Public readings: They're not about the reader

Why give readings?

Poets and other writers give readings mainly because they’re trying to sell books. Audience members attend readings to be moved and entertained—and if all goes well, they might buy a book.

But readings are a vehicle for community. We come together to have a common experience with words. The reader provides this experience, but a reader with books to hawk is not entirely the reason for the experience. Witness those regular reading series, where all of the same audience members show up on the second Tuesday or third Thursday to hear whomever comes out to read.

My first full-length collection is almost a year old, and it has given me many opportunities to share my work with audiences. I can say, candidly, that I’ve had mixed results. All of my readings have done the job, but some have been especially successful. It’s interesting to consider why that may be.

The fact is, I’m trying to become a better reader of my own work, and I think the key to success in this communication—as in most forms of communication—is to really understand and serve the audience.

What do audiences for live readings want from the experience? Several things.

They want to gel as a community. Let’s be honest: An audience at a live reading could just as well stay home and read a book, but it is important for writers to come together in person. What we actually do as writers, we do alone. And honestly, I don’t find it much fun. My poems can be painful to write and painful to read. Not every discovery a poem provides is a pleasant one. Community can provide a balm—a reminder that I have fellow sufferers, and that I’m not all alone.

They want to meet the person whose voice they’ve been hearing. When we love a book, we often have a voice in our head. It’s exciting to hear the actual voice of the (half-) creator of the work. The writing is one thing; the work is another. As readers, we have a hand in making a poem, essay, or story what it is, and the real human voice of our collaborator can give the work new life.

They want to be connected to the world of writing. I used to live in a very small rural farm town in northwestern Ohio. It was a good hour from the nearest reading, but when I heard of a literary event, I got in my Volkswagen and I puttered in that direction. I’d buy the writer’s book, or bring it, and I’d stand in line to get that autograph. Mind you, I’m not a collector, and despite all of my other character flaws, I honestly and truly don’t care about things. Those autographs weren’t about adding value to books; they were about having a chance to converse with a “real” writer, someone who was walking the path I wanted to be on. Every word of those small, private talks seemed vitally important to me then.

They want insight into work they love. When work challenges us, it’s sometimes good to go right to the source and ask a few key questions. Readings and the Q&As and signings that sometimes follow can help us to learn more about the work.

They’re fans. I’ve been there. When we’re fans, we want to meet our heroes and make memories in the process. In college, some friends and I traveled about four hours to see Robert Creeley at an event, the Ohio University Spring Literary Festival. It’s a great festival—amazing writers just milling about like humans—and my friends were wild about Creeley. In fact, one friend, George, had his collected poems, and we were fond of reading from it around campfires, and we’d memorize Creeley poems and draw them forth, on occasion, from memory. I remember George handing Creeley that book—spine broken in four places, all of the pages stained from fingers and smoke, most corners turned. George had carefully taped it back together, and the poet received it with the honor it was due. He had to have known in that moment how much he was loved. That’s why we went, in fact—to tell him.

A writer who is privileged enough to be invited to read should honor the audience, no matter their reason for attending. This is true if the reader is a major celebrity or, ahem, a one-book poet.

When I am the reader, I devote some thought to why might make the event memorable for those present. I’d like to offer an experience, and my poetry, which I generally feel very good about, is not, in itself, an experience. 

Poets are generally cognizant of the fact that one poem followed by another poem, and another and another, etc., can take too much out of an audience. It’s why we include a bunch of jibber-jabber between selections. Some of us are better at jibber-jabber than others. I think I’m kind of funny (we all think we’re kind of funny, just as we all think we have excellent taste), so I like to make my audiences laugh between poems—sometimes to continue the fun, and other times to break the tension or sadness. (I may be funny, but my poems frequently are not.)

It’s good to make people laugh. It’s good, too, to make something happen, artistically—and I haven’t found a clear way to do this. I have a poem with some fill-in-the-blank parts, and it’s fun to let the audience literally finish the work with me. Recently, too, I gave a reading in a gallery, and at the very beginning, I invited everyone present to stand up and look at some rather astonishing artwork with me.

At another reading, this one in Washington, D.C., I contemplated having the entire audience face the White House and scream obscenities with me. I reconsidered, though, and instead had everyone name a person deserving of compassion and grace. It was a thing we did, and it was unusual and strangely healing. Something happened that night, and it’s at least a little bit memorable.

