Writers who read, and readers who write, or even just listen…

The Columbia College Chicago Fiction Writing Department presents the Story Week: Festival of Writers every year. This one isn’t numbered so I don’t know how many I’ve missed so far, but when I received the notice in my student email box, I knew I’d find myself there at least once.

While I wouldn’t consider myself a writer, I am definitely a reader. When I was younger, reading taught me of worlds beyond the one I was suffocating in. The words on a page are inclusive and democratic in ways that people are not. If the writing is encouraging, then anyone who reads it can be encouraged. If the writing opens a door to the future, then anyone who reads it can have knowledge of that open door. Even if the writing is a sorrowful glimpse into the tragedy of loss, anyone who reads it can grieve and is therefore never alone. Anything important, instructive, dangerous, empowering, or even trifling to humanity is accessible to anyone who reads—as long as anyone writes.

So with an aim to find an inclusive and democratic open door, I scanned the Story Week Schedule of Events in search of likely places to find myself. I started with the Story Workshop Mini-Classes. This wasn’t as easy as that statement makes it sound. The last time I attended any type of directed writing instruction was some time in high school, which was a long time ago. I am currently enrolled in a class called Methods & Materials for Teaching Language Arts at the Elementary and Middle School Levels. Which is a long title for a class in which I hope to learn how to help others to gain literacy as I have. As uncomfortable as I was about entering my first college level fiction writing workshop, I realized emerging readers and writers probably feel the same about their first literary experiences. Even though Story Week was supposed to be entertaining, I knew I was going to have to use my imagination. So, I imagined myself taking one on the chin for my future students and I got there early.

After signing up as a non-alumni and being directed to the non-alumni workshop, I moved past all the special alumni—who received a nice journal for being alumni—and found myself in a brightly lit classroom filled with a big circle of chairs. This was a little too much openness; there would be nowhere to blend into the background here. There was a man sitting on one of the chairs in a part of the circle that traversed one wall. I crossed the room and chose a chair beneath the windows on the other side. We acknowledged each other, then he went back to his reading of the Story Week pamphlet. I escaped only once to go to the ladies room to stare in the mirror and ask myself the same thing I always ask myself when I am early for something potentially uncomfortable, “What are you doing here?” to which I allowed myself to answer, “I don’t know.” Still, I wasn’t going to quit and run away, so I went back to the big circle with nowhere to hide and I sat down.

So there we were, the two of us, sitting apart from one another in a room full of chairs. After a while there were three of each, and then another, and another two, and so on until Elizabeth Yokas entered. That’s when the room came alive because Elizabeth Yokas walked through the middle of the circle of chairs and made us all stop ignoring each other. Of course she introduced herself and she got us to introduce ourselves too. Then she made us get rid of all those extra chairs. We had to move the empty chairs away from us and pull our full chairs forward, back, an inch to the right, or two inches to the left, until the circle was tighter and we could all see each other. Each time some one new arrived, we’d start again. Under the careful orchestration of Elizabeth Yokas, who reminded me of a dance instructor in these instances, we moved ourselves, in our chairs, back and forth and over just a little, until each newcomer was included in the circle and everyone could be seen by everyone. This, I thought, was not unlike the circles of kindergarten and first-grade readers I’d witnessed in field observations for my methods classes. Thankfully, we had chairs. In either case, there was to be no provision for hiding beyond the circle.

Elizabeth Yokas is a member of the adjunct faculty at Columbia College; she is definitely a writer who reads. Yet when she began to read, it was not from her own work that she read. Instead she began reading to us from a story fragment written by Kafka. As she read from “The Bucket Rider”, she would pause to remind us, the listeners, to see the scene she had just read. “…often I am upraised as high as the first story of a house; never do I sink as low as the house doors. And at last I float at an extraordinary height above the vaulted cellar of the dealer…,” she’d pause often to make sure we were seeing. I saw.

Of course, I recognize this direction to visualize as a form of mental imaging that connects the reader with the text. Strategic readers are able to make pictures in their heads as they read. As a reader, this is something I take for granted; I just do it. Many of my future students will have to be carefully taught to do this, just as Elizabeth Yokas had carefully made sure we were doing. In this way she led us, pausing often to make sure we were following her with our minds. Then she passed the story.

Another reader took up where she left off. Addressing the reading to someone in the circle, another voice took up reading Kafka’s writing while Elizabeth Yokas continued to lead us with her voice. “She sees nothing and hears nothing; but all the same she loosens her apron-strings and waves her apron to waft me away,” at this Elizabeth Yokas wafted with her own arms, waving an invisible apron to make sure we could see. The reader changed again; the constants remained, Kafka’s story fragment, and the instructional voice of Elizabeth Yokas. It was practically trance inducing.

