Public Lecture Showcase

For the public lecture showcase I went and saw EJ Levy and Joe Wilkins read their
stories and poetry pieces. EJ Levy read The Three Christ on Moose Lake Minnesota and Joe
Wilkins read The Mountain and the Fathers. EJ Levys piece was a story about three men who
were committed to a mental facility due to their claims of being Christ but all were referred to as
a different Christ. One was known as Viking Christ, Another was known as Angry Christ, and the
third was known as Gentle Christ. These three men were considered to be incredibly disturbed.
The staff went to great lengths to keep them separated from one another by setting up different
schedules for them to eat a move around the facilities. The narrator of the story talks more and
more about each one of the Christs as he struggles with his own belief about the three men. The
narrator finds himself between a rock and a hard place on one hand he wants to believe in these
men and another he knows that these men are not any form of religious power, all the while he
deals with his affections toward another employ who works at the ward named Karen. The
narrator even speaks about a time where he was supposed to be working with her and gets
swapped to another assignment he says that his heart ached with sorrow for not being with her
and then it was filled with jealousy and anger when he sees another man from work getting cozy
with her in the hallway. The narrator is a man of great confliction who works through this as the
tale goes on. As for Joe Wilkins The Mountain and the Fathers he talks about his youth
growing up in the lonely mountains of east Montana. Wilkins speaks about how he was raised by
his mother who was quite young and his grandfather due to his fathers death. As Wilkins moves
through his story he not only talks about his own experiences but the experiences of those of the
other boys and men who grew up and lived around him. Wilkins dives deep into the idea of what
it means to be a man in todays world and all the things that come along with it. Wilkins really

dives deep into the ideas on how deeply sad and broken the world he grew up in was. Both of
these stories that were told dealt with people who had found themselves in hard times and one
made the best out of a bad situation the others had more of an up and down journey through it.
Personally I think the pieces these two wrote and read to us relates in an obscure way
back to the class. The ideas that these people struggled in such ways can really relate back to the
struggles faced by the men in the paper I wrote called Be a Man the struggles faced in the
stories by Wilkins directly parallels that of the ones expressed by myself in my paper, as for the
ones in Levys story they too are very similar being that the narrator in her story is a lost man
dealing with religious struggles and sexual struggles.
In conclusion, these two authors read amazing pieces of theirs and were also able to
directly parallel item from our class at the same time. They showed hoe great obstacles in life
can be overtaken with and that greatness can stem from anyplace in the world.