays an invaluable role in so many local writers’ lives.
Life as inspiration
For several writers, life itself provided plenty of memories of both secrets and sins. The opening line of Steve Fayne’s “Crime and Punishment”: “Like many men before me, I was pulled into a life of sin by a dame.” Fayne shared the story of sneaking around with his high school girlfriend after losing the approval of her father. Because Steve had never met the man, he used a fake name, which worked well until the couple’s photo appeared in the newspaper.
“Every word of the piece is true,” said Fayne, who’s been with Third Street for four years. “The photo of Kathy and me with the real Paul Landis was in the yearbook and was picked up by Newsday for a piece they did decades later called ‘Long Island Proms of the Sixties.’ I hope her parents didn’t see it.”
Click on photo for a larger image
Steve Fayne reads from his life-inspired piece, “Crime and Punishment”
Susan Heiligman wrote “After Darkness,” set during a cold summer in Laguna, in the wake of losing an elderly friend while navigating a conflict with her son. “Under usual circumstances, we enjoy a great relationship,” said Heiligman. “Both those events brought out a sense of feeling spirits and moving forward.”
Click on photo for a larger image
Susan Heiligman reads, “After Darkness”
Barry Schweiger’s “Windows” emerged from memories of growing up during the 1950s and ‘60s. Evoking images from Hitchcock’s Rear Window and the Twilight Zone, Schweiger’s noir reading felt like being inside an old film. “I was inspired by years of cinematic radio mysteries, plus the likes of Ray Bradbury and C.S. Lewis, plus having the susceptible and active imagination of a youngster.”
Click on photo for a larger image
Barry Schweiger reads, “Windows”
Every woman knows the primal fear of walking home alone in the dark. Add to that the sinister mood that accompanies Halloween. “Like most of my writing, the root of ‘Walking Home on Halloween’ is true,” said Miranda McPhee. “I lived in New Jersey for 11 years and commuted to New York City to work.” When the bus dropped McPhee back home, it was inevitably dark.
“Commonly I use a single small thought or memory as a springboard and go for a wander in my imagination,” said the British writer, who’s been part of Third Street since 2020. “I tend to lack the self-discipline to sit down and write regularly but I like to lap-swim, so I use this time to develop and finesse ideas without any distractions.”
Click on photo for a larger image
Miranda McPhee reads, “Walking Home on Halloween”
Expanding on the perils of womanhood, Suzanne Spinelli penned both a creepy and poignant horror story about the lengths women will go for beauty. “What Perfection” took the audience inside Dr. Dee’s Apothecary where a sinister plastic surgeon developed a painful and innovative technique to restore youth and beauty.
Click open story button to continue reading…
“I drew inspiration from a variety of sources,” Spinelli said. “As women, there is a lot of pressure – from external and internal forces – to become more. More beautiful, thinner, younger. Since the pandemic, it’s been harder to return to daily rituals like coloring your hair or putting on makeup. What would it be like if we could just magically transform into our perfect selves? I was also influenced by ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ and the price Dorian paid for choosing beauty at all costs. Instead of a portrait, I thought of Barbie dolls and their idealized faces and bodies. Everything flowed from there.”
Click on photo for a larger image
Suzanne Spinelli reads, “What Perfection”
The ekphrastic muse
Ekphrastic writing is one of the purer expressions of the adage art begets art. Using any visual medium for inspiration – paintings, photos, sculptures or other artifacts – writers leap into their own fictive worlds.
“Our members have been fascinated with ekphrastic writing since the spring,” said Dechary. “Lorette C. Luzajic, editor of The Ekphrastic Review, led us through an online workshop on ekphrastic writing and then we published Art Inscribed this summer. When it came time to brainstorm ideas for Secrets & Sins, I gathered a collection of works of art and led our workshop through a series of writing activities that had them respond to these pieces.”
Dechary’s own story, “Long’s Luxury Resale,” was in response to a photo of a piece of jewelry from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection called “Chinese knotted dragon pendant – jade – 3rd century BC.” A young woman, with a penchant for shoplifting, pockets a jade bracelet from a thrift store with grave and unforeseeable consequences.
“I was fascinated by the intricate details of the dragon’s head and the lines on its body,” Dechary said. “It looked alive! The dragon’s teeth looked particularly vicious so, to me, he had to be an evil character. In my story, I made the pendant a bracelet and added a dash of evil magic. Perfect for Halloween.”
