All posts in Interviews

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

HART: Last fall I went to reading at a loft in DTLA. The first reader played a tape he had recorded of himself walking through a park while he read from a book he did not write. He never took off his sunglasses. The next reader looked at the ground and read his poems with a profundity befitting his words; namely, “My banana gun has a licorice trigger.” The final reader told a condensed 50s style sci-fi epic, complete with projected images of collages he made from anatomy books and sci-fi mags and sounds effects from his mouth. He wore a very spiffy tweed suit.

Matthew Hart is a writer and frequent contributor and volunteer at Razorcake fanzine. He’s currently a grad student of Philosophy and enjoys free drinks.

Come see Matthew read at Book Show in Frogtown on Friday, August 8 at 7:30pm.

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

TAWATER: I once saw a man shave a microphone and call it a poem.

Hanna Tawater completed her MFA in hybrid writing at the University of California, San Diego. Outside of writing poems about reptiles, she spends her time pretending to be an oceanographer, playing too many tabletop games, and raising a baby corn snake. Her work can be found in New Delta Review, White Stag, Jupiter 88, and The Radvocate.

Come see Hanna read at 3rdSpace in San Diego on Saturday, August 2 at 7pm.

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

SOLIVEN: The most unusual experience I had at a reading was being heckled by an angry white guy who didn’t believe that mail order brides existed in real life.

Marivi Soliven has taught writing workshops at the University of the Philippines and the University of California at San Diego. Stories from her 16 books have appeared in anthologies and creative writing texts in Manila and the United States. She won awards for her children’s fiction in 1991 and 1992 and the Grand Prize for the Novel  in 2011, all three conferred by the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, the Philippine counterpart of the Pulitzer Prize. The same novel The Mango Bride was published by Penguin Books in the April, 2013. Grupo Planeta is publishing a Spanish translation this year, while National Book Store is currently developing the Filipino edition. A film adaptation of the novel is being negotiated. In June, the San Diego Book Awards named The Mango Bride Best Contemporary Fiction of 2013.

Come see Marivi read at 3rdSpace in San Diego on Saturday, August 2 at 7pm.

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

HUERTA: The weirdest thing that ever happened at a reading was the riot police showing up on the street outside in full riot gear, hitting their batons against their shields the day the Iraq War started. 

Lizz Huerta is a poet, fiction writer and essayist. She owns her own painting business called Wrought Iron Maiden and spends her days listening to audiobooks from the tops of ladders. She is currently working on a young adult fantasy novel that has jaguars instead of dragons, pyramids instead of castles, and warrior women instead of princesses.

Come see Lizz read at 3rdSpace in San Diego on Saturday, August 2 at 7pm.

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

FALOON: A few years back I was touring with friends. When we arrived in Bakersfield — to read at a chain bookstore — we found out that one of us was scheduled to sign copies of his latest book. The rest of us were politely told we could watch and support, but not read. This irked all of us, but stung me more for some reason. I was younger, grumpier, and from my days as a drummer I’d learned that the show goes on, even if there isn’t an audience. So I walked out to the parking lot and read aloud for about 10 minutes. One dude walked past. He smiled but continued.

Mike Faloon is proud to be associated with both types of publishing, the stapled and the bound. He dabbles in the digital, too, with a pair of online music columns, Are You Receiving Me? and The Other Night at Quinn’s. His latest book is Fan Interference from Blue Cubicle Press.

Come see Mike read at Book Show in Los Angeles on Friday, April 18 at 7:30pm.

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

FRANGELLO: I was the second writer slotted at a reading series in Chicago, and the first guy who stood up to read performed his piece entirely in Vulcan. With no translation. My husband bit the insides of his mouth so hard to keep from laughing that by the time I was reading my work he was sitting there swallowing his own blood.

Gina Frangello is the author of three books of fiction: A Life in Men (Algonquin 2014), which has been a book club selection for NYLON magazine, The Rumpus and The Nervous Breakdown; Slut Lullabies (Emergency Press 2010), which was a Foreword Magazine Best Book of the Year finalist, and My Sister’s Continent (Chiasmus 2006).  She is the Sunday editor for The Rumpus and the fiction editor for The Nervous Breakdown, and is on faculty at UCR-Palm Desert’s low residency MFA program in Creative Writing.  The longtime Executive Editor of Other Voices magazine and Other Voices Books, she now runs Other Voices Queretaro, an international writing program in the Central Highlands of Mexico. 

Come see Gina read at Book Show in Los Angeles on Friday, April 18 at 7:30pm.

