Story Slam at the Blue Chair

Last night I took a visitor out for a typical Edmonton evening - a story slam at the Blue Chair Cafe. These happen once a month - 10 writers sign up and they read their 5-minutes-or-fewer story to the crowd. There are 5 volunteer judges in the audience, and the stories get rated. A hat is passed and at the end of the night - voila! The winner gets a cash prize.

Last night's winner was Mark Ramsden, and he happens to be one of my students at MacEwan. I can take no credit for his talents. He isn't in one of my writing classes.

The chocolate mousse turned out to be gluten free and corn free, and it was the perfect topper to an earlier spicy chicken curry soup. The stories were in general palatable, but I was wondering why so many men write about being drunk or on drugs. Do they think the audience finds it as interesting as they do? Not me! I get plenty of exposure to alcoholics around here, so I prefer to hear about something else. Oh, maybe it was the thing to talk about back when drinking/drug culture was seen as the emerging literary force - all that Burroughs and Bukowski et al - which isn't much different from the opium culture of Coleridge's time. In the hands of a good writer, it can be interesting. It's not the content that attracts; it's the skill of the writer. Too many men don't seem to think abut that before they put pen to paper and outline their youthful indiscretions.

At the end of the evening, as everyone was paying their bills and heading out into the half-hearted snowy night, a young man stopped at our table. He had been watching the televised 3-Day Novel series the night before - the episode where one of the judges rapped me for what he saw as racism with regard to something I said to the band in preparation for the reading challenge. The young man wanted to tell me he thought the judge was wrong and that I was robbed. I really appreciated that.