The Season for Readings
Last night, I co-hosted a reading at the UCFV Bookstore with Kuldip Gill. Our aim was to showcase not only published authors, but some of the amazing student writers taking creative writing classes at UCFV–essentially, giving them a platform to try out new work, to show an audience what they have been working on. And the night did not disappoint.
We opened with two student authors, both students of mine, Kim Morden and David Thomas. They both took a Short Fiction class with me, and are now participants in the Historical Fiction class. They each read a postcard story, both, oddly, about ghosts in their own way. Kim’s detailed ghosts inhabiting a woman’s home, and David’s talked about the ghostly calls of lost soldiers on a battlefield. They both read with enthusiasm and grace.
Trevor Carolan read from his latest book, The Pillowbook of Dr. Jazz, and Keith Maillard was invited to campus to read from The Clarinet Polka. As always, Keith was engaging and humorous in his descriptions of music and the members of an all-girl polka band. We even had an accordian player at the reading to add to the ambience. It was a wonderful evening.
And the evening caused me to start thinking about readings – good ones, bad ones, all those ones in between. I’ve certainly done my share, and am gearing up again to participate in a variety for Away–Victoria, Ottawa, Montreal, Surrey. To me, readings are strange things. When I’m writing, I’m never imagining myself reading the work aloud–I’m thinking about it on the page, in the reader’s mind. So it can be difficult to find a selection that works as a spoken art–it needs to be dynamic, active, perhaps humorous or tragic. And since I’ve not been blessed with the ability to write decidedly hilarious scenes, I’ve had the most luck with darker things: girls being caught in industrial machines, drownings, accidents. You know, all those lovely, lightearted moments in literature. I wonder if this makes me seem overly concerned with sadness, with melancholy and despair. Certainly, there is love and hope and desire in my work, as well, but those aren’t the passages I tend to read. And therein lies the rub: a reading is only a glimpse into the soul of the work, and the artist. It’s a bit of a tease, giving the audience just enough to (hopefully) pique their interest.
Reading is an art in and of itself, and I’m always pleased to be a part of any good one–like the one Kim, David, Trevor and Keith gave for us last evening.