I haven't participated here much but I'm going to give it a shot.( I don't care for definition word shy, but maybe that is it, in some regard. )
Later this year I am allegedly going to read in public for the first time in many years, a true story that while I shouldn't really discuss it, I can say that it is of a somewhat nefarious nature, though it was many years ago. I'm not quite comfortable with it as it is from so long ago that that really isn't my life anymore, one of those kinds of stories.
So...there's a lot of writers here and I thought that I would ask, and as my beginning question for my plan to get involved here and participate...
What is/was the most difficult, uncomfortable or embarassing story that you have ever read to an audience?
( Also as luck would have it I will be sans internet for a day or two but I will check this thread and hopefully find responses.)
Thanks!
Teri
I didn't have to read out anything personal like you have, but I did read some of "Choke" to. uh. my relatives. The good bits. Really good bits. Ahem.
If I had to give you advice, I'd say distance yourself from whatever you're reading. It's a story, and you're the narrator. All there is to it. Let the shame come afterwards :) But don't be afraid of public readings because of this. If you get a shot at something of the kind, grab it, I reckon.
I sorry if I came off as an insensitive git, which I usually do. I mean, I don't really know what sort of a thing you wrote about and just how hurtful it might feel to bring it up again. But, please, don't assume I have no idea about that can of worms you mention. It's because I do that I felt I could say something valid.
About reading "Choke" aloud--I kind of got pressured into it and couldn't back out. It was a pretty stupid situation.
Just yesterday I listened to the WTF Podcast with Marc Maron. His guest was a commedianne named Ms. Pat. She had an extremely rough childhood and young adult life (lots of physical and sexual abuse, two children by a married man before she was 16, alcohol and drug abuse in her immediate family, and worse) and she talks about things she did in her younger years that she isn't proud of. Things like hiding crack in her kids' clothing to sell it. Things she did to get by. She turned her life around and turned her struggles into some very brutally honest comedy, and she acknowledged that she sometimes has trepidation about talking about things in her past because she doens't want anyone to think that who she is now is who she was then. You get the impression in listening to her that she has grown through the retelling of the bad stuff but that it was never easy.
Anyway, what you are saying reminded me of that. It's a legitmate struggle you are describing, absolutely.
This is why I don't write personal stuff, and/or why what bits of me that do make it into fiction and song are deliberately dressed up or exaggerated. Those aren't my opinions; they're the characters'. He's the criminal or bigot or pervert, not me. I'm far more concerned about how people will read it on their own without me there to interpret and introduce it, especially if it's first-person like my debut novel was. Though that made the audiobook really fun to perform. I can't think of any stories I've been uncomfortable reading (and I've done a lot), but if I ever was, it would likely be because of the audience makeup rather than my writing, like telling jokes at a funeral.
The most awkard speech I've ever made in public, though, was after shooting video all day at an Islamic school, the principal shoved a mic into my hand in front of the entire assembled body and told me to talk about my experience of the day. I have no memory of anything I said, but it probably resembled the end of Rocky IV. Many times I've performed songs for the very subjects (however oblivious) they were about. But it's the same thing, you just embody the character. Telling a nonfiction story, though, I guess you just use time passage as your disconnect. Or have one of your alters perform it. haha
Well I don't know about read to an audience, but the most uncomfortable story I wrote to a crit group was: The Army Of The Black Monkeys.
Yea as you can imagine, I'm not proud of that story.
It was a dystopian flash fiction about an anti-hero who decided to save television by having black monkeys from a zoo replace the current line of TV producers to produce something experimental and different from mainstream programming.
Looking back on it, I shouldn't have wrote it. You grow and you learn.
Great question. I had one of those that was epic. Bumbershoot arts festival in Seattle. I just happened to be around the Center and walked through and saw there was a poetry reading. And I just happened to have a poem in my pocket... first one I'd written in many years, typed out and carrying it around proofing it. So I went in and got a time and read. There were about 200-300 people there. MC mentioned I was published poet, had run a poetry press in town before. I read. The poem is below, here.
Nobody said anything. Nobody moved. They were frozen, staring at anything but me. I said, "Thanks for the great round of apathy, folks" and moved off. This cute little teenage girl came out and did a poem about dumping her boyfriend. Their relief was palpable. She got a big hand. I clapped hard for her, she was pert and funny. Nobody met my eye or said anything to me the rest of the night until I left.
The poem was:
BLOOD SIMPLE
From: Engines of Desire by Linton Robinson
I saw it first seeping
through the coarse dark
hairs between her legs,
blood thicker than water, slicker than my own,
blood gorged with life, charged with death
Did she bleed because I pierced her?
Or because she lost the child?
She bleeds red from her loins,
white from her breasts,
salt blue from her eyes,
ice green from her guts.
she bleeds copper-gold,
bleeds a dark, tarry black.
I don't know where to look.
I close my eyes to the colors and listen
for a steady dripping that deepens into thunder
as the world throbs hard in my ears,
swollen with its blood and births,
pregnant with its goods and evils.
You can taste it in the wine,
in the host of old recipes;
in any meat, any fish, any fowl.
It's a fine old stock for certain soups,
just lick it off your own fingers.
Blood on your tongue
is more a ritual than a sin,
more an initiation than a crime,
more a meal than a curse.
Under the acrid organic blend
are faint motes of other men.
Past the tongue there is no taste,
just the thick flow down the throat
and on through--a very mixed blessing
that merely keeps me alive.
Does she bleed to feed me because it's too late to die?
Or just to go where I can't follow?
