In Praise of In-Person Readings

When my friend Mary Helen Stefaniak launches her third novel, The World of Pondside, her April 19^th reading will be the first in-person author event I’ve attended at Prairie Lights since COVID.

This momentous occasion has led me to reflect on the many readings that have enriched and shaped my life—both professionally and personally.

Professionally, readings have been huge. When I started teaching at Mount Mercy in 1994, it had a strong Visiting Writers Series directed by my friend Jim McKean, a brilliant poet and essayist. After he retired in 2010, I became the Director. What a joy—giving young writers the opportunity to meet and talk with authors whose work they’ve studied!

Those Mount Mercy readings deserve their own post. Here I’ll focus on the readings I’ve attended outside the university where I teach: readings that help me remember important moments in my life.

First some context: For me, reading is everything. Always has been. When I was a child growing up in Atlantic, Iowa, I thought that writers were heroic and magical, somehow generating pages and pages of words—so many words!—words that transported me and made me dream big. I dreamed of becoming a writer, but when I was a child, I never dreamed that I would get to meet one. The possibility simply never occurred to me.

My First

So imagine starry-eyed me at my very first author event. It’s October 1982, and I’m a freshman at Saint Mary College in Leavenworth, Kansas. One of my professors, the late poet Michael Novak, offered to take me to a writing conference at a nearby college. The keynote speaker was Judith Guest, author of the novel Ordinary People, which had been made into an award-winning film of the same name.

(Clarification: Novak was the first author I met, but I didn’t hear him read his wonderful poetry until much later, maybe after I graduated. When I started college, I hadn’t even read any of his poetry. So Judith Guest was the first author I met whose work I knew.)

She gave two speeches, and she autographed my copies of Ordinary People and her second novel, Second Heaven.

In my journal, I wrote over seven pages about the day. To quote my younger self: “I can’t even express how awed I was.” I also expressed surprise that she seemed “normal”: she looked like my high school principal’s wife, she seemed tired, and she had to get back to Minneapolis for her son’s football game.

The author as both extraordinary and ordinary. I wonder if this midway moment—the paradox and the emotions it evokes—colors most of the author events that linger in our memories (especially for those of us who are writers).

There is awe because you’re meeting an author whose work you admire—maybe even an author who has changed your life. And there is delight and relief because your idol is a bit like you. An ordinary person. Someone who struggles to write. You’re filled with hope because your literary hero has battled self-doubt and rejection before publishing and leaving their mark. But you’re also disappointed: if writing hasn’t come easily to your hero, well, it’s sure not gonna come easily to you.

Yet I had no mixed feelings about the fact that Novak invited me to see Judith Guest. His kindness and attention reaffirmed a pivotal moment with my dad. We were fishing in a boat, silent together as usual, and then he said, “It seems to me that you sort of like to write.” That understatement, that noticing, sent me on my way, gave me permission or blessing or renewed energy to write, to think of myself as a writer.

Two More Firsts

I also received a huge boost at the first reading I attended at Prairie Lights, which just so happened to feature Mary Helen Stefaniak doing her first reading at the store. Yes, the same Mary Helen whose upcoming book launch set this post in motion!

It was August 30, 1991. I know the exact date because I asked Mary Helen, and she knows the exact date because it was her daughter Liz’s thirteenth birthday. I didn’t know Mary Helen or her work at the time. So why did I attend her reading?

You know how some folks will pop into a church and pray? Light a candle for an intention? When I need comfort, I go to Prairie Lights.

On the day of Mary Helen’s reading, I was in doubt about my marriage and my career. The marriage was to a cisgender man (a term that I did not know back then). We were both graduate students specializing in eighteenth-century British literature. I was torn between trying to make things work with him and living happily ever after with a woman on my recreational volleyball team.

I was also torn between the world of academics and the world of creative writers. When I had first arrived at the University of Iowa as a PhD student in literature, I had spent most of my time with students from the Writers Workshop. I had attended readings (not at Prairie Lights, but at large campus venues), and I had attended the fun after parties. By some fluke, I had even taken a class in the fiction workshop. Then, the summer after my first year, I met the cis guy—firmly in the academic camp—and I drifted away from the creative writing world. I missed it. Not just the parties, but the attitude toward literature. The poets and fiction writers loved and honored language, while the academics distrusted and deconstructed it, declaring the author “dead” even when said author lived down the block in Iowa City.

I was in a liminal zone (as academics would say). I was seeking direction and sanctuary, so when I walked past Prairie Lights and saw that a reading was about to start, in I went.

And there was Mary Helen reading from a hilarious short story called “Voyeurs,” which had just been published in The North American Review.

Eventually, it would become the first story in her first book, a collection titled Self-Storage. Then she would publish three novels—The Turk and My Mother; The Cailiffs of Baghdad; and the forthcoming one, The World of Pondside.  We would eventually be in the same writing group: Creative Girls, founded by Eileen Bartos, Tonja Robins, and Mo Jones.

