“So,” I told the surprisingly big crowd, “this is something of a fantasy for my English major self.”
I was standing at a podium in front of a good-sized crowd. Good-sized for a book reading. Bad-sized for a Jay-Z concert. Huge-sized given my expectation that I’d be reading to my Katie, my boys, and an empty room.
Handfuls of students, colleagues, neighbors, and even strangers crowded into Prairie Lights bookstore. These kind people showed up on a Friday night in Iowa City to hear me read from The Person on the Other Side of This Book.
The experience was humbling. Magical, even. My colleagues and students hooted and hollered for me. The Prairie Lights staff had to get extra chairs as audience members wandered in. The events coordinator told me, afterwards, that the reading was beautiful. I can’t say how others experienced the event, but I can say that it was a beautiful experience for me.
***
I don’t know why I was nervous for this reading, but I was. I’ve been performing improv in front of crowed every Friday night for years. I’ve given any number of talks at academic conferences. I’ve been a teacher for an eternity. Still, something about this reading shook me.
Maybe it was the vulnerability that comes from sharing my strange writing with others. Maybe it was an insatiable and unhealthy urge to impress my colleagues, my students, or even my wife and children. Maybe it was my heightened, oh-my-God-I-wonder-if-I’m-having-a-mid-life-crisis-or-dying anxiety. That was a pretty cool descriptor for my anxiety. What an English professor might call an adjective. A string adjective?
Anyway, I don’t know what it was, but I was nervous. And then I wasn’t nervous. It was a joy to see many of the people I’ve met since coming to Iowa City gathered in one of the coolest bookstores in the country. Showing me love. Letting me tell them jokes. Letting me talk about my books. Letting me read my wild attempt at science fiction. Man, it was fun. The sort of experience that will stay with you. Will stay with me, for sure.
Solomon and Samson sat in the front row. Solomon wore my yellow sun glasses. Before the event started, while my students and colleagues were hooting and hollering for me, Solomon pointed to his watch and said “chop, chop.” I thought that was very funny.
After we got home, Solomon showed me that he taped one of the stickers I printed to promote the book to his journal. He wanted to remember the night. I can’t tell you how good it was to hear my son say that to me. How beautiful.
***
“Don’t make him pay,” the event coordinator told the barista, “he’s the author!”
I was trying to get Solomon and Samson a hot chocolate from the coffee shop before the reading.
I laughed out loud.
“I’m not a real author,” I wanted to say. “I’m a fraud.”
People stood in line after I was finished and let me sign their books. I have no idea how to write inscriptions, so the words I scrawled were silly bordering on delusion.
“I’m not a real author,” I wanted to howl at all my kind colleagues, friends and students who were waiting in line. “I don’t know what the hell to write!”
It occurs to me, a handful of books later, that I guess I am an author. No, fortune and fame haven’t found me and I doubt they ever will. But I’ve written many things. And I’ve shared those many things with others. And I feel really good about having done that. Kurt Vonnegut, as I’ve often written in these blogs, wrote that when you create something your soul grows. My writing, like my teaching, is soul-growing work, of that much I’m convinced.
20 years ago I was rejected by the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. I wanted to go to college in Iowa to become a poet. I went to college in Minnesota and became a teacher instead. Twenty years later, I was doing a reading at Prairie Lights bookstore. Toni Morrison has read at Prairie Lights. And, if you trust Wikipedia, Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag, and Seamus Heaney too. And did I mention Toni Morrison?
So an English major fantasy of mine came true a few weeks ago. And it was good.
Samuel Jaye Tanner 