VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a literary gathering?

MOSKOVICH: Nothing unusual to declare at the border on my behalf. We came, we read, we conquered.

Yelena Moskovich is a Ukrainian-born American and French novelist and playwright, author of The Natashas (Serpent’s Tail UK 2016, Dzanc Books US 2018) and the upcoming second novel, Virtuoso (Serpent’s Tail, 2019). Her short story, “Marlene or Number 16,” won the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize in 2016. Her plays have been produced in the US, Vancouver, Paris, and Stockholm. She’s also written for The New Statesman, The Happy Reader, 3:AM Magazine, and in French for Mixt(e) magazine. She currently lives in Paris.

Come see Yelena read at Book Show in Highland Park on Friday, April 13 at 7:30pm. 

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a literary gathering?

O’CONNOR: I did a reading and Q&A will Eddie Muller in San Francisco and a troubled woman in the audience stood up to ask a question. Or not so much to ask a question as to make a statement. And not a statement about my work, really, but about her life and her troubles and it made everyone in the room (including me) incredibly uncomfortable, except for Eddie, who handled it with grace and dignity, both for all of us and for her. Afterward I thanked him for this and he said, “She just wanted to be heard.” I’ve thought a lot about that night and that woman and what Eddie said, and it’s helped inform my own life going forward, as well as a short story from this current book, and the next novel.

Scott O’Connor is the author of A Perfect Universe: Ten Stories, the novels Untouchable and Half World and the novella Among Wolves. He has been awarded the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, and his stories have been shortlisted for the Sunday Times/EFG Story Prize and cited as Distinguished in Best American Short Stories. Additional work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Zyzzyva, The Rattling Wall, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He teaches creative writing at Cal State Channel Islands and for Writing Workshops LA.

Come see Scott read at Book Show in Highland Park on Friday, April 13 at 7:30p

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a literary gathering?

WALLEN: Hosting a DimeStories anniversary in a church hall,  I had to deal with one James Lee, a human trafficker, who guzzled multiple large red plastic cups of wine, then on stage stomped his heavy steel-toed Korean army boots while ranting about killing the dirty children of our overpopulated planet while waving his manifesto, then was drug down the aisle of the church to the curb where the police arrested him. We got a restraining order to keep him from attending any more of our events, but a year later I watched on the news when he strapped a bomb to his chest, carried a gun and other ammunition into the Washington DC Discovery Channel building, kidnapped the TV show’s staff, then was shot and killed by the SWAT team. You can read his manifesto online.

Amy Wallen is associate director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute and teaches creative writing at the University of California, San Diego Extension. Her first novel was a Los Angeles Times bestseller which she read from at a Vermin on the Mount event in LA’s Chinatown in 2007. She loves cemetery walks and will do almost anything for a bag of peanut M&Ms. Not plain.

Come see Amy read at Book Show in Highland Park on Friday, April 13 at 7:30pm. 

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a literary gathering?

HENDERSON: I was at one of Amanda Stern’s Happy Ending series, where Ben Percy bench-pressed Amanda. Then Roy Kesey went up to read. He called me from the audience to assist. And I had to shave his legs while he read. And by “shaving his legs,” he meant putting tape on them and then ripping them off.

Susan Henderson is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is the author of two novels, The Flicker of Old Dreams and Up from the Blue, both published by HarperCollins. Susan lives in Kings Park, New York and blogs at the writer support group, LitPark.com.