did a reading last night

My favorite book store in town does an open mike reading series the last Wednesday of every month. I'd only been to one before and that was a hair over three years ago to promote SmokeLong and drum up submissions for our first issue. Amazing how the mag has grown since then. Last night, I asked E what she wanted to do and she said she was out of reading material and would I like to go to a bookstore? Funny you should mention it, sez I, I'd been thinking about going to Elliott Bay to do their open mike and promote SLQ, but I'd pretty much decided not to since we're closed for subs right now. But it would be fun, so you wanna go to that and then browse the books after? Sure, sez she.

I'd have liked to have had a teeny bit more time to prepare: take some time to select what to read, print it out, peruse it a few times to re-familiarize myself with the rhythms so that I could make more eye contact with the audience. From getting off the bus to getting to E's to getting back downtown didn't allow for much time, though, so I grabbed two print pubs I was in (both defunct now, alas) and read from those. 'Twas fun. I plugged the mag (and was surprised that the emcee actually remembered that night three years ago, even saying, "Yeah, you were here three years ago." Good memory!) and read Flicker and Pink Fuzzy Bunny Slippers. It went pretty well and it was great to be in front of an audience again (for those who don't know, my creative jones used to be filled with acting).

All of the other readers did poetry (we were a little bit late, so I may have missed one or two, and they may have done prose), so I'm not sure whether plugging the mag for subs will result in any, but it was still fun. I'm clueless about poetry, so I'm not sure how good the other readers' work was, but there were a couple I really enjoyed. Will have to do it again some time.