“Flirting is all about getting your heart’s desire.”

Burrell is a polished woman, wearing a knee length blue dress with beaded tear-shaped cutouts. Her nails, toenails, and understated bracelet are expertly coordinated. She appears confident and engaging—not too surprising for someone in her profession.

Burrell seems to be a walking embodiment of the characters in her book—young, successful, and armed with a romantic plan. Her novel, “Single Girl Summer,” the impetus for her workshop at Listenbee, is semi-autobiographical. “Single Girl Summer” features a recently divorced woman struggling to find her footing in the dating world. Burrell herself began the story after a painful divorce, and this experience doubtless informed the novel. Like Burrell, the three main characters all have successful careers. One is a lawyer; another owns her own restaurant. Though the novel appears to have more than its fair share of romantic-novel clichés and unrealistic moments, it has an empowering core—strong, successful women, taking control of their emotional and romantic lives.

Many in the crowd at Listenbee last Friday already knew and loved Burrell’s book for this reason; others who wandered into the gallery during the course of their Second Fridays art walks were just hearing of “Single Girl Summer” for the first time. The crowd nodded attentively as they listened to Burrell speak. In the this post-Mad Men era, it may be commonsense that a woman can be successful, independent, and unabashedly flirtatious all at the same time. Still, every now and then it’s nice to have a reminder. This is such stuff as dreams and book tours are made of.

Clark and Samarov are headlining this second installment of the Seminary Co-op’s “Doppelgangers” reading series, which aims to bring together local writers with similar interests, styles, and even last names (the first installment featured Adam Levin and Sarah Levine, both local authors and SAIC faculty). With the lighting situation resolved, the two writers, monoliths in the world of ‘Chicago cab driver fiction,’ assume positions on adjacent barstools and begin to read.

Clark chooses excerpts from “Nobody’s Angel,” a work that reads as a traditional murder mystery but also functions as a historical and topographical exposition of the mean streets of Chicago. Clark himself grew up devouring the works of Raymond Chandler and Nelson Algren, citing the first three pages of Algren’s “The Man with the Golden Arm” as the work that made him want to write. This influence is noticeable in his prose, which is simple and uncluttered, and, when read in his wonderfully abrasive Chicago accent, reflects the man’s desire to capture a seedy past and in the process, tell a damn good story.

Samarov, by contrast, is more of a critical commentator, interested in recounting his experiences with stupid, drug-addled, oversexed passengers, and using these to describe the reality of being a cab driver in a bustling, metropolitan city. “Cab drivers aren’t really seen as people,” he relates. “To most, you’re just the back of a head.” This sense of alienation, Samarov adds, makes for “a behind-closed-doors” dynamic that he believes heightens the humor and intimacy of his stories. Reading from “Hack,” a collection of short stories that take place primarily in downtown Chicago, Samarov, in Bukowski-like fashion, rants about inebriated teenagers, backseat sex-fests, and his general loathing of the ‘Drive-thru’ all in an honest, humorous, and genuinely unaffected fashion.

The event concludes with a brief but illuminating Q&A session, revealing, among other things, Jack Clark’s once unmistakable resemblance to Travis Bickle (I’d buy it) and Dmitry Samarov’s grim but characteristically comical message for prospective English majors: “Be careful, you might end up working at Starbucks or, you know, driving a cab.”

Behind Ondaatje’s light-hearted demeanor is an enduring history of printed works which have brought complex emotions, empathetic characters, and moving landscapes to inspired readers for decades. His most well-known book, “The English Patient,” centers around a burn victim with hardly any knowledge of his identity, and explores the intersections of several histories and characters. The English Patient garnered the Man Booker Prize for Ondaatje, who explained at his talk that the book started with a simple setting. A patient in bed, a nurse, and the two talking—such situational elements comprise what Ondaatje calls a “keyhole” to the content of his novels.

