Pallbearer's Social
Raymond Cothern, a native of Louisiana, studied writing at LSU under Walker Percy 
and Vance Bourjaily. He was winner of the Deep South Writers Conference for his 
one-act play Who's Ross McDonald? A full-length version of The Pallbearer's Social 
was a finalist in the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference. 
In addition to producing 75 theatrical productions in regional theatre, he recently 
completed another full-length play, Memorial Video, about a sweetly dysfunctional 
family and the effects of Hurricane Rita on their lives. His fiction had been published 
in Manchac and Intro 8 (Doubleday & Co.). He is presently at work on a memoir, 
Swimming Underwater, about growing up in Baton Rouge and framed by the story 
of the devastating effects of viral encephalitis on his daughter and of her triumph in 
achieving a normal life.