Too often readings are a too-long, inexpressive reading of words on the page. Sometimes that’s preferable to the uncomfortable performative acts of certain writers. Sometimes the work is so good it can sustain it.

I’d love to offer some advice for successful readings. I suppose I’d say things like, “Go short instead of long,” or, “Practice reading clearly,” or “Pick work in which something interesting happens.” The best overarching advice is a combination of “Be engaging” and “Make sure your work doesn’t suck,” but no one really sets out to be boring and bad.

My thinking here is that readers should consider the very real audience who is welcoming them—what they need, why they’re there, what would make them happy. Maybe the most important thing to keep in mind is that when we read, it’s not about us—or if it is, it’s only slightly so.

At the end of the day, if we would be good ambassadors for challenging new writing—and we must—we have to think about ways to engage and connect.

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Literary community: The importance of reading

Law Library, U.S. Capitol, circa 1895

Today’s post is the first installment in a three-part series.

***

Every writer has some relationship to the idea of a literary community. For many of us, it’s a very complicated one. But for all writers I know, their first experience with literary community happened when they were drawn into another writer’s imaginative space through the pages of a book.

For some, writing is a solo act, and the idea of a community is a distraction. If they commune, it is with a muse—the imagination, the deep mind, perhaps the divine. And there is also a kind of community that happens all alone when we immerse ourselves in the pages of books—we resonate with a story, poem, or essay, and we feel authentic closeness with the mind that birthed it.

As an aspect of community, reading is at once the most powerful and the least acknowledged. Books can change us. Books have changed me—this seems unassailably true about every book ever. Most have changed me for the better.

Reading is also an aspect that is frequently skipped by busy people, to their detriment—whether they are writers or not. Cutting ourselves off from other writers working today is especially harmful to those of us who try to write and publish, though, when we consider that we are both products and shapers of our time. A poem might happen on its own, but literature is a joint venture. The Odyssey is a fine poem and tale, but it would be an odd and probably even an irrelevant expression if it were produced today. 

When we neglect the writing world, we run the risk of getting fixated on the work we read when we were just starting out as writers. I’ve been in more than one college writing class where the professor was teaching from twenty-year-old books—excellent ones, but clearly dating from their own student days. Their failure to include anything newer gave me the sense that they weren’t current with their reading, and because of a paucity of current influences, it was beyond their ability to mix things up.

I know books don’t come with an expiration date. But that provocative and challenging poetry book from twenty years ago, as world-shattering as it may have been (and may still be), shouldn’t carry the whole weight of our relationship to verse. The world has changed; our zeitgeist has changed. The book we once carried in our purse all the way to the gate of the airport to greet some a forgotten boyfriend and tut-tut over a stain on a blue dress from the Gap, Marcy Playground loaded into our Walkman—who even is that person? Yet “there she was / like disco lemonade ….”

It seems ridiculous to stop there, doesn’t it? We’re wearing different clothes, different eye shadow, different attitudes and aspirations. Why would we wear the same fiction? How could we show ourselves in public that way?

Those works still matter, obviously—and not only as artifacts. They’re part of an ongoing conversation, and we refer to them all the time, both tacitly and overtly. They were a necessary step to the place we are, and they continue to have vital things to say. But the conversation moves on, and we have to move with it.

So there is something to be said for devoting ourselves to that part of literary community—the part that reads and reacts and feels. I wish we were a nation of devout readers. We couldn’t be anything but a compassionate nation then, and we would care for one another the way our fiction and poetry teach us, over and over, to do.

But as awesome as the community of books is in our lives, the literary community can’t stop at our desk. A responsible member of a community doesn’t just take from it; we give back to it. Giving back can mean something as small as offering a book recommendation or as large as organizing a literary event. I believe, though, that it is incumbent upon all of us to find ways to contribute meaningfully to the ongoing conversation.

Another example of Martin Luther King

Photo of Martin Luther King, Jr., by Michael Ochs Archives

Martin Luther King, Jr., Day is an opportunity for some people to sleep in, and for others to get up and go serve others.

I’ve always liked that idea of this important holiday as a day of service, and I can think of no more beautiful way to recognize someone than to give and serve in his name.

Plenty of photos exist to show King’s personal service and sacrifice, including his ultimate sacrifice. But I think one of the most enduring gifts he gave was that of his words. Linking arms and marching represents just one side of this national hero. It is good to remember that some of his hardest effort happened while he was immersed in books, engaged in thought and meditation, and with a pen in his hand.