Ondaatje, white-bearded, looked every bit the part of the authorial sage. He spoke of the writing process, and how his mind spawns a novel from a well-visualized setting—which he relies upon to provide the underpinnings for characters, themes, and plot. He also read a few selections from his poetry collection “Handwriting,” and some new fiction. With gentle intonations and an unstirred focus on his creation, Ondaatje presented three passages from “The Cat’s Table,” which was published in 2011. He shared some excellent insights, expanding on the importance of setting to his writing, and he admitted to having no official process, or formal understanding of how he writes. As evidenced by the precisely constructed work he recited, Ondaatje remains an artist in every sense of the word.

The books have been made by any and all comers: for $25, participants receive a blank sketchbook and fill its 32 pages with whatever they want. Each person chooses beforehand how they’d like to categorize the book. Choices include travelogue, atlas, almanac, and plain ol’ sketchbook. This year’s most popular category was “fill me with stories,” which describes the sketchbooks well—most seem to fall along a continuum from art object to personal story.

Jani, an art student and hairdresser from Wisconsin, had come to the exhibit to visit her own sketchbook, which took her two months to complete. As she talked about her work, “The Grey Side of Life,” she took pictures of other sketchbooks’ barcodes so she could look them up later in the project’s digital library.

At the checkout counter, a girl named Martha hugged her sketchbook, titled “Opposite day.” One hour and many trips to the checkout counter later, her mother told her, “I’m all sketchbooked out.”

Over 10,000 books were made this past year. Once participants complete and return the books, they go on an international tour that includes stops in San Francisco, Toronto, Melbourne, and Chicago. While the sketchbooks are on the road, the barcode system “checks in” with their creators whenever they’re viewed. After the tour, the books will be retired to their permanent home in the Brooklyn Art Library.

The crew travels with the books. The group claims on its website that “a great road trip is always spontaneous,” and the project’s director, Eli Dvorkin, echoed this sentiment. He talked about passing through a ghost town in Nevada on last year’s tour. “It still had an opera house left over from the gold rush days,” he said. “The whole town, which now has about seventeen citizens, gathered around the truck for an impromptu exhibit.”

(Vida Kuang)

“Our Black Year,”  a new book by writer and UofC Law School graduate Maggie Anderson, opens with the author and her Harvard-educated financier husband savoring a celebratory lobster in a chic Gold Coast restaurant. The ensuing tome, in a harshly ironic twist, expends most of its bulk following the same couple as they dodge “unsavory types,” rummage around for something edible in derelict minimarts, and crisscross the South and West sides frantically searching for nutritive food for their two young children.

No, this is not the story of a formerly affluent day-trading couple laid low by the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The Andersons’ perplexing and ultimately moving culinary desperation was entirely self-imposed. They were well off, African-American, and appalled at the egregious inequality in their racial community. To do something about it, the Andersons decided to buy exclusively from black-owned businesses for an entire year, and document every cent spent.

That this was a challenge is unsurprising. That it should be next to impossible in Chicago, the long-time center of Black America, punctures the myth of a post-racial society and illustrates an income gap that obstinately refuses to narrow.

In July 1931, when the country was mired in worse economic doldrums and Jim Crow was the entrenched and seemingly unshakable law of its lower half, W. E. B. Dubois wrote, “If we once make a religion to spend our meager income so far as possible only in such ways as will bring us employment consideration and opportunity, the possibilities before us are enormous.” Continually stymied in his relentless rhetorical push for political equality, Dubois came around to the belief that the only way to alter the racial status quo was for the black masses to more aggressively leverage their economic clout.

Eighty years later, the Andersons attempted to put Dubois’s plan into action. The couple shifted their investments to black-owned banks, switched to black physicians, and bought gift-cards from black-owned gas stations and restaurant franchises. They were determined but not unreasonable; there are no black-owned health insurance companies in the United States and they weren’t about to let their children go without it. Their receipts were then to be handed over to researchers at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, to keep tally of their progress.

As residents of Oak Park (placid, prosperous, and mostly white), the family understood that taking on this challenge would necessitate a lot of increased travel-time to the South and West sides. The first hurdle was just discovering which businesses were black—Maggie, it’s worth noting, had opted to make running the experiment into her full-time job. While there are a handful of black business directories for Chicago, they proved incomplete. The Andersons therefore were reduced to going in-person to businesses in black neighborhoods at random and asking if they were black-owned. Almost unfailingly, the answer was no.

