Reading at AQLF, Sister SoAmI, and Absence Management

Below there's a shot of Paul reading last night at Outwrite Books in Atlanta; he's reading one of these moving, idiosyncratic prose pieces he's been writing, lyric meditations that think and sound like poems but (mostly) don't have linebreaks. It was a warm, good-natured evening, with readings by Sister SoAmI, Dan Vera, and Alex Sanchez. Dan read a delightful poem imagining Emily Dickinson giving a reading in Boston and having a little too powerful an effect on her audience. The bookstore was hopping and lively, and you could see people out on the sidewalk streaming past behind the readers, and it all felt nicely energetic.

Sister SoAmI (see below) is one of the founders of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and she read a wonderful prose chronicle of the history of the order that somehow felt like manifesto and elegy at once.

And now I'm in a hotel room in Tulsa, just for tonight and most of the day on Saturday, for some more literary doings. Speaking of poetic, check out the mysterious portal in the photo above; it's an actual doorway in the Atlanta airport, though it seems like a surrealist office, or the visual equivalent of a Charles Simic poem. What could be behind it?