Click on photo for a larger image
Third Street Writers President Amy Dechary reads, “Long’s Luxury Resale”
Inspired by Edvard Munch’s well-known painting The Scream, Theresa Keegan penned a personal tale about enduring her adult daughter’s string of bad choices in men. One tattooed the word “L-U-S-T” on his fingers. Another walked winter’s icy streets barefoot. To put a fine point on her frustrations, Keegan delivered the piece while wearing the iconic mask (albeit an arguably more disturbing version, with lights!).
Click on photo for a larger image
Theresa Keegan brings a mother’s aggravations to life
“Mostly, I think our writers like to let loose with these pieces,” Dechary said. “Most of us don’t typically write suspense or horror, so we have fun playing with the genre and trying our best to keep our audience on the edge of their seats.”
Room to roam
Among other things, readings like these give seasoned writers space to test new ideas. Vice President Rina Palumbo, who’s been with Third Street since its inception and publishes regularly in literary journals, has been experimenting with new forms. “Visitation,” published online at Ligeia Magazine, is a story told in four parts (known as a “fractured narrative”) and structured as a countdown. To read “Visitation,” click here.
“It’s a form I’m experimenting with generally, but specifically, in this case, I wanted to emphasize the countdown from 3-2-1-zero,” she said. “I went to Catholic school, so martyrs and stigmata and visitations by angels (who may be demons) linger in my subconscious and erupt on occasion. Honestly, sometimes I don’t know what I’m writing about until I’ve written some words, and then the broader outline of a story shows up, which happened here as I wrote the middle part first.”
Click on photo for a larger image
Vice President Rina Palumbo’s “Visitation” appears online at “Ligeia Magazine”
Poet Ellen Girardeau Kempler wrote “Hazel the Color” years ago, after her second trip to Northern Ireland, Dublin and the Irish Republic’s northwest. “It struck me that hazel, with its pagan symbolism, would be a better color than emerald to describe Ireland’s connection to its history and land. I was thinking of ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ by William Butler Yeats,” Kempler said.
“As a collector of Celtic folktales, Yeats must certainly have known of the magical significance of hazel trees, which were said to grow along the borders of the Otherworld and were guarded by the fairy of poetry. Remember, in Celtic legend, fairies are malevolent beings who must never be trusted or angered. It’s a dark, superstitious mindset,” she said.
Kempler also read a humorous flash fiction piece titled “Last Wishes” about two brothers who inherit a talking parrot named Cleopatra from their womanizing father. Cleopatra is the only woman who survived him.
Click on photo for a larger image
Poet Ellen Girardeau Kempler read the poem “Hazel the Color” and a humorous flash fiction piece titled “Last Wishes”
Dennis Lockwood’s “Dreamkeeper” began with the haunting line, “I sell dreams.” “When we decided to write for a Halloween event, I was drawn to the old adage of the devil stealing souls,” Lockwood said. “So I came up with the dream sequence of the devil enticing a down-on-his-luck young man with fame and fortune. But in the end, was it a dream? It’s a fun piece to read and holds the audience’s attention.”
Click on photo for a larger image
Third Street Writer charter member Dennis Lockwood reads “Dreamkeeper”
The story behind the stories
Since their founding in 2015, Third Street Writers has published numerous anthologies and held several public readings. Their roughly 35 members have published their own work in books, journals, newspapers and online publications including Juste Milieu, Bending Genres, Milk Candy Review, Writer’s Resist and elsewhere. The group meets regularly at the Susi Q Center for classes, workshops and critique groups.
Click on photo for a larger image
Cecile Sarruf, who wrote “Into the Woodland”
“I continue to be overwhelmed by the amount of support for this project we get from our talented members and the community at large,” said Palumbo. “But I want to extend a special thank you to Bryan Heggie of LCAD, who is so incredibly generous.”
If art begets art, and writing begets more writing, the synergy between the LCAD Gallery and Third Street Writers is more than entertaining for its audience. It’s a generative space for its artists. As Dechary remarked in her opening comments, writers could spend a whole day in that space reacting to the art. But listening to those spooky stories against the backdrop of disturbing art added another layer of mysterious pleasure to the night and a perfect way to kick off the Halloween weekend.
To learn more about Third Street Writers, visit their website at www.thirdstreetwriters.org. The group meets on Mondays from 12-2 p.m. in the game room at the Susi Q Center located at 380 3rd St., Laguna Beach.