Even a full-service grocery store proved next to impossible to locate. At the time Dubois was writing, this was the single largest category of black businesses in the United States.  After starting the project with a certain degree of publicity in May of 2009, the Andersons simply could not find one. The narrative is bookended by visits to the closest thing to an ordinary black-owned food provider they could initially locate—J’s Fresh Meats.

“Almost nothing here was worth buying,” she writes. “There were not price tags on anything and there was no meat…fresh or otherwise at J’s fresh meats.” To top it off, this dubious oasis attracted the kind of clientele that often made Maggie Anderson unwilling to get out of her car.

For a time, the Andersons found a supermarket and became fast-friends with its African-American owner.  Within months, however, it became clear that the Andersons were among his few regular customers.  They organized fundraisers at their church and received many verbal statements of support from a theoretically galvanized black community, but in the end few people proved willing to ditch Jewel or Publix on principal.  Eventually (mercifully toward the end of the Anderson’s economic odyssey) the store was shuttered and the Andersons were forced, frustrated, to resume their urban foraging.

Food was not the only basic necessity the Andersons found in short supply. The Anderson adults were able to rely for the most part on a pre-set stock of clothing, but their daughters had no such luxury. With growing girls and no black-owned children’s clothiers, essentials like new shoes were aggravatingly hard to come by. There were also fewer visits to Chuck-E-Cheese (a hardship this reviewer takes to heart).

The book makes an incisive and important argument, but there are distracting elements. Occasionally, the seriousness of the disparity Anderson is trying to dramatize is undermined by a tone that has trouble finessing the boundary between motivational and preachy. When confronted in a gas station by a drink-sodden pan-handler looking to trade food-stamps for habit-sustaining cash, Ms. Anderson publically upbraids him before treating the reader to a series of pages on how he has failed the civil rights movement. When approaching a woman with a toddler behind the register, Mrs. Anderson “also noticed—because it is [her] habit to look whenever [she] see[s] a  young Black woman who appears to be a mother—that she wore no wedding ring.”

Accounts of the married couple’s domestic bliss and surprise at its reluctance to unspool under strain continue long after the point has been made. There are also a few too many remarks along the lines of,  “John was dying without his bagels. I missed my sun-dried tomatoes, feta and boursin cheese, and ahi tuna.”

This is understandable, and honestly sounds delicious, but given that much of the book laments the food deserts that force African-Americans to eat junk or schlep to white communities to get basic foodstuffs, the pining for boursin cheese is perhaps better left out of print.

These are minor quibbles, but the central charge that has been leveled at the experiment since its inception, namely that its pro-black aims and assumptions are racist, is patently ludicrous. Maggie Anderson chronicles the discomfiting frequency with which this slander was raised by both blacks and whites. The fact that any person could say this with a straight face, displays a level of ignorance about the nature of the divide that this book does much to correct.

The ripple effects of even a little extra cash flowing into embattled black businesses could, over time, transform neighborhoods. After reading “Our Black Year,” no one can deny the scope of the problem. Of the few black owned firms around, 40% of them operate in the red. In the book’s epilogue, Anderson reveals that since she and her husband ended the experiment, many of the places that sustained them have since gone out of business. Bronzeville coffee is gone, though Kimbark liquor, as many readers will be aware, isn’t going anywhere.

At a time when the country is singing a hymn to a post-racial era and the Supreme  Court appears poised to strike down Affirmative Action of any sort, economic barriers to black success are more formidable than ever before. The U. S. Census Bureau reported that the median net worth for a black household in 2009 was $2,200 while for whites it was $98,000. That’s not a typo, it’s the largest racial wealth chasm ever recorded.

Claire Hungerford/Ethan Tate

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The sound of children sets Fenn House apart from its neighbors. A sunny Friday afternoon on a week when schools are out for spring break elicits inevitable shouts and laughter from children pouring out of the house. They duck in and out of a  wooden makeshift lean-to erected on the front lawn, a tribute to 1968’s Resurrection City in Washington D.C. and 2012’s Occupy movement in Chicago.

