shades of mays past
I recently got out my writing scrapbooks to show something to J and spent some time paging through past high school editorials about whale populations, old rejections, and yellowed award certificates and stumbled on some flyers and clippings from 2004-2005. I was reminded that it has been exactly 20 or years last month since I gave my first reading with my parents in the audience. I was still pretty inexperienced, having only been reading my work regularly at bars and cafes and random events for a year or so at that point. I remember being kind of nervous, and readying my mother with the knowledge that when I talked about mothers in poems, I wasn't necessarily talking about her (though later this would change.) That I made a lot of stuff up and created a lot of personas in those early poems. We walked over to the reading at the Edgewater Library, which was hosting poetry month events. I had won a juried reading the year prior, thus the invite to feature. The library itself was still a squat and almost windowless building then (now rebuilt) with huge orange-carpeted multi-purpose room no doubt designed in the 70s. I was terrified that no one would show up, but there were a handful of people I did not know, including two very complimentary elderly women who bought copies of all the chapbooks I had in tow.
Afterward, my mom said it was like she was watching another me, a different me, that became someone else on stage. She has said similar things when she saw me perform in a play senior year, but these were my words. Later, she would say that she never really got it--the whole poetry thing--despite watching me for the previous decade or more, reading and scribbling and submitting. But during that reading, she was the purpose and the fruits of all that work. My parents would come to a few more readings when they could and when they were during the day. The release of a chapbook in a bookstore out in the burbs, a Printers Row event, a reading up at Woodland Pattern, and several afternoon readings at WomanMade Gallery. They came to my book releases at Quimbys for a couple books and came with me to AWP 2007 down in Atlanta, then again a year later for a college workshop & reading I did at GSU. My mother, one of the last times I saw her in good spirits and fully herself, boasted to the nurse's aid caring for her that I was a poet with a proud and boasting tone. Which in the the presence of a very overworked nursing home staffer making a difference in the real world, admittedly seemed frivolous and ridiculous as a profession to be right then.
I have waxed and waned on how much I like reading my own work. My last bigger reading I think was via Zoom for the Poetry Foundation, which I enjoyed, but it was years ago back in 2021. I've recorded audio readings, sure, but nothing life in the time since. I've been thinking about setting up more in-person readings now that the world has opened back up and people are doing things again and gathering more enthusiastically. I've lost touch with the literary scene almost completely in Chicago, but would be interested to see what is going on out there now that I have evenings free and bandwidth for fun things. Readings are still and continue to be, the best way to connect with audiences and sell books when you can literally put them directly in hands.
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