510 Reading Series at the Minas Gallery

There was standing and floor-seating room only at Hampden's Minas Gallery on Saturday evening for this month's installment of the 510 Reading Series.

The 510 Reading series occurs the third Saturday of every month and dedicates itself to showcasing authors of fiction from across the globe. Michael Kimball, local author of Dear Everybody, hosts the readings.

Reading on Saturday was Jessica Anya Blau, currently a Maryland resident and teacher at Goucher College, reading from her novel Drinking Closer to Home. Her first novel The Summer of Naked Swim Parties has been praised by such literary luminaries as John Barth. Pat King, a Baltimore resident, read from his unpublished but nearly completed autobiographical novel Exit Nothing. Tara Laskowski, a suburban D.C. resident and Pushcart Prize nominee, read from a variety of her short works, and Nik Korpon, a Baltimore resident, read from his novel Stay God.

Blau began with a rather candid indirect acknowledgment of the anxiety authors feel in getting up and reading. “Everybody who knows me knows I have to take a Klonopin before I read, and I forgot. But I took it like five minutes ago, and so this is my first reading without a Klonopin. If I seem sort of freaky, it's because it hasn't hit yet,” she said. Her admitted state of anxiety, however, didn't show. She read at a measured and comfortable pace from a work whose subject revolves around rather uncomfortable, anxious themes. Largely about the experiences of adolescent sexuality, Drinking Closer to Home draws on familial and biographical material. Though grounded in “fictionalized fact,” the lyrical strengths of the work neared the poetic, utilizing repetition as a way to generate feeling beyond plot and character.

King's Exit Nothing hinged on very different literary concerns. He was clearly influenced strongly by the world-view and stylizations of the Beats as well as Henry Miller, who was referenced multiple times in the course of the reading. In  the passages, King abandons house and home and moves in the middle of the night to Pittsburgh to live with a figure he calls The Mad Poet. Eventually finding himself in Baltimore, he continues his quest toward what appears to be a goal of literary, romantic purity.

Laskowski's was again something different altogether from the previous readings. Her work was small, compact and observational. The pieces spanned only a few pages—“microfiction” or “flash fiction.” If Blau's and King's work (and later Korpon's) depended on the exuberance of experience, hers depended on its humility and sufficiency. In one piece, she examined the effect the bourbon economy in Kentucky has on its residents and families—an examination that produced tender linguistic gems akin to the mist that hangs in distilleries above aging bourbon, called “the angels' share.” If Wikipedia had a heart, I think this is the kind of thing it would record.

Lastly, Korpon returned to the embellished real. His novel Stay God is a literary noir that's hyper-conscious of the fact that there's a whole lot of noir out there. The effect is that tropes found in other books of the same genre are nearly wholesale adopted and reorganized into what might be called a parody. Everyone slowly inhales cigarettes, smoke is exhaled from nostrils “like a cartoon bul.l” Lipstick gets left on napkins. Characters sit in bars sipping whiskey and wine and drop odd, knowing references to literature and rock albums. If Korpon fails it's for trying too hard, but maybe that's the point. Caricature is a genre all of its own these days.

Even beyond the quality of the readings, the diversity of style, authorship and content was the real mark of the evening. The 510 Reading Series succeeds in bringing a wide range into a small gallery.