Currently, the space is home to the Southside Hub of Production (SHoP). Just as the modest wooden structure in the yard at 57th and Woodlawn brings together events from different times and places, SHoP was intended from its beginnings in October 2011 to provide a meeting point for differing perspectives. “We wanted to pull people of different backgrounds and ages and social backgrounds, drawing them into one space so that they might make connections they didn’t think they could make before,” Laura Shaeffer, SHoP’s creative director, explains.

To that end, SHoP has carefully cultivated a relationship with artists and residents of Hyde Park. No stranger to the neighborhood’s art community, this relationship was built upon SHoP’s previous guise as the Op Shop, a nomadic project which moved from storefront to storefront throughout the neighborhood. Shaeffer describes the valuable lessons learned through Op Shop’s four iterations.

“Because they were on four different corners on four different streets, you really got to know the demographics and how they do shift between blocks,” she says. “I learned so much about my community and my neighborhood through the Op Shop, and I thought it was very successful.”

She continues, “On the practical level, though, one seeks some kind of stability, and it became very obvious to me that the ideas that were the focal points of our projects needed a longer time to develop. To have a communitybuilding center, you really need longer than one month.”

Traditions and projects which have benefited from having a permanent space in Fenn House include weekly Sunday night potlucks and a small thrift store which, stocks everything from personally drawn postcards to luxurious men’s coats.

SHoP’s current arrangement, however, will soon be coming to an end in the summer with the expiration of their lease from the Unitarian Church. For Shaeffer, this new uncertainty about her own artistic future is both exciting and nerve-wracking.

On one hand, she explains that moving away from the current location allows for the next stage in the evolution of her long-term artistic project. In her view, projects like SHoP need to change with the needs of a community. “I really do treasure the freedom in being able to revisit something from a different perspective,” says Shaeffer. “There’s a freedom in not having a manifesto, and instead being responsive to the community.”

Yet, it is uncertain that the organization will find its next location in Hyde Park. They are in talks with Alderman Willie Cochran for a possible move to an open lot in Woodlawn—a change that would pose new questions for SHoP.

“When you go to a new neighborhood, you’re committed to understanding and learning about it. Woodlawn would be very different in feel and demographics, history and politics, and so we would require a new relationship with the community,” Shaeffer says. Even though her community art would have to adapt to these new surroundings, she insists that she would welcome a challenge of this nature.

What seems likely is that the new project will be centered on children and the ways in which they engage with artwork. For her next project, Shaeffer envisions a junkyard playground, a concept adapted from Denmark in the wake of the Second World War. Though a vacant lot in Woodlawn is a far cry from the rubble caused by global war, she still sees a great potential in children learning about subjects like woodworking. Ultimately, she hopes the children can put those lessons into practice by building something themselves.

This would, however, be old territory for Shaeffer and her partners in SHoP. The educative possibilities of art are already at the forefront of their installations, and much work has gone into making their current Fenn House a space for play. Time and again, this passion for engaging with children and families shines through when Shaeffer speaks. Much of this can be attributed to her own dual responsibilities as an artist and a parent, a tension which she wanted to solve in setting up SHoP.

“SHoP was always meant to be an intergenerational space, focusing a lot on the family. It’s a space where you can come with kids, or where you can even come as an older person to interact with children,” she explains.

“We need to be artists and parents at the same time and we cannot separate that,” she continues. “It’s enlivening to come into a space that is full of voices and cries. It’s fairly chaotic sometimes! But it’s orchestrated chaos.”

It is thus unsurprising that Fenn House is nearly always filled with the sound of giddy children dashing about. While their current space is well-endowed with plenty of space and a large, welcoming yard, there is the distinct possibility that the next location will be much smaller. To Shaeffer, such a transition wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.

“We’re in a mansion now, and maybe I won’t need a mansion when I move!”

Underneath these tangled issues of location, neighborhood, and community lies the central question: What is home? It is a question she has sought to answer through the art on display at the Southside Hub, most notably in “This House Is Not a Home,” an installation which opened at the end of February. “We wanted to talk about home, and then broadening that to what makes the feeling of being at home, even if that home isn’t necessarily a physical structure,” she states. “Places like prison become your home but are not your home at the same time, so we wanted to open it up as broadly as we could.”