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

KALI: Someone turned white and passed out and the paramedics were called.

Taleen Kalenderian is a writer, musician, and L.A. native. She is founder of DUM DUM Zine, and co-frontwoman of the 3 piece post-punk band, TÜLIPS.

Come see Taleen read at Book Show in Los Angeles on Friday, April 18 at 7:30pm.

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

ROBERGE: Probably a night when all the readers were supposed to go for ten minutes and a poet read 44 minutes (we timed it) of her “epic poem” about…well, among other things, her father going down on a bull. It was, I pray, a dream sequence, but I have never forgotten the line “and the bull’s black balls smacked my father’s fat face!” screamed over and over. That might be the most unusual.

Rob Roberge is the author of four books of fiction—the novels The Cost of Living, More Than They Could Chew and Drive, and the book of stories Working Backwards from the Worst Moment in My Life. Stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He plays guitar with the LA punk band The Urinals.

Come see Rob read at Book Show in Los Angeles on Friday, April 18 at 7:30pm.

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

SPECKTOR: I’d say sharing a microphone with Al Stewart (“Year of The Cat”) for a sung encore.

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, as well as a nonfiction book of film criticism. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, Tin House, The Believer, and numerous other periodicals. He is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Come see Matthew read at Book Show in Los Angeles on Friday, April 18 at 7:30pm.

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.

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

WENTZ: There was a café in Portland, Oregon I can’t remember the name of that I occasionally went to for open mics in the early 90’s. A lot of people read at these. Twenty, thirty, more, usually from where they sat. The mic would just get passed around. There was a street poet named Bad George, who was fairly popular and fairly insane, and Gus Van Sant put him in a movie or two. Bad George had one of those red and black, Michael Jackson “Thriller” video jackets. His poems I can’t remember so much, and he was usually very drunk. Anyway, one night the host announced that there was someone special coming up next, and the cook came tromping out of the kitchen in his long, dirty apron, eating an incredibly large carrot. The cook took the mic, sat up on a countertop, and went right into a long, improvised story that seemed to be about some sort of creature or person he once chased down a hill, captured, and then ate alive, bit by bit, with great emphasis on consuming the eyeballs. Through the entire monologue the cook was chomping this massive carrot, ala Bugs Bunny, and when he finished his story he handed the mic back to the host, and returned to the kitchen, still eating the carrot. Later I was taking a leak in the restroom, and the cook wandered in to take a leak and I told him I thought he did a good job, and he said thanks. He was done with the carrot then, and I never tried any of the food there.

Zack Wentz’s work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in New York Tyrant, Weird Tales, Black Clock, [PANK], decomP, Opium, NANO Fiction, Necessary Fiction, Mud Luscious, Nerve, 3: AM, Fiction International, Word Riot, elimae, Vestal Review, and elsewhere. His novel The Garbageman and the Prostitute was published by Chiasmus Press. He runs New Dead Families.

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

PLACE: Thus far?

The Boston Review called Vanessa Place “the spokesperson for the new cynical avant-garde,” the Huffington Post characterized her work as “ethically odious,” and Anonymous on Twitter says, “Vanessa Place killed poetry.”

Come see Vanessa read at Book Show in Los Angeles on Thursday, February 13  at 7:30pm

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

LANGE: Nothing unusual ever happens at readings, only in the bars afterward.

Richard Lange’s stories have appeared in The Sun, The Iowa Review, and Best American Mystery Stories, and as part of the Atlantic Monthly’s Fiction for Kindle series. He is the author of the collection Dead Boys and the novels This Wicked World and Angel Baby, which is a finalist for this year’s Hammett Prize. His new collection, Sweet Nothing, will be released in February 2015 by Mulholland/Little, Brown. He received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow.

Come see Richard read at Book Show in Los Angeles on Thursday, February 13  at 7:30pm

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

GRAY: I read once in Sacramento at a reading which had been double-booked with a networking event. I ended up yelling at a man through a bullhorn, which he did not deserve but likely didn’t hear anyway.

VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?

TERRY: My strangest experience at a reading is going to happen in five minutes.

Chris L. Terry recently moved to LA from Chicago. His debut novel Zero Fade has been nominated for the American Library Association’s YALSA BFYA, and included on Slate.com and Kirkus’s Best of 2013 lists. He has contributed to Razorcake Magazine since 2006. Photo taken by Stacey Wescott.

Come see Terry read at Book Show in Los Angeles on Thursday, February 13  at 7:30pm.