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Bluegrass Writers Studio
521 Lancaster Ave
Mattox 101
Richmond, KY, 40475-3102
Phone: 859-622-6263
Fax: 859-622-3156
r-dean.johnson@eku.edu

November 2014

Kicking into the Infinite Abyss

By Kristen Thompson, Associate Coordinator, Bluegrass Writers Studio

Anyone familiar with my literary ways knows that I’m a devotee of Dr. Peter Mark Roget. Roget was sort of the Charlie Brown of the 19^th century. He was a gloomy, sullen sort who most certainly would’ve fallen prey annually to the Van Pelt swiping of the Thanksgiving football, landing on his back with an untranslatable sound of anguish.

By all reports, his melancholy was not entirely his fault, but had roots in the depression, schizophrenia, and suicide in his family. So his pathology was perhaps a bit more involved than a 5-cent diagnosis at a sidewalk stand (nickels! nickels! nickels!), but the result was the same: a quest to make sense of the madness.

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Jen Parks Writes a Novel, part 3: A Tale of Two Cities

By Jen Parks, Bluegrass Writers Studio

It’s five-thirty in the morning on a Tuesday, and my alarm has just gone off. Though I don’t work today, I should get up, do some yoga, or stumble, sleepy-eyed down the stairs into the kitchen to make the kids’ lunches. Instead, I close my eyes against the long day of reading and writing and chores looming ahead of me, knowing that my head won’t fall back upon this pillow until almost midnight.

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Pen Name: Sara Tonin

By Kelley Davidson, Graduate Assistant, Bluegrass Writers Studio

When I was seventeen I started crying, and I didn’t stop for almost ten years.

I became vegetarian a few years prior to this, and my newfound “consciousness” quickly consumed me with infinite compassion for every creature I saw. I couldn’t take a step through my backyard without thinking of the anthills I was crushing deep under cover of grass, and subsequently stopped lying languorously in the sunshine, stopped picking through the blades in search of four-leafed clovers. I practically stopped going outside altogether. I stayed in my room where I, a human, the worst kind of creature on earth, couldn’t hurt anything. I skipped school (a LOT) and wrote long (and terrible) manifestos about how the Black Plague was probably a blessing, “because, like, look at all the humans it killed.”