VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?
KENNEY: I was reading at Tower Records in Boston on my first book tour and came to a section in the story about golden showers when some 10-year-old kid came wandering through, so I stopped and we all waited until his father caught up to him and ushered him out.
The most special one was reading at City Lights on Halloween years ago with Cara Bruce and Pleasant Gehman. We all wore devil horn headbands for the holiday and afterward the manager took us to the basement where there was sort of a dresser-shrine that had Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist beads and a matchbook from William Burroughs on it and stuff from all of these greats. He said we could each leave something too, so we left our horns. I felt like I could just die a happy writer right there.
Shawna Kenney is the author of the award-winning memoir I Was a Teenage Dominatrix (Last Gasp), co-author of Imposters (Mark Batty Publisher), and editor of the anthology Book Lovers (Seal Press). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Playboy, Ms., Creative Nonfiction, Vice, The LA Weekly, Narratively and more. She teaches creative writing in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and gets around LA mostly by bike.
Come see Shawna read at Book Show in Highland Park on Saturday, June 11 at 7pm.