It has a smell of sweat and urine,
of rot and germination,
of fish and death and sweet-sick pollution,
of things already eaten and already passed,
of water already broken,
of air already breathed too many times before...
of corruptions still in progress.
In short, of all turned earth, of everything alive.
The odor washed away by the rivers,
lost in the clean, sharp wrack of sea.
I look up into the rain, sniff running water,
hold up my clean hands to the sky.
Does she bleed some tainted form of water?
Or a more fluid form of flesh?
This dripping tactile glass of hours
winds the months, plots the periods of years,
tells the torture of aborted time,
always unfinished because never begun,
a clotting, cloying cycle
by which life loses itself in the dark.
It's an almanac I can read off the sheets
when I can't see the stars,
bright cardinal points without which
there would be no returning.
Ebbing or stemming, she's always been bleeding.
Is the spoor is getting richer?
Am I getting warmer?
In the desert blood doesn't last long at the surface.
It sinks away grain by grain,
flows into underground rivers,
forms deposits of need and blisters of wealth.
I touch the stains as gently as the sand.
Sticky and hot, it makes me feel porous
and touches my life like gravity,
draws me under, where springs flow
and mirages are formed.
Does she bleed from sin and rupture and long run downhill?
Or just straight out of her heart?
The spoor leads me up into the trees,
red splashed behind the green
like a feldspar fleck in stone.
There's bright sign on the trail,
but maybe just from other climbers.
Yet there is blood on these rocks,
bones frozen deep in the crevices.
The very particles of the stone are tiny animals,
drowned and drifted and crushed together;
lives not so much lost as collected and concreted,
all their fluids petrified, then crumpled like cloth
lifted by their dry weight, changed by their very elevation,
bursting forth and flowing red in their own heat,
spreading out to harden in black scabs.
The slickrock is carved in old flows,
flirts the eye upward like any cathedral.
Has she bled all over the sumacs?
And smeared the Western sky?
Above the trees, the trail is blackened and burnt,
runs cold as each peak points higher and thinner and paler.
Blood drops freeze into sharp crystal shards.
They glow in slightest light,
I see them sown through the snow
like rubies preserved in amber.
Am I losing the scent?
Or is she running out of blood?
The rock turns to ice, then to sleet,
then to snow, to white air
But still I can breathe,
even while my lungs freeze
I stand above it all, blowing frost clouds at the sky...
and see blood on the moon.
Is the purpose of blood to cool the brain?
Or merely to feed us then waste us away?
Of other people's work, I read Choke out loud in its entirety to my mom. She loved it. Maybe Guts, which I read to some of the classmate's in my Speech 101 class.
Of mine, I read this piece of flash fiction to some friends where a boy gets struck by lightning while masturbating in a field during a storm.
Speaking of parents, my father read my entire second novel aloud to my mother, a little bit at a time. It's much less offensive than my first, but it still amused me to picture that. Was also one of the reasons I later wanted to produce an audiobook.
Also speaking of parents, only slightly off topic, when I was like 14, they used to make me perform AC/DC's "Big Balls" for family and friends whenever they'd entertain. Humiliating. But it probably cured any stage fright I'd had up until then.
Ha ha, what awesome parents, Gordon :D
Truth be told I'm not sure I'd consider reading anything to an audience, so I'm not sure how to answer the question. Mostly because reading anything in front of an audience (even say a small classroom in a university) the idea of it makes me freeze.
Yes! A poet that hates public speaking.
The only time I've read nonfiction was for the same series you're doing. I hate personal stories, too - but the good thing to remember is that everyone there is doing the same thing and the series is known for some very gritty/dark stuff. And I always have a drink before any reading. The most uncomfortable I've ever been was my first reading (which you were at! Haha) for the obvious reason and because I was reading something wildly graphic and nichey (it was about a gay BDSM couple breaking up while one strips nude) to a crowd of strangers. Pretty sure that helped. If I can read that story in mixed company I can read anything!
I think my own issue with personal stories (I wrote down the most major one, though I wouldn't exactly call it gritty or dark) is more I'm not even sure how much I even remember.
Like I remember the most significant things, like when I almost slipped off an edge on a camp ground. Again also written down.
I attribute a lot of it is I think in images rather than words. And these images tend to combine sometime. Then there is the issue with false memories.
So it's like a puzzle game finding scattered images. Like a ruins of the mind.
In college, I workshopped a story about a waitress who ends up quitting her job after an encounter with three difficult black women who come in for lunch at the end of a shift, and then don't tip. There's a lot of racial discrimination and judgement in the serving community, especially at certain types of restaurants and in certain neighborhoods, and I wanted to bring that to light through my main character -- to make her somewhat unlikeable, but to make her viewpoint understood. I also wanted to portray the black women as sympathetic, though also bad customers.
Reading that aloud in a class of rich kids who never had to work in the service industry before was ROUGH. They wanted a clearer line drawn about who was right and who was wrong, mainly that racism is wrong (which it is). I just don't write that way, especially when it comes to protagonists. They're never completely likeable.
So yeah -- that gave me a major case of nerves.
^
On the bright side, there are worse audiences you could have read that to.
Oh but reading personal poetry is especially weird. It was kind of a leap of faith just publishing a poetry book, but I can't stand audiences.:/
Always manage to trick myself into stage freight.
lizlazzara, I wrote a monologue in a playwriting class from the perspective of a white supremist father. Then had to act it. Also, a very uncomfortable experience, especially with the edition of acting, I had concerns that the perspective of my character would be mistaken for my personal views.
I was workshopping a story and a lady interrupted me because my MC cursed, and the crazy ass writing group let her. I never went back.