VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a literary gathering?
O’CONNOR: I did a reading and Q&A will Eddie Muller in San Francisco and a troubled woman in the audience stood up to ask a question. Or not so much to ask a question as to make a statement. And not a statement about my work, really, but about her life and her troubles and it made everyone in the room (including me) incredibly uncomfortable, except for Eddie, who handled it with grace and dignity, both for all of us and for her. Afterward I thanked him for this and he said, “She just wanted to be heard.” I’ve thought a lot about that night and that woman and what Eddie said, and it’s helped inform my own life going forward, as well as a short story from this current book, and the next novel.
Scott O’Connor is the author of A Perfect Universe: Ten Stories, the novels Untouchable and Half World and the novella Among Wolves. He has been awarded the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, and his stories have been shortlisted for the Sunday Times/EFG Story Prize and cited as Distinguished in Best American Short Stories. Additional work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Zyzzyva, The Rattling Wall, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He teaches creative writing at Cal State Channel Islands and for Writing Workshops LA.
Come see Scott read at Book Show in Highland Park on Friday, April 13 at 7:30p