Last night, there was a strange gathering at Eyedrum, an Atlanta gallery.(By strange I mean, men in blood-spattered tank tops, a nurse wearing white leather and platform shoes, and the plastic corpses piled in the corners.)
The gallery, Eyedrum, is located on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. If you have read any of my novels, you will know that I know MLK Dr. like the back of my hand. Or so I thought. Eyedrum is on the *other* side of MLK, near the Oakland Cemetery which houses such dead celebrities as Margaret Mitchell and Maynard Jackson. Who knew there were galleries, lofts, etc way out there? Not me, and not Natasha Trethewey who was riding shotgun.
Existential Question: What is urban renewal? When you get lost in your own hometown.
But enough of my musing. The point of the gathering (and the point of the post) was to celebrate the winners of this year’s Creative Loafing Atlanta Fiction Contest. (The theme of the contest was BLOOD, which accounts for all the party-strangeness.)
After serving as one of the judges, it was a great pleasure to meet the writers in the flesh after first meeting them on the page. Congrats to Brett Bender and the other winners! You can find their stories on the CL web site.