It was the trance-like pleasure of being read to; I had forgotten this sensation until a week before, when Dr. Patricia Braun, our Methods of Teaching Language Arts professor, read to us from a instructional narrative about a cactus. It was part of an exercise called Listen Sketch Draft. We were to listen as she read, then at several places we were asked to stop and quickly sketch as many of the details of what she read as we could remember. After sketching, we would draft a sentence or two about the sketch we had just made. Making the connection between listening, visualizing, and writing is essential for young writers. Dr. Braun shared some of the sketches made by emerging writers in response to the same exercise; their drawings and insights were remarkably better than ours.
At the Story Workshop Mini Class, Kafka’s story fragment ended and Elizabeth Yokas took up another book, this time Native Son. Richard Wright. Bigger Thomas. I really did not want to visualize this. It was only the part about the rat. Fear. Visualizing Native Son the way we were being instructed to could not end well. Could it? Elizabeth Yokas began the reading; addressing it to one of the listeners across the circle. I won’t hit you with the gory details except to say that after reading my part about the black rat being bashed over the head with the black cast iron skillet by the black man surrounded by black women in the one room tenement apartment, I was glad for the seat I had chosen beneath the windows. The sun helped.

Of the pile of books on the floor in front of the chair Elizabeth Yokas was seated in, two remained: Madame Bovary, and what appeared to be some sort of anthology. She had placed four books there at the start of the workshop. At this point, we had read from two books, but she did not read from Madame Bovary, or the anthology. Instead, she asked several of us to give a word. Just one word, offered to all of us seated in the circle, along with the same direction to see it there in the center. We gave each other words. I don’t remember what I said; I remember the black man seated to my right offered ‘emasculated’. The man who’d been sitting alone in the room before I arrived turned out to be hard of hearing. The word had to be repeated louder. “Emasculated,’ we both said almost in unison.

Elizabeth Yokas directed us through multiple cycles, each time encouraging us to let the word enter our minds where it might have some effect on the writing we would do latter. Some of the participants had pieces they were already working on, the rest of us would be expected to write anything we wanted. Just as I was wondering how we would climb out of the lower regions of Richard Wright’s psyche, we were instructed to give a word that had nothing to do with anything we had heard since we’d entered the room—and we were not to think of this word before it was our turn. Each word was to be gifted with no connection to anything at all. While I tried really hard not to think of my word in advance, I waited as others tried not to think of their words in advance too. Some of us had obvious trouble with not thinking in advance. There were some very long pauses as single words were offered and appraised. Some people wrote down all of the words, some jotted the ones that seemed interesting or useful to them. Although I know I was influenced by all of them, I did not write down all of the words. Sidewalk, sunlight, sign, bird, dirty, window, cup; these are a few of the words I caught and saved.

We went through a round in which we were directed to give a description of the sounds we could hear in a place we had gone to in our minds; traffic, laughing, humming, running, children, and so on; then we were given a chance to write. I should have used a pencil. I didn’t. So I struggled with the tool I was using at the time. It doesn’t matter because it was soon time to read what we had written—aloud. To everyone in the circle. This took lots of encouragement. Lots. One man said he would not feel comfortable reading what he had written, and besides he had to leave soon. He read second or third, because he had to leave soon, and then he did not leave.

This reading aloud of one’s own writing before an audience that will certainly judge before you’ve had a chance to make it perfect, was undoubtedly the most uncomfortable part. It was also the best part. We do a lot of this sort of writing and sharing in our methods classes. I try to imagine this happening in a public school with lots of young writers who are not necessarily comfortable with themselves or anyone else. I try to imagine how different the sharing might be in a place were students feel threatened. Will I be able to comfort my students with my voice as Elizabeth Yokas has comforted us with hers?

Speaking of voices, earlier, when the story fragment from Kafka, and the chapter from Richard Wright had been read, the changing voices were someone disconcerting. The pitch, the volume, the style, character, and cadence of each reader’s voice changed the experience of the story for me. It made me want to find the story and read it myself—silently.
Now, when these same readers were reading their own writing, I noticed something magical. The voices matched. They didn’t match each other; instead, the voice of each reader matched the writing of the writer who was reading. I noticed a similar magic later in the week as I listened to Sapphire reading from her novel, “The Kid”. As she described her methodology and reasons for writing this extension of the novel, “Precious”, her voice was clear and conversational. Yet, as she read nice long excepts from her own written words, her voice took on a quality that made her writing breathe and pulse as if it were alive. It wasn’t acting. One of the readers in the Story Workshop was an actor; he read as an actor, rather than as a reader. There’s clearly a difference between reading and acting. Sapphire’s reading of her own work made me experience her words as something alive.

I have been literate for almost fifty years now; I still cannot take literacy for granted. On a podcast of the From Truth to Fiction panel, hosted by Charles May, I listened to writers reading from their own writing, and talking—somewhat humorously—about truth in fiction. I came away with more questions, both for myself, and for my future students. On the last day of Story Week, at the Chicago Cultural Center, I listened to writers reading the work of Chicago writers who, in some cases, wrote about Chicago. Listening, sometimes with my eyes closed, I could see, and hear. There were sensations of smell, and touch, and struggle. Bigger Thomas showed up yet again; this time to dispose of an inconvenient girl friend. I tried to protect myself from the painful parts by only half listening, but I found I could not. I was moved to laughter more than once, and to tears at least once, by a passage of writing that surprised me with its impact. Seated in the grand public space beneath the dome of the Chicago Cultural Center, I worried about this. Then I realized I was in a room full of writers. Writers know that once all five senses engage, reading ceases to be reading. The writing lives. Something alive is harder to ignore. I will remember this for my future students.