Alan's First Reading

This Friday I had my first public reading since graduating from Arkansas, which makes it my first reading at DePaul University, my first in Chicago, my first since having actual publications, etc. Of course, I was nervous. I’ve been told I give a good reading—its the theater background, I think, and the pleasant benefit of a dozen on-stage appearances in high school—but that doesn’t make much difference when scaled against the awareness that a room full of people, who you’ve never met, will be hearing and evaluating your work for the first time and—lucky you—you get to watch them do it. That’s a nerve-wracking thing in principle, much less in practice, and I spent most of Friday trying to cut “The Night Comes in A Falling”, my most consistent crowd-pleaser, down to a twenty-minute read, rather than its twenty-six minute full version. This proved difficult, but also proved unneccessary, as in the end I was able to simply to read the story all the way through, go over my allotted time, and nobody seemed to mind. This good-natured scheduling was typical of the experience, which I’m glad to say was very pleasant, butterflies aside.

The reading was technically supposed to be a year-end faculty reading arranged by the students in DePaul’s Masters in Writing program, but scheduling conflicts etc. kept other faculty members from attending. That worked out well for yours truly, because I got to feel like a bigger fish than I actually am, and got to enjoy people calling me “professor” all evening, even though I very much am not. And people seemed to enjoy the story. We went out to a local bar near Lincoln Park with pool tables, cheap pitchers, and servicable bar food, and got to talk writing for awhile. Like I said, reading in public has always made me nervous, but I actually felt right at home. That’s an encouraging sign of things to come, I hope.

Posted by Alan Ackmann - Jun 3, 09:27 AM.
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