From behind a black music stand, fantasy writer Shayne Laughter used dramatic narration and character voices to examine multiple realities during First Sunday Prose at Boxcar Books.
“These worlds are interdependent but invisible from one another,” Laughter said.
Writers gathered yesterday afternoon at the book shop to entertain an audience of about 10 people with a combination of fantasy, mystery and free-form writing.
Laugter’s short story was a police-style fairy tale about the woodsman and wolf from “Little Red Riding Hood.”
She said the setting of a mystical forest is where the fantasy of magical powers can be used to analyze reality.
She likes to write about the people who use or discover their supernatural connections to nature or other people.
Shapeshifting, for example, is a power that examines illusion and reality, she said.
Her work often adds subtle commentary about parallel worlds. She said conflict is necessary, because without a struggle of power forces, neither really needs to exist.
There is no official theme for any of the Sundays, though they occur regularly month to month at the book shop. Event sponsor Joan Hawkins said she tries to find three writers whose works are fairly similar, but there is not always a pattern.
“It might be very eclectic,” she said.
First Sunday Prose offers writers a chance to share their work in a live setting that is not often available for them, Hawkins said. Poetry readings are often available for the community, but the opportunities for prose writers to share their work with people are less common.
Although she did not perform, Hawkins writes prose and said she notices the effect of the work changes with this type of immediate feedback.
“You feel very different about your writing after reading it out loud to an audience,” Hawkins said.
In his stories, author Ray Zdonek writes about a shock-jock DJ who uses his friendship with a state policeman to become involved with crimes and mysteries in the area.
Zdonek said his mystery writing takes some inspiration from his own passions. He said he is from Gary, Indiana, and volunteers for WFHB, and his main character, although more extroverted than Zdonek, is a jazz DJ at a radio station in the Gary area. Zdonek chooses to write about Gary to help people learn about the area other than through what they read about it in the news.
Zdonek explained to listeners that he picked a passage from one of his novels that showed character rather than action to help listeners better understand the tone of his work.
Zdonek said he began writing mystery novels about five years ago. He first started his career by writing poetry but later decided to expand his skills. He has read mysteries since he was a teen and figured he knew enough about the genre to add to it himself. As he learned his own novel-writing process, he learned that it was very different from writing poetry, Zdonek said.
While inspiration for poetry comes whenever he feels the need to express different emotions, mystery is more immersive for him.
“It’s become so self-involving that you forget where you are and who you are,” Zdonek said.