Mary Helen and the other members would help make my writing so much better than it would have been without their insight. And they would make my life so much richer than it would have been without their friendship. Mary Helen would one day teach fiction writing in China, and because I would be going through a rough patch, she would bring me prayer beads, complete with a video of the monk who had given them to her.

But that evening, my only experience of Mary Helen was awe. I wanted to be just like her when I grew up: able to write something that would make an audience laugh so hard they’d cry.

Check out the opening of Mary Helen’s story “Voyeurs”:

The first time Judy and I saw the naked man, it was by accident. We were thirteen, and we were crossing the Walnut Street bridge over the railroad tracks, talking about whether we would get an abortion or would we have the baby no matter what. It was 1964. I said I would have the baby no matter what. So right away Judy asked me if I’d seen the movie The Cardinal, which, I knew, had been rated B by the Legion of Catholic Decency. It was playing at the Avalon at the time. I reminded her that my mother wouldn’t let me see movies that were rated B by the Legion of Decency. Well, said Judy (whose mother played the saxophone in a three-piece band and didn’t give a hoot for the Legion of Decency), in the movie the Cardinal’s sister gets pregnant…

How I related to Mary Helen’s Catholic humor! And how I must have needed it! I was about to get divorced and come out as a lesbian, about to share this news with my mother, who was more conservative than the narrator’s in Mary Helen’s story.

And, thanks in part to Mary Helen’s reading, I was about to become a lot more eclectic in my literary and writerly pursuits. No exaggeration, Mary Helen’s reading nudged me out of the liminal zone and toward my happy professional life as a generalist English Professor who writes lesbian mystery novels and academic essays with really long titles.

My First Lesbian Reading

Around this same time, I stumbled upon another life-changing reading. I must have seen a poster in EPB (the English Philosophy Building) or an article in The Daily Iowan advertising a reading by a lesbian poet. I decided that attending this event would help me determine whether I was truly a lesbian. (Yes, my earliest lesbian experimentation involved not sex, but stanzas.)

The reading was in Shambaugh or some other large campus auditorium. I remember slipping into the back row, alone, envious of all the lesbians sitting together in the front. I’m pretty sure that the poet we had gathered to see was Cheryl Clarke. She was Black and tall and butch. (Did I know the word ‘butch’ back then?) Whoever she was, I’m sorry to say I didn’t take in much of her poetry. I could barely take in the fact that there were so many literary lesbians and that I was in the same room with them. That audience, that community, filled me with awe and a desire to belong.

Two other readings played an even bigger role as I found myself and my people. One featured Adrienne Rich, and one, Leslie Feinberg.

Adrienne Rich

I attended the Rich event a year or two after the Mary Helen reading. I had divorced or was divorcing the cis guy and proudly out as a lesbian. I’d had a brief relationship with the volleyball player and was only a few months away from meeting the love of my life. With me at the reading was my best friend in graduate school, Michelle DeRose—the first straight friend I came out to. (It was at The Mill with Magic Johnson on the TV coming out as HIV-positive).

Joining Michelle and me at Rich’s reading was the entire population of Iowa City. The crowd broke the fire code and filled every spare inch of space in the lecture hall. I was sitting on the steps between the actual seats, nearly in a stranger’s lap, overjoyed by the crowd. I was no longer alone, no longer an outsider looking in, no longer confused. I was certain—certain that I belonged with this community paying tribute to this lesbian icon.

Behind the podium was the icon herself: she who had written “Diving into the Wreck” (one of my favorite poems to teach), she who had written “The Floating Poem” (one of my favorite poems period), “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” and “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision.” And, and, and. Adrienne Rich had made me.

And not just me. Before the reading, someone from the Women’s Center or the university’s Faculty Staff Alliance gave a stunning tribute to Rich’s impact on the lesbian and feminist community.

Rich seemed overwhelmed by the tribute, her voice and hands shaking when she thanked the speaker. “She looked not well,” Michelle said recently as she and I tried to remember the reading, “far more stooped and fragile than I would have expected given the power in her poetry.”

For me, Adrienne Rich’s reading was all about power. Not just the power of poetry, but the power of community. The power of knowing who I was and where I belonged.

Leslie Feinberg

Over a decade later, I attended Leslie Feinberg’s event with the love of my life, Benjamin Thiel. It was Feb. 26, 2003. I know the exact date because Ben is good at keeping track of important moments. Back then, Ben was my partner of nearly ten years, but not yet my husband because he was in the midst of transitioning from female to male (and Iowa did not yet have marriage equality).

I’m sorry to say that I had not been supportive of Ben when he first considered transitioning, and if it hadn’t been for his patient trust and forgiveness, I wouldn’t have been sitting with him in a lobby at the Iowa Memorial Union, eagerly anticipating the arrival of one of his heroes, Leslie Feinberg.

