Author readings!
Way back when I was a student in a creative writing program we workshopped by day, and on special occasions we did readings at night too.
And I learned a lot from those readings. You might think that after all the workshopping, we would already know how readers would respond to our writing, but it wasn’t like that at all. We didn’t read out loud in our workshops, for one thing — we printed out copies of our work a week in advance, and then when it was our turn to be critiqued, sat silently around a big table to listen, and then everyone handed back their printouts covered in pen and pencil marks to the writers with even more comments and corrections.
It was intense, but it was also… quite controlled.
But at readings there was an audience, and even if it was mostly the same students you had seen in your classes all week, the energy was entirely different. It felt like putting on a show — at least we all thought a lot about exactly what to read, and then practiced our pieces over and over in advance, and on the night we got nervous about going up to the microphone.
And while the people in the room listened politely (between the ordering food and drinks and wandering around the cafe, when we did them in cafes) — every so often something got a big reaction.
And oh, it was quite glorious to get a reaction.
It surprised me a little, just how glorious it was. I was playing in bands too at the time and even though we were unsuccessful enough to mostly just open for other bands in small clubs, I was almost used to being up on stage in front of a crowd, and even cheering and encores.
For us in the band, the audience response wasn’t just what we lived for, it was also essential information: no matter how much we disagreed most of the time about which were our best songs, when we wrote up our set lists together we always included the “crowdpleasers,” and were strategic about where to put them in the song order.
But of course bands are collectives, and a song is a machine with a thousand moving parts and and there were ten or twelve of them in a set, and our sets were big noisy things rushing past and flinging us off the stage again almost before I knew it.
And the scale of a reading was nothing like that. It was just me by myself up there, my own voice for just a few minutes against a background of near silence, with everyone out in the room paying close attention to every phrase and inflection — and everyone clearly visible (since there were no mercifully blinding stage lights in a cafe). It was scary. But it was also exciting.
And it also taught me a lot about what was working in my writing, and what wasn’t.
June launches
Anyhow, this is all a very long way of saying that I got to read at two launches in one weekend in June, and really enjoyed both of them, including meeting and talking with many very interesting brilliant people at both events.
(And also noting that two social events in one weekend — let alone readings! — is a lot for a person who usually spends her free time hunched over a laptop in imaginary worlds with imaginary people. It was pretty wonderful. Also exhausting.)
The first launch was for the Off the Map anthology, edited by Betsy Warland, Seema Shah, and Kate Bird, in the largest meeting room at the Vancouver Public Library. The place was absolutely packed, and while you would reasonably expect that an event with a lineup of 33 readers (including some who had never done this before), things might go a little sideways or at least be uneven, every reader was excellent and compelling, and the event was super well-organised (and didn’t even run over time).
As for me, my own Off the Map piece includes doodles, and in the end I decided to do hand movements to try to express what was happening in the visuals for the part of the piece I read. I think it worked pretty well — at least I saw people smiling and laughing when I hoped they would.
Everyone’s reading worked well!
The second launch was the next night, at the celebration of the 100th issue of the Vancouver literary magazine subTerrain— at a Main Street pub. There was a much looser feel, partly because of the casual setting and set-up (and drinks), but also because almost everyone there appeared to already know each other — so to me the overall vibe was very much what I would have guessed what a subTerrain party would be like, based on all the years I’ve been reading the magazine: friendly, funny, and smart.
And of course I loved the readings, many of them by well-known writers, introduced with a lot of humour and self-deprecation — and appreciation for the publisher.
(And as for my own two pieces, since they were each under 100 words, I didn’t have to make any decisions about which parts to read — so that part was easy!)
The terror
So where’s the terror that I promised in the title?
Well, I also did a short reading at a course-slash-residency I attended in early July.
The writer teaching the course is a literary hero of mine, which was thrilling but also meant I was deeply deeply rattled.
Then of course there were the other students, who were all exceptional. When we met as a group everyone read for a couple of minutes from their current projects as a kind of introduction, and every one else’s sample was gripping and made me want to hear more.
As for mine, well….
Remember when I was talking about playing music in front of audiences, and how some songs were crowdpleasers? What I didn’t mention was that some songs just didn’t work. Sometimes it was because they needed more work, but sometimes it turned out that they just weren’t good enough, and we would drop them from our set.
Reading my own work that afternoon was excruciating — I was painfully conscious the entire time that I had to do better. And in the days after that it continued to be painful, and also scary, coming to terms with just how far my work was from being ready, and then trying to find something presentable for our more formal student readings a few days later, where all the students from all the other classes would also be there to listen.
But I eventually found something. And I reminded myself that this has happened before, and usually the more fear and pain I am feeling, the more I’m learning.
I hate this kind of learning. But there you go.
And I think that reading went okay too, in the end.
