VOTM: What’s your strangest experience at a literary event?
BROOKS: My strangest experience at a literary event would have to be the Emerging Voices reading at The Jubilee, a two-day music festival that had been held in Silverlake, but this year was moved to the Arts District in downtown Los Angeles. Within the empty warehouses, stages were set up in vacant rooms to accommodate a variety of acts. As I got up to read, the band next door started playing head banging, mosh pit pounding, heavy metal music that permeated the cement walls. It felt like “Public Reading Boot Camp” and the lead singer was my drill sergeant screaming, “Keep reading, solider!” Even though I couldn’t hear my own voice, and the audience was straining to hear my words, I kept reading my essay, appropriately titled, “Fuck.”
ELLE BROOKS is the host of the San Diego’s “Wake Up & Write!” where she provides highly-caffeinated prompts to get writers writing. Elle is a 2013 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow, as well as an alumni of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. She is currently working on a memoir titled, In the Land of Liars, Cheats & Thieves: A Love Story.
Come see Elle perform at 3rdSpace on Saturday, August 24 at 7pm.