From Outwrite DC 2019: previews of "Mostly Dead Things" and "Disease"

I visited OutwriteDC Saturday (14^th and U St NW Washington) for two hours.

  

There was a science-fiction-horror reading session in the “living room” with the view of U St.  

  

 Unfortunately the group's website doesn’t have all the program details. There were four or five authors, mostly trans or female.  There was one author from Minneapolis (where I lived 1997-2003). The best reading was the last one, a heterosexual erotica where the woman has set up physical traps, which prostitutes in Vietnam actually did during the Vietnam war (yes, I did hear about this when I was in the Army 1968-1970, a preview of gays in the military.)

Then I went to Kristen Harnett’s session in the “dining room”.

She talked about her experience getting caught in a power failure while in Wisconsin.

I bought her novel “Mostly Dead Things”, 356 pages, Tinhouse press, hardcover.  The novel appears to be a dark comedy about a woman whose father runs a taxidermy shop, and her misadventures when he suddenly commits a very public suicide.

I bought another book “Disease”, by Hans M. Hisrchi, from Beaten Track Publishing, paper, 204 pages. The author lost his mother to Alzheimer’s.  But the book is a first person fictional account of a man in a same-sex marriage who gradually slips away to Alzheimer’s, with an afterword from the husband. It’s pretty hard to imagine what your consciousness is during the end but I will find out when I read it. I could imagine the same concept with ALS;  a cousin died of it in early 2018.