Photo by B. A. Van Sise (for ontheside.info

InDigest continued its reading series “1207″ the other night at the KGB Bar.  Dustin Nelson founded the quarterly online mag two years ago and has crafted a solid website that plays host to a variety of voices in the arts.

InDigest’s analog manifestation is the reading series, which encourages presenters to read something from their own work as well as something that inspired them as they wrote it. This time Deborah Clearman read from her Guatemela-based novel Todos Santos from Black Lawrence Press.  Clearman, not wanting to outshine her own words, read from the US State Department’s 11-page document of travel warnings for Guatemala. Emily St. John Mandel read an excerpt from her second novel The Singer’s Gun new this year from Unbridled Books, offering a quotation highlighting the difficulty of “being impeccable” in a universe without virtue. Finally, the disarming Aaron Michael Morales–who I’d seen at a Coffeehouse Press reading with Travis Nichols at McNally Jackson last week–read an excerpt from his new novel Drowning Tucson. Forgetting to bring something that inspired him, he read something that devastated him: a passage from a book about the sexual deviancy of meth addicts, the subject of the novel he’s currently writing. In the passage, a police officer describes the three bathtubs of human feces he found in a meth cook’s living room, as well as some other colorful habits of addicts.

Watch out for the next 1207 reading at KGB on August 22 with Justin Taylor, Tom Grimes, and JC Hallman.