VOTM: What was your most unusual experience at a reading?
O’CONNOR: When I was in fourth or fifth grade, I entered an oratorical contest for the local Optimists’ Club. I’d breezed through the school-wide heat, and secured a place in the finals. The competition was held in a motel by the Syracuse airport, in a small conference room looking out onto a runway. A few rows of banquet chairs were filled with adult members of the club, various relatives of the competitors, friends, possibly a few vagrants just looking for a place to sit, furtive couples taking breaks from the kind of clandestine trysts that take place at motels by the airport. My speech was entitled, “Optimism: A Way of Life.” There were three contestants, myself included. I came in third.
SCOTT O’CONNOR is the author of the novella Among Wolves, and the novel Untouchable, which won the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. His new novel, Half World, will be published by Simon and Schuster in February, 2014. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.
Scott will be reading at 3rdSpace in San Diego on Sunday, Nov. 10 and at Book Show in Los Angeles on Monday, Nov. 11.