While I missed many books this year, I went to a ton of author readings. Last semester alone, I attended about seven events at the University of Missouri (new PhD student readings and visiting writers), probably three more at Orr Street Studios, and another, oh, let’s call it five at Get Lost Bookstore in Columbia. Over the last five months, I probably went to an average of a reading per week. If I sit and think about it for a while, there are also all the readings from this past summer and this past spring, which would then include readings I went to in St. Louis and Washington, D.C., where the AWP Conference was in February.

Believe me, all semester long, I bitched and moaned about going to readings. We all did. Hey, people like to complain. There was definitely a time this semester when I looked at my calendar, and there was something like seven readings in ten days. I tried to make all of them, too. But why? Why did I want to go to all these things? Especially when, as you probably can guess from this, more than once, I had the sinking feeling I didn’t want to go at all.

But readings aren’t just about me. They are about my literary community, my arts community, and even when I’m cranky, it was always the right decision to get myself in gear and attend.

Readings are, in many ways, just like editing a magazine journal. To paraphrase Joyce Carol Oates, editing is a we, and one can get somewhat tired of an I. She was talking, of course, about the difference between being an editor and being a writer, and why being a magazine editor is an attractive vocation. But the same idea – being involved and being for other people rather than just yourself – applies to readings.

Writers, when writing, spend their time alone. The solitude is essential for deep thinking and the process of creation. Loneliness, of course, goes hand-in-hand with this quiet, and after spending years working on something – poems, a novel, stories – getting in front of an audience of people and sharing that work can be a welcome shift.

It can also be a disaster. Many of us, I’m sure, have been to readings that were … well, lackluster. We’ve also been to readings where people are trying a wee bit too hard to be “entertaining.” There are plenty of these stories. This makes the readings that are really and truly an amazing experience. For me, hearing Edward P. Jones read his work is still one of the most incredible things I’ve ever heard.

Readings are the chance for writers to be outgoing, extroverted, friendly, celebratory. Listeners, often writers and avid readers too, are warm and gregarious. Alcohol is (hopefully) involved. We gossip. Laugh. Shake hands. We crave remarks and thoughts about the work, discover what other people are working on, what we’re reading: we want to know who and what is being read not just published. We’re eager to talk.

Here in Columbia, there are three regular spots for readings: any event our English Department holds, the Hearing Voices series at Orr Street Studios, and at Get Lost Bookshop down on Ninth Street. I attend as many as I can, and hope that wherever you’re reading this from, you’re doing the same in your part of the world.

Follow Michael Nye on Twitter: @mpnye

The poet Dean Young, ready to drop knowledge and drink ice water.

This past Friday, my friend Marc McKee organized a benefit at Orr Street Studios here in downtown Columbia in order to raise money for Dean Young. In case you haven’t heard the good news, Dean received a transplant last week, and thus far, all news has been good about his body accepting the new ticker. More news on his progress is here. All of us feel tremendous relief at this news. Despite the circumstances, the benefit was more of a celebration, a social event that honors both Dean’s spirit by being as lively, funny, encouraging and deeply benevolent as the man is,  as well as his poetry’s zany and antic cartwheels in the service of art and beauty.

However …

The good fight isn’t over. Surgery is expensive. Heart surgery is really expensive. And this isn’t the time or place for political discourse, but health insurance is only going to get Dean so far. We need your help. Marc, knowing this, asked for a little help. Gabe Fried, a terrific poet himself, helped Marc round up poets to give their time and energy; and Allison Smythe was instrumental in securing the space at Orr Street Studios on such short notice. The three of them put on a terrific and fun benefit last week in the hope of raising whatever amount they could to help with the medical costs. Dean’s friend Joe DiPrisco has been the mastermind behind several national events that have been created in order to help out. Here‘s where you can get the good word.  Joe wrote:

Dean’s expenses will be sky high and relentless for as long as he lives–which is going to be a long time if we can help it. Yes, he has “good” insurance, but insurance does not pay for everything, and we estimate his out-of-pocket expenses to be in the area of $50,000 to $100,000 a year—going forward for many years to come.

At the benefit, Marc let us know that over $170,000 has been raised by nearly a thousand contributors thus far. Eight poets affiliated with the University of Missouri, Stephens College, and the local arts community came together to celebrate Dean’s work; each poet read at least one (often two of Dean’s poems) as well as one of their own. The readers included Marc, Gabe, and Allison, as well as poets were Katy Didden, Jessica Starr, Melissa Range, Austin Segrest, and Sara Strong.