King was a visionary. He could make such a lasting contribution to the world’s understanding because he was equipped with such a profound intellect, and he put in the effort to supplement and improve it with study and contemplation.

We know he absorbed every word of Ghandi, and that he quoted him throughout his life. And Henry David Thoreau was another important figure in his study. It goes without saying that this Baptist minister was influenced by the philosophy of Jesus, and by his examples and his thinking, as recorded in the Gospels.

He was inspired by Plato, Rousseau, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, and he also loved literature, including Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Leo Tolstoy, and so many others. The insights he gained through poetry and fiction informed his philosophy and even his rhetorical style.

As a nation, we face a number of challenges. It is good to remember that one of the most important ways we can serve is to rededicate ourselves to learning and understanding. It’s no longer acceptable—and in fact it never was—to brush off difficult concepts about science, economics, government, or the social contract because they’re too far beyond our comprehension.

To make positive change in the world, in the manner but doubtlessly not the measure that King did, we will need to be vigilant. We will need to ask the right questions, and we will have to dedicate ourselves to deep study, and to communicating what we learn.

I can’t think of any revolution that didn’t start with language. We can think of those Gospels, or of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, or of our Declaration of Independence—“declaration” signifying words. Every great change requires action, yes, but it is rooted in language and thought.

It is heartening to know that everywhere in this country, dedicated people are feeding the hungry and helping those who are desperately in need, all in the name of our great exemplar, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And I hope some are recommitting themselves to reading, and to contemplation of things read.

Sources consulted:

Montford, Christina. "8 Books That Inspired Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." Atlanta Black Star,

http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/11/20/10-books-inspired-dr-martin-luther-king-jr/4/

Raab, Nathan. "10 People Who Inspired Martin Luther King (And He Hoped Would Inspire Us)." Forbes, 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanraab/2014/01/20/10-people-who-inspired-martin-luther-king-and-he-hoped-would-inspire-us/#5eb918ff5aa1

Going home again

I suppose a lot of us who make our art in private feed a fantasy of public acclaim.

Maybe I’m not alone in picturing myself giving the commencement address at my old high school, or maybe showing up on the news in some triumphant way, so that everyone in my hometown would explain how they knew me or repeat that cool thing I said that one time.

Truth is, I haven’t lived in my hometown since 1987, and I don’t know anyone there. It’s strange; as a child, I could enter any business, and I would know three-quarters of the people I saw. But I just visited my hometown over this past weekend, and I didn’t know anyone—not a single person I encountered anywhere, aside from family.

There will never be a triumphal return, and anyway, the fantasy is not a serious one. I had a bad reputation in high school, and it was a frantic, peaceless time for me—marching band, clubs, classes, friends, boyfriends, something going on every night. With my blond hair, I was widely considered “ditzy” or bubble-headed, and I seldom got credit for my intellect. I’ve never missed high school, and those were not, in fact, the best years of my life.

Over the weekend, I traveled to Gallipolis, Ohio, where I grew up. I drove twelve hours one way and landed at my dear mother’s door. Make no mistake, the trip home was worth it; I got to enjoy my mom and two of my three siblings, and I was glad I went.

But on Saturday, I had planned a poetry workshop and reading from my new full-length collection at the French Art Colony, my hometown’s gallery and art space. I had promoted this event heavily online, and the local media, such as they are, were alerted.

And when 10:30 a.m. rolled around and the workshop was to begin, I had to face a grim fact: Nobody had come.

So much for triumphal returns. Mine amounted to sitting in an elegant dining room of this historic home-turned-museum and grading composition papers while I waited for the second event, a 1 p.m. reading. I couldn’t exactly leave; someone might have shown up with an urgent need to become a sonneteer. You can’t, in good conscience, leave someone like that hanging. You just can’t.

My sister Brenda, pretty much the nicest person I know, showed up before both events to arrange little finger foods on trays. Before the workshop-that-wasn’t, she had arranged little brownies on a tray, and when she came back, this time with my brother, Don, the tray was nearly empty, somehow. (Ghosts?) And I was alone.

They didn’t let on how sad this was. Instead, they both put themselves to work, arranging cheese and crackers and other sad things on sad trays for the sad empty room.

