So, thanks to the wonderful Theresa Beckhusen, I read at Indy Reads Books, a lovely bookstore in Indianapolis, and also led a WordLab session there. The bookstore itself is lovely–the photos below don’t really do it justice–and I can’t say enough about how kind and accommodating the staff was.
The reading and WordLab session went well (to read a summary of the character-mapping exercise I led, click here). We had a good crowd, and they were game for just about anything, which is a fantastic energy for a teacher to work with. It’s been a while since I’ve done a reading, and I was happy to learn that I wasn’t as rusty as I’d feared.
Sal and Theresa gave me a whirlwind tour of Indianapolis. Honestly, I had no idea what to expect. I visited Purdue’s campus back in 1998 (for Triennium, for those of you who know what that is), but that’s about it. I must say that Indianapolis is one of the cleanest and most progressive cities I’ve ever visited. By “progressive,” I mean that things are improving steadily there. They have an active literary scene. There are a number of new restaurants featuring locally sourced beer and meats. There’s a huge brewing scene in Indianapolis, which means every restaurant has 12-300 craft beers on tap. There’s also a healthy cycling and outdoorsy community there. Being from Pittsburgh, I couldn’t help but marvel at all the space they have. Also, since the city’s laid out on a grid, you can just look at something in the distance and directly drive there. Try that anywhere in Allegheny County and you’ll end up in a river.
Some highlights:
Suntory Whiskey actually exists. Sal built a fire and we drank about a gallon of it. It was magical.
Visiting Hero House, a great comics store in downtown. I bought Issue #1 of Outcast and a copy of Don Lomax’s Gulf War Journal.
The Indiana State Fair. They had a number of “selfie stations” set up. I got one in front of a hog farm, and also took one with the Soybean mascot. It took several tries, considering the sheer size of the costume.
At Fat Dan’s restaurant, eating a rack of ribs off a sheet of butcher paper, with thick brown high school-cafeteria paper towels as napkins.
We didn’t have time to visit the Kurt Vonnegut museum downtown. So it goes.
Every time a character swore in the new Dragonball Z movie (“That talking purple cat is a real bastard”), you could hear everyone in the theater clucking in disapproval.
The new Dragonball Z movie features a talking purple cat.