When Feinberg walked through the lobby, Ben squeezed my leg in excitement. So hard, we’ve joked over the years, that I bruised. So hard that I knew he wasn’t holding anything back: we were a team, transitioning together.

Some of Feinberg’s words that night seemed to speak directly to my own changes:

Don’t elevate fear into theory.
Don’t let someone turn your complexity into simplicity.

Back in graduate school, I had read some “feminist” theory that would now be labeled as TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist). This TERF theory had been shaped at least in part by fear—and it had fueled my own disbelief and fear when Ben first came out to me as trans. I had tried to turn Ben’s complexity into simplicity. But that mistake was in the past, and at the end of Feinberg’s event, when Ben was too awestruck to ask Feinberg to autograph his copies of Stone Butch Blues and Transgender Warriors, I got the autographs for him.

At Feinberg’s event I once again knew that I was right where I belonged: side-by-side with my beloved partner, Ben.

Not all author events are so impactful, but many others help stitch together parts of my life.

Readings with Friends

I love readings, and I love my friends. So put the two together, and they make for happy memories. In the photo below, I’m with Cathy Cutler (my dear friend since junior high), and we are eagerly awaiting Maureen Corrigan and Sara Paretsky. Once, when Cathy and I saw John Irving, the audience was too large for Van Allen Hall, so we trailed the crowd to Phillips, irritated that we’d get crappy seats even though we had arrived early. But fate was on our side, and we wound up sitting on the floor mere feet from Irving at the podium!

Shakespeare, Carol Ann Duffy, & Jane Smiley

A couple readings enabled me to geek out on my beloved Shakespeare. (No séances involved.) One was at a Shakespeare conference in Cambridge. UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy (also a lesbian poet) gave a magnificent talk on how the Bard impacted her own work. The other reading involved Shakespeare more obliquely.

It featured one of my favorite living writers, Jane Smiley. She read and discussed Some Luck, the first in her Last Hundred Years Trilogy about an Iowa farm family. Although I love the trilogy, my favorite Smiley novel is her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres, a rewriting of King Lear set on a family farm. I had published an essay about it titled “The Uses of Tragedy: A Thousand Acres and American Exceptionalism” (yes, one of those long academic titles). During her autograph session—“I suppose that now you all want me to scribble in my books”—I told her about my essay, and she said she’d like to read it!

Talk about geeking out! When I emailed it to her, I tried to keep my excitement and glee in check:

Dear Jane,
Thanks so much for your interest in the article I wrote about A Thousand Acres. I’m a native Iowan who grew up in a rural community, and I have an intense nerdy interest in rewritings of Shakespeare. So your novel is one of my favorites.
I would, of course, love to hear your thoughts about my essay, but I know you’re busy.

Reader, she wrote me back!

Thanks, Mary–
I quite enjoyed reading your essay. I would say, as maybe Shakespeare would, “I did my best with unforgiving material.” You brought a lot of it back to me.  Good to see you.

Nostalgia Trip With Vonnegut

Now that I think about it, a lot of readings are geek-out fests. In 2001, as I stood in a long line at the IMU waiting to see Kurt Vonnegut, I exchanged story after story with stranger after stranger about when we first read Vonnegut and what he meant to us.

I had worshiped Vonnegut in high school and college. I embraced his quasi-atheism as a bookish way to rebel; I earnestly journaled about passages like this one: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” In college, much to the chagrin of my professor Carol Hinds (a die-hard Austen fan) I wrote my senior thesis on Vonnegut and Twain. So in the IMU, I was paying tribute not just to Vonnegut but to my younger self.

If some readings are nostalgia trips, others are about building or honoring the future.

Toward the Future

When Chris DeVault, now the Chair of my department, first arrived at Mount Mercy, I took him to see Irish poet Eavon Boland so that he—a Joycean and a lover of Irish literature—would warm to his new home.

When I wanted to add more contemporary writers to my LGBTQ+ Literature course, I took myself to see Andrea Gibson at Prairie Lights.

When I wanted to celebrate the accomplishments of emerging writers, I enjoyed readings by Lyz Lenz and Daniel Tyx. Lyz’s discussion of Godland sparked insights about my own spiritual journey, and Daniel’s book about immigration injustices at the Texas/Mexico border gave me an interesting text to teach in Writing and Social Issues.

Daniel is the son of a dear friend (and wonderful writer), Carol Tyx. I’ve known Daniel since he was in junior high, so maybe his reading was also part nostalgia trip.

You never know what a reading will mean to you, how it will shape you, or what it will enable you to commemorate.

Go to Mary Helen’s reading: Tuesday April 19, 7 p.m. at Prairie Lights.  Then go to lots more readings. Let me know about the ones that stand out in your memory.