VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?
STRADAL: Strangest thing that happened at a reading: Years ago, I attended a reading a bookstore where a woman read a true story about how she, along with someone unknown to her, helped turn around the life of a suicidal friend. The woman next to me in the audience began to cry. It turns out that she was the unknown friend, and she had never met this reader or heard that side of the story. Her one other friend there had introduced us and disappeared, so I sat in her car with her as she cried, and ended up talking with her most of the evening and going out for Mexican food. We’re still great friends to this day.
J. Ryan Stradal has also appeared in Hobart, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Rattling Wall, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Midwestern Gothic, Joyland and NFL.com, among other places. He lives in Los Angeles, where he helps create products and materials for the Echo Park Time Travel Mart, and works in TV on programs like Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, and Storage Wars: Texas. He likes wine, books, root beer, and peas.