Join Us Friday, May 10, 2019
DimeStories Open Mic
Guest Host: 
Dick Cummins
Bio:
In the early ‘60’s Dick attended the U. of Iowa on a jock scholarship. This experience consisted of majoring in English and mostly jocking out, drinking beer and appraising the coeds.
His senior year, due to an encouraging rejection letter from a fiction editor at the New Yorker, he got into the vaunte
d graduate Iowa Writers Workshop, basically through a service entrance as it were.
Most of his classmates were from prominent families, Ivy League legacy or Stanford grads with trust funds. This meant that on the first of every month many pitchers of beer at Donnellys were provided by newly replenished remittance bank accounts. Being a street kid from the projects, Dick was way out of this league, but saved a lot of money on beer.
The story went that Robert Lowell had backed out of a workshop teaching position at the last minute so an author was found to take his place who had only four original paperbacks, some sci fi pulp and women’s magazine stories to his credit. No one had heard of Kurt Vonnegut but he was a better instructor than the often hung over Nelson Algren (Man with the Golden Arm/Walk on the Wild Side) and
Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road NBA 1960) who suffered a harrowing nervous breakdown during his second year.
Finally armed with a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction writing, Dick got a teaching and coaching position at a tiny jock farm junior college in southern Iowa. In 1980, when his agent finally dumped him, he wrote a grant and started a reading and writing lab at the U. of Montana with 20 Apple IIe computers. A year later he was offered venture capital to start his own educational software company and he never looked back
Now retired from Twenty-First Century Research, a local area network company he owned in San Diego for 25 years, Dick is writing stories and memoir fragments and doing standup – when he can stay awake long enough. He also ha
s been getting on stage at Moth StorySlams in L.A. and Santa Monica.
3-Minute Prose, Some fiction, some fact, all true. 6:30 pm Sign ups; 7:00 pm Readings San Diego Writers, Ink; Liberty Station; San Diego
Congratulations to our April Standouts!
Audios coming soon! 
Ali Juhdi – I Should Write Today
Josh Turner – Potus Interuptus
John Shaw – A Collection of Souls
Ed Coonce – The Obit That Won’t Quit and Nanninga