Dean Young is a close, dear friend of Marc’s, and hearing Marc talk about what Dean meant to him, what his poetry has meant to him, and to so many others, was one of the highlights of the evening. Katy Didden shared her story of meeting Dean at Bread Loaf, his pure delight at being there, in open fields under a clear sky, meeting fellow writers with his characteristic joy and good humor.

Marc McKee captivating the audience through lyrical hypnosis.

Here’s something to acknowledge: several poets admitted they have never Dean. I thought this was a brave and marvelous thing.  They only knew Dean through his poetry, just from what they’ve discovered about him through his work, his influence on Marc, and the impact he’s made on “Dean-iacs” over his many years of teaching. His accomplishments are numerous: ten books of poetry, Pulitzer Prize finalist, the Griffin Prize, the Lenore Marshall prize, and the winner of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and so on. But the accolades really don’t matter: something about his poetry has moved us.

It’s strange to hear the cadence of eight different poets reading Dean’s work. I’ve read another writer’s work aloud before, and it is an incredible challenge: the inflections, pauses, rhythms, all of it, is so different when it isn’t the work that you spent months working on. Yet every single poet read Dean’s poems magnificently. We laughed a lot Friday night – how can you not when hearing Dean’s best work? – but there were also moments that also brought us to tears, like the final stanza in “Elegy for a Toy Piano“:

When something becomes ash,
there’s nothing you can do to turn it back.
About this, even diamonds do not lie.

We also heard “Changing Genres”, ”Red Glove Thrown in Thorn Bush“, ”Commencement Address“, ”Bay Arena“, ”Centrifuge“, ”One Story”, and “How I Get My Ideas.” It was a terrific, successful, fantastic evening, and we all have Marc McKee, Gabe Fried, and Allison Smythe to thank (along with all the other poets) for such a great event.

One thing I always tell my writing students is “be generous.” Sounds simple, but as we all know, it really is incredibly hard to be a giving and kind person, not just in a workshop, but with our writing, with ourselves, and throughout our lives. And, so, my request to all of you out there in the TMR audience, is just that: be generous. We need your generosity. It would be an incredible gift if you would.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of the Missouri Review. Donations for Dean can be made at the National Transplants website, Transplants.org, can be made by clicking here. Remember that any size donation, even just a buck or two, is greatly appreciated and goes a long way towards helping. Thank you!

Originally, I planned on writing some sort of Monday morning essay about The Missouri Review’s 4th annual audio competition. Which is important and you should enter (really!). But all week, I’ve been chewing over ideas that are, I think, related to our auditory experiences, and wanted to write about something I experienced last week that actually has a link with our audio competition. Just maybe, this post will come together in some sort of cohesive way. Maybe.

Last week, Orr Street Studios, located here in downtown Columbia, hosted two readers for their (mostly) weekly art series, Seeing Visions/Hearing Voices. On the docket were my friends John Nieves and Amina Gautier. John is a doctoral student here at Mizzou, and his poems have appeared in a slew of places, including Redivider, Fugue, Adirondack Review, California Quarterly and Florida Review.  Amina is the most recent winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award and her story collection, At-Risk, is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press in September. More than sixty of her stories have been published, appearing in Antioch Review, Best African American Fiction, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Pleiades and Southern Review. Amina’s work has been honored with scholarships and fellowships from places like the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference. Basically, it rocked.

(Which makes the fact that I was twenty minutes late even more embarrassing. I am always late to the Orr Street readings. I have no idea why. There was, however, plenty of time for Amina to flaunt the Lakers Game 7 win over the Celtics in my face. So I had that going for me).

Even stranger: Amina literally knocked the lights out. Twice.

Really! I think there was something goofy going on with the motion sensors or something, but yes, twice during her reading, Amina blew the lights out, something that she can proudly tell everyone for the rest of her life.  Weirdly, if this had happened during the last scene of the story she read – “Been Meaning To Say”, which originally appeared in Southwest Review – it actually would have been appropriate (no, I won’t spoil it for you).

I would imagine that most of the readers of this blog have attended readings at least once, if not fairly frequently. One of the things that made the Orr Street reading wonderful was that I was listening to not just writers, but friends. Knowing how much effort Amina and John put into their work, how long it took them to get to this point with their poetry and stories, made the listening experience all the more delightful. A personal connection, a sense of intimacy with the writer’s process, the constant happiness creeping into your smile because you are witnessing the success of friends – their art out there in the world and expereinced live – made the reading all the more enjoyable.