The pressures of being an artist and having a family at the same time also came to the fore, she says, because “some of the people in the show talked about how to be an artist and a person who has a family, and how to involve your children in that creative process.”

It therefore becomes clear that her immediate artistic interests are deeply intertwined with the larger fate of SHoP, and her life more generally. It is only fitting, then, that the last show before their move away from Fenn House will be anchored by the idea of leaving.

“The last show we’re going to title “On How Much Things Matter,” and it’ll be about ends,” she says. “We do not want this to be heavy and somber, but we wanted to end with thought and reflection on endings. What we leave behind, what we take with us, how we leave spaces.”

To leave, however, one needs a destination. Shaeffer is still unsure where that will be, and how a move away from Fenn House would be financed. She offers up a variety of possible routes, ranging from the realistic to the relatively far-fetched.

“There’s the possibility that an angel sweeps down and decides that he needs to buy this building because the Southside Hub is serving the larger community and bringing people together through the arts,” she says hopefully. “Or there’s the possibility that ten people decide to invest in this space because this building isn’t going to lose its value and it’s a good investment.”

Yet, regardless of the outcome, she remains optimistic. “Otherwise, we all leave and pack up, enjoy the wonderful year and know it was a great ending. The lease is up on July 31st, and I’m very sure everything will be clear by mid-July.”

(Jane Fentress)

Last Wednesday at ten of three, a small group had already started to gather around the locked doors of an out-of–the way University of Chicago classroom a full forty minutes before vaunted Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton was scheduled to give a lecture entitled “The Death of Criticism?” Though a quick search for the event yielded nothing but a broken link to the university events calendar, posters around campus had quietly announced the lecture and word had spread.

As the crowd grew larger, one young woman, notebook in hand, said determinedly, “We are not going to get stuck with seats in the back,” and dragged her companion closer to the door.  Once the room had opened, it became clear that getting any seats at all would be a challenge. The back corners of the conference room quickly became standing room only, and many who arrived on time stood in the hallway, craning to see inside. When UofC professor and director of the Nicholson Center for British Studies Bradin Cormack apologized for not expecting such a large turnout, someone standing in the back let out an audible, exasperated, “Why not?”

The question was begged yet again when professor Maud Ellmann pointed out in her introduction that Eagleton is a rare “public intellectual,” the type who could pack a lecture hall at any university. After reminiscing about their days singing communist anthems in pubs at Oxford, Ellmann cited Eagleton’s work on literary theory and religion (he has authored over 40 books), praising his “lifelong campaign against capitalism.” Indeed, though he only quoted Marx once, Eagleton situated his problems with modern cultural and literary criticism in the framework of capitalism. He rejected the need to create a justification for art as a product of our obsession with use-value and condemned the treatment of language as a mere structure of meaning rather than a textured experience. Ultimately, Eagleton lamented the commodification of culture as a replacement for religion and as a new social foundation, saying, “culture is of our nature, but I don’t think it’s identical to it.”

Throughout the lecture, Eagleton peppered his claims with self-deprecation and cracks at pop culture and politics, pointing out that “there is more in religion than can be dreamt of in Rick Santorum’s philosophy.” After his conclusion, the first hands were in the air before the applause had died down. Eagleton answered questions on his teacher Raymond Williams, his opinion on the clashes within contemporary Marxism, and his personal cultural identity. It was apparent that the audience was more interested in the speaker than in his arguments—the proletariat had spoken.

“It’s a very scary disease,” says Hedreen, a writer, filmmaker, and first-time participant in the national conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). “Brain Trust” was one of the many off-site events that was held during the conference last weekend. Hedreen found writers through the AWP off-site events page, and secured the venue through an old friend. Hedreen is particularly concerned about the fear and silence surrounding Alzheimer’s disease, which affects 5.1 million American families, and wanted to reach out to other writers who are addressing memory loss in their work.

