the difference between then and now

Yesterday I attended a program called Fiction Writers At Lunch. This is a get together sponsored by the fiction writing department at Columbia College. FW@L is a clever or simple minded way of letting you know what occurs at the event; fiction writers come, they are served lunch (And this was way before "Snakes on a Plane"). This leads to a bevy of decisions about how to spend my precious dollars that need to be made month after month, from what theme the FW@L ought to have to what kind of food should be served (yesterday it was from my favorite restaurant, Thai Spoon, which I could tell just by looking at it and deducing that Thai Spoon's close proximity meant it could only be their pineapple fried rice with tofu).

Some months the department has featured readers and you just come and eat and sit and listen. The best is when they have open mics like they did yesterday. The theme yesterday was Meet-and-Greet. How terribly droll. Many times I have gone to FW@L and eaten (something to show for my precious dollars!) and ignored the open mic list. I'm not particularly fond of reading my work in front of three dozen or so of my peers, men and women, or pretty much anyone. I'll do it, I have done it, but I don't exactly jump at the chance to get up in front of people and have them all staring at me while I share with them the thing that is most special to me in the whole wide world, you know?

So the reason I say open mics are best is not because I love to read my work, but because students get to read and you get to hear work from people you might never have a class with or you hear new work from someone you had a class with a year ago and what you hear is something really fresh and new.

Yesterday I happened to be sitting next to my teacher (don't you dare call me a brown-noser!) who gave me the you-ought-to-get-up-and-read nudge...which I automatically declined. I don't read, I told her. She pished at me. She resumed looking for something to read from her journal. I comtemplated this.

This is the teacher I am glad to return to after three years of schooling. Someone I admire tremendously. The woman who gave me this artistic creed: "All art is meant to disturb."

I looked at her profile. She didn't have to read. She was faculty. She was set in stone. She had nothing to prove. And I realized that standing up there to read was more about my feeling like I had to prove to everyone I deserve to be a writer. So I got up, quickly, went to the computer lab and printed out something to read.

I chose my best work, of course. Something I hadn't read aloud before, outside of class. A piece of fiction, oddly enough. The ending of the goth girl from the liquor store series. I picked out a couple pages to read and fingered them nervously until it was my time to read. My heart was pounding. My face felt flushed. I was shaky. The host of the day introduced me badly, but I didn't let it bother me.

I walked to the microphone and introduced the story and began, a fully capable reader, standing in front of my peers (hiss, hiss) and met their eyes and let the words fall on them, and heard their laughter (there was laughter!) and it was just about the best experience I have had in many, many days.

Despite any fun I may poke at the department, that they provide moments like these for the taking, for the willing participant, it makes me glad that I chose to go there and even makes me consider that grad school there might not be so terrible.

stine