Then there is the other thing: actually being a good reader. Amina and John delivered there, too.

What makes a good reading? Tough question. There’s actually much more to it than just the written word. I’m blown away by how frequently writers will stand up and not tell the audience “Hey, thanks for coming out tonight” or something simple like that. How often the reader will not notice the way the audience responds to the work. Haven’t you ever felt a reader lose his or her audience? The room gets too still; there’s an impatient politeness to the way we refuse to move or rustle; heads turn away, downward, minds on what to pick up from the grocery store on the way home. Even when I first started going to readings, I could sense when a reader lost the room. I figured this was rare: in fact, it’s far too common.

The poet Adrian Matejka was recently thinking about this, too: what about the etiquette of the public reading? Among other things kicked around was the poet beginning with reading a single poem by someone else; readers taking two minutes post-reading to be gracious and say hello to the strangers who come up and say thanks; and not hurrying off to the bar (and out the door) too quickly. What Adrian is curious about, I think, is the sense of the public reading not being such a one-way experience, but a collective experience of art and literature.

N+1 has famously blasted readings as incredibly boring. Sadly, I do partially agree: many readings are, in fact, quite mediocre. They certainly don’t have to be. Writers don’t know how else to promote ourselves, and the public reading seems to be a tradition that we just don’t think much about anymore: why do it, what is its purpose, and so forth. But I’m not ready to give up on them. A few years ago at Washington University, I heard Edward Jones read from his collection All Aunt Hagar’s Children. He seemed a shy man uncomfortable in public; his shoulders sloped and his eyes focused on the floor, saying very little when not behind a microphone. His reading? One of the fiercest and most visceral readings I have ever heard. He absolutely blew us away, metaphorically blew the lights out with this commanding, clear, beautiful voice that reverberated all the violence, tension, intrigue, and danger of the story he read. He took 45 minutes. He could have taken 45 days. No one in the audience would have minded at all.

Voices reveal. Voices reveal character, authority, confidence, charm, humor; voices give the story and the poems another element, an extra thing (joy? play?)  that we go to public performances to experience. The best readers, the Aminas and Johns and Adrians of the literary world, know this. Even knowing it, when it works, when it really works, when the reading is that fantastic, we as readers – and listeners – are all the more grateful.

Michael Nye is the managing editor of The Missouri Review

As the lights dimmed and Sedaris emerged, bobbing towards the podium and glancing timidly at the anxious gallery awaiting him, I leaned back and prepared for that pleasant belly ache like everyone else.

And, in case you had any doubt, he did deliver. 

After starting off with a piece from his latest collection, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, Sedaris jumped from earlier stories, to unpublished journal entries, and lastly, to jokes he’d been told on earlier readings.  Also interspersed was more general oration that proved as entertaining as his writings, including a reading of a book title in what was to Sedaris an unknown language.  When he asked the audience if anyone knew the language, and someone yelled “Croatian,” Sedaris replied, “Come see me after the show.  The book’s yours.” Needless to say, it was a great show; but it was what followed the show that most impressed me. 

The moment Sedaris said, “I’ll be in the lobby afterwards if any of you would like me to sign a book,” I began to make my move.  I was clapping as I did so, sure, but I was more so concentrating on limiting was sure to be a significant wait.   As I rose, made my way out of the row, I saw masses of people flooding towards the exits like there was a fire. 

After standing in line for twenty minutes, two friends approached me with signed books.  On one, Sedaris had sharpied a crying Jesus with the words “Why did you kill me?” above his signature.  On the other, were the words, “I’m glad you can joke.”  My friend had told her best one, upon Sedaris’ earlier request. I guess it hadn’t landed so well, as he’d also crossed out the word “joke” and underneath written “walk.”  I laughed, impressed that Sedaris had taken the time to personalize their signings.  My friends left, and I resigned myself to the long wait ahead. 

Almost two hours later, a story for my fiction class as well as the university concert series pamphlet read, I was next in line to get my book signed.  At this point, I thought, stealing glances at a slumped David Sedaris, I’m sure he’s just signing them.  No way he’s still personalizing each signing.  The person in front of me cleared out, and I stepped forward.