The readers at “Brain Trust” came from around the country to attend the AWP conference. Drawn by Hedreen’s advertising on the AWP page, they decided to dedicate an hour to readings on the difficult topics of Alzheimer’s and dementia. The readers and the audience were excited to meet each other, heartened by the discovery of a community. And though the room buzzed with caffeine and conversation, the atmosphere was more subdued at “Brain Trust” than at the typical AWP reading. Not only were the readers generally a bit older—there were as many professors as MFA students—but the subject matter demanded serious treatment and had affected almost all of the writers’ lives. Sporting sweaters, nice scarves, and an air of solemnity, for the scheduled hour they read memoirs, poems, and novel excerpts. They all seemed to know the physical details of this terrible disease, which affect the brain’s ability to think, plan, and remember. They are also cognizant of what it feels like when a beloved relative’s memory has deteriorated so far they can no longer remember the names of those closest to them.

They are all part of a sort of tribe, one reader said, “a club they shouldn’t have to belong to.” Each of them had a family member affected by Alzheimer’s or dementia, and many served as caregivers. Their writing was informed by the experience: one poem expounded on the fast-slow pattern of memory loss shown in an Alzheimer’s patient, and an excerpt from a novel used clumps of text to reproduce what goes on in the mind of an Alzheimer’s patient.

The featured writer for the night was Alice LaPlante, who just finished her first novel, titled “Turn of Mind.” When her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she tried to cope with the disease’s effects on her and her family by writing. “I couldn’t really get anywhere with my private writing until I started fictionalizing it,” she said. Her novel, a murder mystery told from the point of view of an Alzheimer’s patient who is the primary suspect in the case, attempts to “push the reader in the space” of an Alzheimer patient’s brain. While her book jacket describes the novel as “unputdownable,” LaPlante says that the plot is only incidental. LaPlante’s novel, instead, helped her to connect to the mind of her ailing mother, making bearable through fiction what was unbearable in reality.

The readers all discussed coping strategies, both pragmatic and spiritual. One reader suggested trying to fill in a patient’s memory working from the edges in, like a puzzle. Another reclaimed medical jargon by describing the plaque that forms around the neurons of a brain affected by Alzheimers as “twisted like morning glory vines.”

While the styles and formats of each of these works differed, the authors reached a kind of communion in words. These writers, together, translated a painful experience of loss into the world of literature. One poet described how, in her attempts to see a silver lining in caretaking, she imagined that her dad’s memories weren’t leaving him, but instead going to be kept somewhere else, on some hidden planet. Another, reflecting on the manner in which Alzheimer’s patients seem to be stuck repeating the same moments over and over, suggested that maybe they were just repeating it until they got it right.

Martinez-Cruz was much more modest about her achievement. She thanked the artists and musicians of Pilsen in a brief speech before the 18th Street crowd at Harbee Liquor and Tavern. “You make Pilsen a safe space to think and feel,” she said, speaking highly of her community but barely mentioning her book, an examination of the intellectual life of Mesoamerican women. Her friends, however, were happy to do it for her. “Her book is the first of its kind,” said Shereen Ilahi, professor of history at North Central College, where Martinez-Cruz teaches Spanish. She described it as “seminal and groundbreaking.”

Martinez-Cruz’s friends extend beyond the walls of academe, of course, and plenty of her less tweeded pals came out for the release party. José Villareal and Rotten Finko (whom Villareal described as “one of probably two or three true punk rockers in Chicago”) of the band Rotten Finko and the Convicts were there to show support as well. “I admire her so much,” Villarreal said. “She’s done something most Latinos have never done.”

The release party doubled as an exhibit where local artists Eric García, Nuco Villanueva, and Thelma Uranga displayed their work. García’s political cartoon entitled “Tragic Love Story” hung on the wall, illustrating the bad romance between Uncle Sam and a frightened-looking woman marked “Illegals.” A skateboard designed by Villanueva featured a skeletal Virgin of Guadalupe, and a photo by Uranga took the large “Mexico” sign of a border patrol stop as its subject. The art in the venue that night exemplified the theme that ran through the event: Chicano identity, and the strength of collective memory.

“My book was very much born in Pilsen,” Martinez-Cruz said. “This is a place of energy and thought.”