And then, wonder of wonders, two people showed up! My Facebook friends, Kelly Sundberg and Shane Stricker, drove almost an hour from Athens, Ohio, home of Ohio University, to Gallipolis, home of … my mom. People who weren’t related to me not only came to the reading, but they made real effort to get there. They acted like it wasn’t sad, and that made it a lot less sad, really.

And then, additional wonder of wonders, another friend showed up. This was John Jackson, a fellow graduate of the Gallia Academy High School Class of 1987. “I’ll bet you’re surprised to see me here,” John said, and I was. I hadn’t seen him in nearly thirty years, and he was never a big poetry person, to my recollection. What’s more, we’re just about as far apart as two people can get, politically speaking, and we vex each other with some regularity on social media. An example: a glance at his Facebook feed reveals posts objecting to political action taken by pro athletes against police violence, and my own page shows full-throated support for their controversial actions and their message. That’s just the difference between John and me, but we continue to like (and tolerate!) each other.

So that was the scene. Around the table with me were my brother and sister, not poetry lovers by nature, but readers and thinkers who are wise to my bullshit and my airs. And there were two extremely talented writers, Kelly and Shane, who know my Facebook persona and are solidly part of the contemporary literary world. And there was John, a smart, soulful guy and a good egg, who came just to support someone he thinks is crazy about half the time.

And there was cheese. Plenty of cheese.

I read more than a dozen poems, and between them, I tried to find things to say that would be illuminating to this mixed group. And we had dialogue between poems. The group was small enough that I heard that occasional comment (“I liked that one,” that kind of thing) and we had little conversations about the work and life in general.

I read one poem, and John, a musician, was reminded of a favorite song of his, by the band Tesla. He recited a verse, and was so moved that he misted up in the telling. (Not into poetry, he’d told me—could have fooled me, John!)

It ended up being kind of beautiful, actually. I’ll treasure the memory of exactly ten hands clapping. They were ten precious hands—as good as a stadium, for my money.

Yesterday, the day after my twelve-hour return trek, I was unloading some things from the trunk of my car just outside my house, and I heard a voice.

“I really liked your poetry reading the other night,” a man said.

I experienced a temporary disconnect. This wasn’t Brenda, Don, Kelly, Shane, or John. But no, the stranger was referring a reading I’d had here in Springfield, Missouri, at Missouri State University. There had been a good-sized crowd, and I didn’t know everyone present. This person must have been in the room.

I thanked him. “That means so much,” I said. And it did. And it still does.

Poetry isn’t the movies. It isn’t arena rock. Lines seldom wend around the block for a poet. But sometimes you connect, in ways you would never predict. And sometimes someone claps—sometimes someone speaks up to let you know you made an impact.

I’ll take it. That’s more than enough glory for me.

Learning By Connecting

            I have always been fascinated by learning, and for most of my life, I have devoted time and energy to it, both inside and outside of formal classes. I am a student right now, actually, in a TESOL certificate program at Missouri State University, and that has me hitting the books and writing papers and taking tests for the first time in years. However, I am also trying to learn more about a number of subjects on my own. Geography is one. I enjoy reading about countries of the world; in my spare time I like to see how quickly I can fill the names of countries into a blank map. I’m getting pretty good—fast, and clear on the difference between Slovakia and Slovenia, Guyana and French Guiana, Malawi and Mozambique.

            I teach writing and speaking to international students, and right now (in fact, at this moment, as I write along with them on the overhead projector) they are writing an essay about their unique learning styles. It is a good question to ask—What kind of learner are you? For my students, the answers run the gamut, from the styles American students are well versed in—visual, auditory, kinesthetic—to their more personal preferences, like studying with others or listening to music while they work. (If my students end up being the ones who come up to you at the start of the first session of your lit class to announce that they are kinesthetic learners and may require appropriate accommodations, I apologize, and wish you well with the challenge of applying tactile elements to your lesson plans on Jane Austen’s Emma or William Wordsworth’s The Prelude.)

            My students’ assignment has me thinking about my own learning style, which is as idiosyncratic as anyone’s. For me, learning starts with seeing, whether that is with words on a page or pictures on a website. As I read, I get snagged on interesting words, and then sound takes over. Encountering a musical name like “Tannu Tuva” sends me Googling—what does Tuva look like? What do the people there do?

            Turns out that this formerly independent state is now part of the Russian Federation, and Tannu Tuva is no more. The area is properly called the Tyva Republic. It is a lush, green place, not unlike Montana in appearance. One thing that some people there do, as it turns out, is throat-singing—a method of song-making that allows them to produce multiple notes in the back of the throat. Tuva, as it turns out, was an interesting place, well worth learning more about.