“Hello,” Sedaris said, smiling wide-eyed, as if I was first person to ever ask him for an autograph. 

I said hello and thanked him for coming.  “And thanks for your patience,” I said, “You must be exhausted.”

He paused, pen poised above the title, and looked up.

“I like signing books,” he said, and smiled.

After a moment, “It’s Owen, is it?  O-W-E-N.  Are you a student here, Owen?” Then, following a nod, “What are you studying?”

I told him English-Creative Writing with a fiction emphasis, and he perked up. 

“Do you write short stories?”

A couple minutes and a couple questions later, he handed me my book.  “Thank you for waiting,” he said, still smiling. 

While he talked with my girlfriend, and asked her to tell him about her latest non-fiction piece, I flipped to the title page of Me Talk Pretty One Day.

“It was about my love for Bruce Springsteen,” she said.

He laughed.  “Have you ever met him?”

She told him about the time she touched his sweaty arm and vest at a concert in Chicago. 

“Oh wow,” he said. “Was it everything you’d imagined?”   

As a young writer, I often feel intimated by the literary world.  It is a place of grim prospect.  Spend your whole life in front a computer or notebook, working to communicate something worthwhile and original in a worthwhile and original way.  Sure, there are literary journals to strive towards, as well as grants and fellowships and other awards, but who cares about these things besides other writers?  It’s even worse if you write primarily literary prose or poetry.  Romance or crime, you’ve got a chance, but if you plan on writing anything else for a living, you better start playing the lottery. 

Because of these truths, it’s easy to grow bitter. Many writers work and struggle and eventually prosper while this bitterness consumes them.  I’m sure David Sedaris wouldn’t say he’s never had a bitter moment, but last night I saw no evidence of one.   For at least three hours –we weren’t even close to the end— he made an effort to connect with every single person in that line.  And he’s going to do the same thing every night for the next month.  How does a writer, especially a well-respected literary writer, do this?  Maybe if this was his first book tour, then maybe I could understand his insatiable desire to engage fans, but he’s been publishing books for over fifteen years.  And not only that, but he reads his work, over and over again, with a zeal as noteworthy as his actual prose. 

            This baffles and inspires me.  If David Sedaris can work and struggle and prosper with such an impressive character intact, I have to believe that so too can anyone.  I hope I always will. 

We thanked him and left.  Outside Jesse, we opened our books to the title page.  On mine, he’d drawn an owl perched on the publisher’s name. It looked at me, wide-eyed, patient, still.  And on hers, he’d written “Your story has touched my heart.”

About the readers:

Marc McKee received his MFA from the University of Houston, and is completing his PhD at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, The Journal, Pleiades, and others; recent work appears in Barn Owl Review and Handsome and is forthcoming from Copper Nickel. His chapbook, What Apocalypse?, is available from New Michigan Press, and his full length debut, Fuse, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2011.

Jason Koo is the author of Man on Extremely Small Island, winner of the 2008 De Novo Poetry Prize (C&R Press, 2009) and a Finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. He was born in New York City and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston and his PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center, he has published his poetry and prose in numerous journals, including The Yale Review, North American Review and The Missouri Review. He teaches at NYU and Lehman College and serves as Poetry Editor of Low Rent. He lives in Brooklyn.

Photo: Editors’ Prize winners with Jeffrey E. Smith at the Editors’ Prize Reading (4/12/2008): (from left to right) Otis Haschemeyer, Jude Nutter, Jeffrey E. Smith, & Robert Kimber.

On the sleety evening of Saturday, April 12, we had the pleasure of hosting the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize Reading and Reception. Despite rampant flight cancelations leading into the weekend, Robert, Jude and Otis were all able to join us. We had an incredible pool of submissions for last year’s contest, but our winners’ readings demonstrated the qualities of freshness and heart that won for them these prizes.

Many thanks to the prizewinners for traveling to Columbia to share their work with us. Thanks, too, to the prize’s benefactor, Jeffrey Smith, and to our local friends for braving the unseasonable elements in the name of literature – and mini-quiches.

Those of you who weren’t able to attend the reading can discover the prizewinners’ work in issue 31:1, now available (those of you who did attend have undoubtedly already secured your copies).

Photo: An excited audience at the Editors’ Prize Reading (4/12/2008).

Visit our MySpace page to see more photos from this and other Missouri Review events.

Seth read from a new piece he’s working on concerning a group of brewers addressing a public health crisis. A good time was had by all!