Rebecca Stoner

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“Did you bring anything to read?” author Brendan Detzner asked as guests walk into Bad Grammar Theater, which also happens to be his home. Detzner and fellow author Mike Penkas were standing behind a table where their books and T-shirts are displayed for sale. Behind them was an unmade futon with a partially eaten pepperoni pizza nearby, and Macbook Air perched on a desk.

Bad Grammar hosts the only reading series that is part of Second Fridays in Pilsen. But the DIY appeal of Bad Grammar sets it apart from the chic vintage stores and funky, polished galleries that participate in the monthly art crawl. Detzner welcomes strangers into the top floor of his home, encouraging them to add their own stories to the evening’s program. Stories are read every half hour. They usually last 15-20 minutes, and then the audience disperses to chat. People tend to stay for a few stories, and then wander out for snacks or to visit other Second Fridays events. Many return later to hear more.

Bad Grammar does not require its authors to bring in fully polished finished products, so it’s easy for newcomers to walk right in. The work presented is far from amateurish, but the best way to describe the reading group is rough around the edges: they haven’t quite yet mastered the Chicago literary scene, but that doesn’t mean they don’t show promise.

As Penkas introduced the first story, he peered at the audience and asked, “How many of you are new here tonight?” Several of the guests seated in mismatched chairs around him raise their hands. “Shoot,” he said, and joked, “If I’d known, I would have just read some of my old stuff.” Although popular belief indicates that readings tailor the intellectual elite, the atmosphere in Detzner’s home was comfortable and inviting, a stage where storytelling is the focus and elaborate pomp is unnecessary.

Detzner got the idea for the monthly series after meeting talented Chicago authors through reading events at the former Edgewater bookstore Kate the Great’s. When a few of his favorite readings shut down earlier this year, Detzner decided, “It’s my turn to hold the football.”

Since many established readings are held in the Lincoln Park area, Detzner liked the idea of having an authors’ hub south of Roosevelt. He found this angular duplex in Pilsen, in the heart of the Chicago Arts District, and thought, “Hey, maybe some people will want to stop in and hear a story.” The location has a few distinct advantages, he says. “Most events have to persuade people to leave their homes and come across town. All we have to do is entice some of the hundreds of people who’ve already decided to come out to Second Fridays to walk fifteen feet.”

Detzner hopes the event will improve the visibility of local authors. He feels that he and many of the readers at Bad Grammar have been “screwed over by small presses,” who are quick to reject work from fledgling writers and provide little support to help promote and distribute their work. Having written two novels, Detzner says he wouldn’t mind selling some copies through the readings.

But Bad Grammar is about more than selling books. Detzner sees the value in reading before an audience, and believes it can actually improve the quality of the writing. He claims that reading his own work “makes me raise my standards when I’m writing,” and appreciates feedback from “people who don’t have any particular expectations or theory, and just know if they like what they heard or not.” He wants to extend the opportunity for this kind of productive criticism to other writers, in part because he thinks it can “provide a good incentive to not be self-indulgent or boring.”

The subject matter of the stories to follow ranged from zombies to the guilt faced by a drug dealer who believes he killed Kurt Cobain. Many of the pieces were humorous, shading into the realm of the absurd. The first story, for instance, featured a misanthropic nursing home attendant who described a knife fight between two residents as an impromptu production of West Side Story.

That night, the sparse turnout required Detzner to shoulder the responsibility of most of the reading. Penkas contributed one story, and an audience member named Brandon Sichling read his poem called, “Let’s Hear it For Menstruation.” Detzner seemed surprised by the low attendance. “I don’t know what’s up with tonight,” he said, “I’ve had like five readers before.”

Like many of the stories presented at the reading, Bad Grammar is still in development. Detzner hopes to attract more authors and a larger crowd, and to establish a warmer, more inviting atmosphere. Despite the Facebook event’s assertion that this is an event for both established and emerging authors, it seems that Detzner and his friends are still trying to establish their own niche in Chicago’s literary world. It’s a hard scene to break into, but it is, fortunately, willing to embrace authors who lack the benefit of a big name. Detzner admits that many of them are “still trying to make it work.” Bad Grammar’s a good start.

Bad Grammar Theater. 1743 S. Halsted St. Every second Friday of the month, 6-10pm.