VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?
GABRIEL: My wife is a poet and has been involved in running reading series’ for ten or fifteen years. So, yeah, I’ve seen some stuff. Readings outside (locked venue; no key). No-show readers. Late-show readers. Readers too nervous to stand up. We once moved an entire audience several blocks to another venue, because—what?—oh, I can’t remember. The strong smell of paint? Maybe no key again. I’ve seen people pass out on stage, people drunkenly ramble; I’ve seen introducers offend the reader with slights about their age (again, drunkenly). But perhaps the most unusual (or at least the most wonderful) thing I ever saw at a reading turned out to not be a reading at all. This non-reading occurred when Tillie Olsen came to my university to read a day or two, as it happened, after the acquittal of the officers who had beaten Rodney King, just as the riots in Los Angeles and elsewhere were gaining a full head of steam. She stood on stage in front of hundreds of people and began to talk about her life fighting for social change in the 1930s, anecdote after anecdote, encounters with police, times in jail. She was a masterful storyteller, and we all sat completely rapt. It was cathartic and hopeful to have someone contextualize the events the country was heading in to. On my way out of the auditorium, I bumped into a teacher of mine, a faculty member presumably responsible for bringing Olsen to campus. “She didn’t even read anything!” she hissed. Only then did this fact occur to me.
Jerry Gabriel’s first book, Drowned Boy (Sarabande, 2010), won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. It was a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection and awarded the 2011 Towson Prize for Literature. His second book, The Let Go, a collection of long stories, was published in May by Queen’s Ferry Press. He lives in Maryland, where he teaches at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and directs the Chesapeake Writers’ Conference.
Come see Jerry read at Book Show in Highland Park on Friday, June 12 at 7:30pm and at 3rdSpace in University Heights on Saturday, June 13 at 7:30pm.