By Brian Dunlap

Over the course of the past year and a half, with organizations, museums, and theaters, among other venues, having to move their events online due to the pandemic, they have connected with so many friends old and new, who are not local to their physical event space.

Two Orange County open mics, Two Idiots Peddling Poetry and SHOUT! the Open Mic, are no different. They have seen their range and impact expand greatly with features and open mic readers attending from around the country. As the country is slowly opening back up, and both open mics have recently returned to in-person readings, they don’t want to lose these connections. Thus, they decided to join forces to create a new online reading series called “Three Idiots Shouting Poetry.” The first installment of this new online collaboration will occur on August 26 at 6pm Pacific Standard Time.

This new virtual open mic will meet every fourth Thursday on Zoom.

“Three Idiots Shouting Poetry” will first feature poet Marty McConnell. They say about McConnell on their Facebook event’s page, “[p]art of the vanguard of poets fusing and refusing and queering the delineations between literary and oral poetry, Marty McConnell’s work blurs the lines between autobiography and personae to comment on and illuminate what it means to live and love outside the lines in 21^st century America.”

Marty McConnell is the author of the poetry collections wine for a shotgun and when they say you can’t go home again, what they mean is you were never there and the book Gathering Voices: Creating a Community-Based Workshop.