On Saturday, March 12, as part of their ongoing reading series, Morgantown’s Black Bear Club featured three WVU affiliated writers: Anthony Swofford, SJ Stout, and Mark Brazaitis at 123 Pleasant Street.

Tony Swofford

First up was Tony Swofford, reading a recent nonfiction essay, “On Being Fat: A Physiological Degredation,” which he said he wrote instead of writing what he was supposed to be working on. He surprised and amused the sizeable audience immediately with his opening line, “The first time I was called [fat] by someone I loved . . .” The first someone was an expensive, pedigreed girlfriend who he, to everyone’s surprise, beat in what was supposed to be a fun tennis match at an Italian resort; another was his personal trainer who left him to join the military. Tony is the author of the memoirs Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails and Jarhead, as well as the novel Exit A. He moved to Morgantown last year with his wife, the writer and WVU professor Christa Parravani.

SJ Stout

After a short break for baked goods provided by Brittney Scully, SJ Stout, a first-year MA in literature, won the audience over with poems that were humorous (a sexy dream about Bernie Sanders), poignant (a fawn-shaped hole in her heart), and inaccurate (an epigraph from a sixteenth-century science books that explained how frogs might fall from the sky when their eggs are sucked up into clouds).

Mark Brazaitis

And finally, to close an excellent evening, Mark Brazaitis, a WVU faculty member in fiction on sabbatical this semester, read “The Eye Man” from his most recent short story collection, Truth Poker. Mark’s story gave us characters who seemed real to life, if a bit extreme—evangelical missionaries in Guatemala helping out a clinic, a undefined116122.undefined116123.undefined116124.undefined116731.undefined213152.doctor who made eyes, a skeptical narrator, a blind boy—pushed to dark edges, but then brought back to show the humorous and redemptive moments possible in the every day.

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