Last Friday, for the first time in months, I gave a reading. I honestly don’t remember the last time I stood up with one of my books in hand, or pages of a new story, and read in front of an audience.
But, a few months ago, my friend Dave Housley wrote me and said, hey me and Aaron Burch are coming through town, wanna do a reading? I didn’t think about it and simply replied, Yes!
Last Thursday, Liz said, hey we should go to the pool with the kiddos after work tomorrow and we can bring dinner and I said that would be great and a few hours later she said, isn’t your reading tomorrow, and I said oh yeah, I forgot.
Because I did. Because I had deliverables at work and also agreed to play 3-on-3 basketball for a corporate charity event and I had to walk the dog and the pool sounded great and I could do all those things and the reading too, right?
I had emailed a few people I knew in Columbus and said, hey come throw tomatoes at me I’m doing a reading I never do that anymore you should come hang, and more of them showed up than I expected. I read excerpts from my best short story, which is the opening story from my last book. And I got to have a beer with Dave and Aaron, friends I’ve known for fifteen years, at a pretty snazzy venue and we snagged a photo with a legendary unicorn.
I couldn’t stay out with them to have more beers and watch the World Cup even though I really wanted to. That’s okay. After the reading, my friend Kyle said “the idea that strangers can still gather in a room to listen to stories restores my faith in humanity.”
I have two much heavier topics I’ve been meaning to write to you about for a while, but this morning, despite my son being up the last two nights with (probably) teething issues and feeling spectacularly sore from Sunday basketball, I’m still carrying a bit of that glow from being in an independent bookstore on a Friday night with my friends, both the ones on stage and in the crowd.
Three Better Things to Read:
Well, sheesh, if you made it this far, you should be reading Aaron’s literary magazine Short Story Long.
I’m probably going to steal Leslie’s idea of writing about her story publications over the years.
Of late, I’ve wondered about ordinariness too…
Until the next time,
~ Michael
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