            My brief exploration into Tannu Tuva is indicative of my own learning style—independent, natural, sporadic, curious, disorganized. I love factoids and I love people, and there is nothing more fascinating than learning how people in other places get through their days.

            It’s something that fascinates me about my students, too. What is life like in Gujarat, in western India? What is it like in a smaller, history-rich city in China? In Riyadh? I wonder—and I ask. My learning style means that they tell me a detail about their country and I Google away, trying to imagine where they’re from, what they’re about, what they do and love and play and sing and eat.

            I know that they’re a lot of fun to spend time with. They’re good-natured, and they go along with my sometimes-bizarre lesson plans. They are happy to write and speak and share their truths, and they have gotten over their fear of making a mistake, abandoning it in favor of their desire to communicate something essential.

            I guess my own learning style, if I’m to conclude our assignment, is to position myself in the vicinity of fascinating people and bug them until I begin to know some things they know. It is to reveal aspects of my own life so that they will, out of a sense of decorum or pity, reciprocate with details from theirs. It is, in short, to forge connections where I can.

           

            

Murder With a Donut on the Side

            I love a simple murder.

            If I had a whole day stretched out in front of me—no kids, no deadlines, no papers to grade, and an opportunity to do nothing at all—I believe I would spend it reading a mystery novel cover to cover, in one sitting, not even breaking for lunch.

            And then I’d start another.

            When my literary friends ask me to name my favorite author, I demur. There are so many to choose from, I tell them, then cast my eyes upward, as if trying to choose from among Melville, Atwood, David Foster Wallace ….

            But as a point of fact, my favorite author ever to pick up the pen is the marvelously inventive Raymond Chandler, whose gritty knowingness was revealed in his masterful use of the simile:

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.

I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.

I felt like an amputated leg.

She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.

I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.

On the dance floor half a dozen couples were throwing themselves around with the reckless abandon of a night watchman with arthritis.

The voice got as cool as a cafeteria dinner.

The voice that answered was fat. It wheezed softly, like the voice of a man who had just won a pie-eating contest.

From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class.  From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.

I love the quality of the observation behind each simile, and this intelligence pervades whole novels—his entire oeuvre—even when figurative language is not in play.

            I also love Agatha Christie, and have equal fondness for her Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple novels. Christie offers clever and observant investigators and drops clues so that the reader has a chance to unravel the case in real time, unlike those authors who introduce details at the end that make the killer suddenly obvious.

            While this rare intelligence is my favorite aspect of the Chandler or Christie novel, I don’t demand it in all of my mystery reading. In fact, my favorite subgenre is, pardon the pun, the cheesiest there is: the culinary mystery.

            In the culinary mystery, the person who investigates murders has a day job in the food industry. She is a baker or a caterer or a cookie-shop owner or a donut-maker. She typically resides in a small town, one with an unnaturally high murder rate (sort of like Cabot Cove, Maine, where the 3,000 residents had about a one in four chance of being offed during the twelve-year run of Murder, She Wrote). And between the chapters, or at the end of the book, the author includes recipes. (If you’d like to “sample” a culinary mystery, try Diane Mott Davidson, Joanne Fluke, or Jessica Beck.)

            What doesn’t do it for me is a larger mystery—espionage or, worse, some supernatural source of evil. I like the ridiculous notion that someone can dispatch some Alpine/coastal/desert/tundra town’s community theater manager or mayor or volleyball coach, and the woman who runs the donut shop can track him or her down and make sure justice is served, maybe twenty times or more in the life of a series of novels. I don’t believe the donut-making detective exists. I can’t help but believe in the former—dangerous nations and pervasive evil—and I don’t find the thoughts of them at all enjoyable.

            There is much to be said for a simple murder. As a former reporter, I covered murder trials, and they were terrible—nothing simple about them. But the elimination of a two-dimensional character in a wholly unbelievable novel doesn’t bug me, and the knowledge that there will be comeuppance in 150 pages pleases me greatly.

            I’d read a silly mystery novel right now, in fact, but a child needs my attention, and this copyediting project isn’t going to finish itself. One of these days, though, I’m going to give in, lie down with an appealing mystery, and put out a “do not disturb” sign for the whole world—and right now that couch is looking about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.