The Liminal gallery (housed in the same building as Community High School) in Roanoke, Va., hosts monthly readings. They’re built around a particular theme — usually something on display in the gallery, or something students are studying.
Writers from both the school and community are invited. Most of these are short story writers, but I’ve been going — and reading organizer Cara Modisett has been kind enough to recruit students to perform my work.
For the Nov. 29, 2012 reading, the theme was based on “Children in the Shadow of Conflict: Selected Novels and Cultural Perspectives,” a course being taught at the school.
Hannah Garry performed my piece “Coyote,” about how an illegal immigrant had to pay off a “coyote” — one of the border crossing guides — to get her family across. It was inspired by a newspaper story I read some years ago about how dangerous such crossings can be because many “coyotes” are quite unscrupulous.
Immigration is a theme of another one of my works — the yet unpublished and unproduced full-length script “The Ballad of Alejandro Lopez,” which is currently under consideration at a theatre in New York.
dwayneyancey 