Glass Mountain, the UH undergraduate literary magazine, held the fourth event in its reading series at Café Brasil with comedic stories and music from Austin Smith of A Sea Es.
On Tuesday the theme of the night’s readings aimed to honor October’s visiting writer Ryan Dobosh, a comedian and stage performer from Austin.
Glass Mountain Assistant Fiction Editor Amanda Scott and University of Alabama graduate Amechi Ngwe were among the readers showing their appreciation to the guest of honor.
Before unveiling their tales of the evening, both students gave a few remarks about Dobosh being easy to work with and immediately clicking with him while working on a project.
The night began with Ngwe’s story about a struggling artist and his encouraging girlfriend.
His second piece gave a detailed account a wrestler entering the ring to battle an older, famously experienced opponent. Despite his advanced age, the older wrestler easily kept pace with his younger adversary.
Appearing for her third Glass Mountain reading, Scott read stories from an older male prospective.
“Fetal Efforts of the Great Divide,” takes a humorous approach to former President Bill Clinton as he reflects on his life and how his wife and daughter view him.
Her second piece, “The Deer,” tells of a car accident involving a man and an injured deer. The man considers events of his life during the moment of impact and recollects even further when the car crashes into a tree.
As the man and his daughter walk home after surviving the incident, he notices how his daughter handled the accident in an easy manner — from encouraging him to get out of the car to her watching the moon when they got home.
Scott called the story semi-autobiographical, as it was her take on her father’s perspective.
Finally, Dobosh read two stories involving teenage hijinks that had the audience laughing.
“Differently Able” tells of a group of teenage boys who go to the zoo and find an unattended wheelchair and decide to ride around in it. The group took turns playing in the chair until the story goes on to tell how, when it was the narrator’s turn, he ends up at the seal tank and is put in the spotlight by the seal trainer.
The second piece, “The Renaissance Man,” spoke of a student at a high school academic tournament and his struggle to answer a question about a renaissance artist. Dobosh hilariously tells of the strategy that the teenager employs to answer the question; he simply starts to list the names of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Musical guest Austin Smith closed the show with a great set that had the audience jamming along.
The authors were able to keep the audience’s attention throughout the entire evening with their insightful and funny stories, making Glass Mountain’s fourth reading series a success and keeping their promise of a fun evening.
As with its other reading series, Glass Mountain continues its tradition of adding talented writers to Houston’s literary community.
Literary reading honors comedic writer via humorous; realistic tales — http://t.co/JdcvglJY