Be afraid, Indianapolis. Be very afraid. Because we’ve invited some of the most fiendish minds we know to Indianapolis Friday and Saturday, October 26 and 27. And they’re interested in your children.
It’s all part of our Write of the Living Dead weekend to help raise money for Second Story, the local not-for-profit organization devoted to introducing kids to creative writing. And you not only have a chance to hang out with some pretty accomplished horror writers–you can do a little work with them, as well.
Join us Friday night, October 26, for Punchnel’s Writer Night for Second Story at Service Center for Contemporary Culture and Community, where our special guests–Laird Barron, Gary Braunbeck, and Catherynne Valente–will join the winners of our Zombific(a)tion! contest to read some of their hair-raising work. (Our winners will be announced this week–so stay tuned.)
Then on Saturday afternoon at Service Center, these same writers will be hosting horror writing workshops. The cost is just $25 for an up-close-and-personal writing session, and you can choose the writer you’d like to work with:
Laird Barron is an award-winning author and poet whose novels include The Croning and The Light Is The Darkness. He spent his boyhood in Alaska, where worked as a fisherman on the Bering Sea and raced in the Iditarod three times in the 1990s. Barron was a Shirley Jackson Award winner in 2007 and 2010 for his collections The Imago Sequence and Other Stories and Occultation and Other Stories. His work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Lovecraft Unbound, The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and elsewhere. Barron has also served as managing editor of the Melic Review. He live in upstate New York.
Gary Braunbeck is the award-winning author of 19 novels, collections, and nonfiction
books; he writes mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mainstream literature. His fiction has been translated into Japanese, French, Italian, Russian, and German. Nearly 200 of his short stories have appeared in various publications, and some of his most popular stories are mysteries that have appeared in the Cat Crimes anthology series. His fiction has received several awards, including the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction in 2003 for “Duty” and in 2005 for “We Now Pause for Station Identification”; his collection Destinations Unknown won a Stoker in 2006. His novella “Kiss of the Mudman” received the International Horror Guild Award for Long Fiction in 2005. Braunbeck’s novels include Coffin County and Far Dark Fields. He is an adjunct professor at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
Catherynne Valente is the award-winner author of more than a dozen volumes of fiction and poetry, including The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making which, in 2010, became the first self-published novel to win a major literary award; it received the Andre Norton Award for YA literature before going on to become a national bestseller. Valente won a Hugo Award for Best Fan Podcast in 2012 for SF Squeecast. She lives on a small island off the coast of Maine with her husband, two dogs, one enormous friendly cat and one less enormous, less friendly one, six chickens, a red accordion, an uncompleted master’s degree, a roomful of yarn, a spinning wheel with ulterior motives, a cupboard of jam and pickles, a bookshelf full of folktales, an industrial torch, an Oxford English Dictionary, and a DSL connection.
Want to get up-close and personal with our horror writers? Register now for one of our workshops. And plan to join us all weekend long as we have such a good time, we’ll wake the undead.
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Zombie photo by iluvrhinestones from seattle, oceania, upload by Herrick (rampant) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.
