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Just got back from the last event in UNCG’s alumni reading series before spring break and now can’t stop thinking about how writers read their own work. Novelist and nonfiction writer Nancy Lemann (author of The Lives of Saints) had some interesting approaches – to say the least. She asked the audience up front, an intimate one consisting mainly of MFA students and faculty, “What should I read?” We had plenty options to choose from. So we suggested her first book. Okay, Lemann said, then prefaced that she’d written it over 20 years ago. After that long, “You’re really not the same person,” she said, and sighed. Then Lemann read impatiently for a few paragraphs until finally looking up. “Then it just goes on and on.”

We laughed as she put the book aside, then stopped and remembered one good part to read – just a paragraph or two. Then the same question presented itself. What about us? What did we want to hear? She herself wanted to read a nonfiction piece about her friendship with her all-time hero, Walker Percy. The audience had to coax her to read from the piece; she was afraid reading aloud would reduce her to tears.

I enjoyed the reading but left thinking, at first, how strange and different this one had been than all the others I’d attended. I now sit at home, meditating on all the readings I’ve attended and what to make of them. I’ve been to two Mark Strand readings. The first time, at USC, he was fantastic – creepy, dark, funny, wild. The second time, here at UNCG, he read in a much quieter and subdued vein. Novelist and jazz critic Stanley Crouch took a bathroom break right smack in the middle of his reading. Francine Prose, I remember, read a chapter from her novel A Changed Man despite a sultry sore throat and then answered questions in a hoarse groan for almost twenty minutes. I wanted to throw her a cough drop. Kwame Dawes has been known to sing at some of his readings. Joe Queenan was supposed to read, I think, but decided to talk instead, and it was hilarious. I’ve seen famous writers lose their place during a reading and start over, only to give up and start rambling about what they had for breakfast. The more I reflect, the more I realize there’s no single way to read your work.

I remember a great piece of advice one writer gave me. Sure, practice reading. Speak slowly. Enunciate. All that stuff. But then she said it’s a good idea to edit your work for a reading, even after it’s been published. Good prose aloud and good prose on the page aren’t always the same. Pick something funny, she said, with plenty of dialogue to keep your audience engaged.

All of this churns in my brain while I wonder how good I’ll be at reading my own stuff. Well, let’s hope all those workshops and prose-poetry readings I volunteered for at USC have helped. In the mean time, I’m going to take cues from my own new hero – Neil Gaiman, who reads his work amazingly. You can listen to him read all of The Graveyard Book on his website:
http://www.mousecircus.com/videotour.aspx