Seersucker Live: fun, games and literary reading
Written by Megan Balser.
Photo by Katherine Rountree.
Last night, SCAD and the Seersucker Live team joined up to host “The Art School Episode.” Alongside Seersucker members Erika Jo Brown and B.J. Love, the SCAD writing faculty read some of their work to an audience of students and writers.
Seersucker Live is a nonprofit event that hosts reading performances featuring mostly local writers from Savannah. The events usually take place in a bar, but this one was held in the booze-free Oglethorpe House ballroom.
This was the first time SCAD officially teamed up with Seersucker.
Professors James Lough and Jonathan Rabb have read at events before, but not in SCAD capacity. Lough reached out to Seersucker to make this partnership happen. Co-host and co-founder Zach Powers said they hope to collaborate with SCAD more in the future.
“We like working with SCAD because obviously it’s the place with the M.F.A. in town,” said Powers. “It’s also a great source of aspiring writers, and honestly one thing we don’t think we’ve done as well as we’d like to is attract SCAD students to our events.”
Powers hopes to “bring the writing community together” with Seersucker.
“We want to get more SCAD students to our events in the undergraduate and graduate programs because that’s the group we hope will be networking,” he said.
The first reader was Brown, a poet and educator at Savannah State University. She got the night moving with quick, breathless, dystopian poetry.
Following her was Beth Concepcion, SCAD professor, dean of the School of Liberal Arts and chair of the writing department. She read two personal nonfiction pieces, “Letter to a Flasher” and “Field Day, i.e. a Date with Satan,” both equally humorous.
Finishing off the ladies, SCAD professor Andrea Goto read two of her published blog posts, “The Unredeemed Radish” and “Pet Cemetery,” which was far more hilarious than it sounds.
Next came the guys. SCAD professor Lee Griffith took the audience on an introspective journey with his fiction piece, “A Stonemason’s Lot.” After that Seersucker co-host and co-founder Christopher Berinato read a short parody of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.” Then Lough read an excerpt from his book, “This Ain’t No Holiday Inn: Down and Out at the Chelsea Hotel 1980-1995.”
Love, a poet and Savannah State professor, followed with poems about Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage. Finally, Rabb finished the night with an excerpt from the beginning of his upcoming book about a Holocaust survivor who moves to Savannah.
It was a full and entertaining hour and a half. The readings represented the diversity of talent within SCAD and Savannah as a whole, and created a literary event that even non-writers could enjoy.
“I thought it was good,” said Catie Dellemonache, a first-year graduate student in themed entertainment design from New Jersey. “I’m not a writing major, but it was entertaining.”
Lough talked about how these fun events foster a sense of community among writers.
“It’s the Savannah writing community and it’s great to keep up with what they’re doing and what they’re writing and kind of hang with other writers,” he said. “Because we can, frankly, and you can’t everywhere have that kind of community.”
He also noted the benefit of SCAD students seeing their professors read at these events.
“They get to see that we are real writers, for one, not just teachers,” said Lough. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being just a teacher, but that we take it seriously. That we do it in the world. And I think that’s a great role model for students.”
The next Seersucker event will be Seersucker Shots: SSU Live! Saturday, April 12 at Gallery Le Snoot at 7 p.m. It will feature poetry by Shane McCrae and SSU students. There will be another Seersucker Live Saturday, April 19 at the Book Lady Bookstore.
