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.

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

McCLEARY: Last fall, a now-defunct performance space called The Void tried their hand at doing a monthly reading series. I went once and read some stuff, and then felt obliged to go again the next month because A) a bunch of my friends were reading and B) the Void was across the street from my house. The series had been kind of drunken and haphazard to begin with, but this particular night ended up being even weirder — the host/owner didn’t show up, there wasn’t a setlist, and every mixed drink that got ordered turned out to be ginger ale mixed with beer. Also, none of the performers wanted to be first to go up on stage and read. After an hour or so of this I started to get bored, and joked that I could just go up first and read from whatever I had with me — despite the fact that I wasn’t on the bill, and all I had to read was an 80’s comic book about post-apocalyptic surfing, a copy of Jarett Kobek’s If You Won’t Read, then Why Should I Write that I’d received as a comp and knew nothing about, and a crumbling, coverless paperback 1977 edition of Dune. Maybe it just the ginger-ale-beer, but after five minutes of discussion my joke was ruled a brilliant idea, and I found myself on stage. Ultimately I read from everything I had with me. I learned the dangers of reading Dune aloud, since half the words are unpronounceable neologisms. I also somehow also ended up MCing the reading for the next several hours. I recall at one point telling a long story about walking to Tijuana for beer — not my story, but a story I’d just been told five minutes before by a friend at the bar. After the show half the readers, half the audience and I went to the diner down the street for terrible midnight food. The next week the Void closed its doors forever and the owner moved to Texas. Our reading was their final show.

Keith McCleary is a writer and graphic designer from New York. He is the author and illustrator of two graphic novels, Killing Tree Quarterly and Top of the Heap, from Terminal Press. His prose and comics have appeared in Heavy Metal, Flash, Jupiter 88, and Weave, and his teleplay ‘The Gothickers,’ co-written with Sophia Starmack, was featured in the CCLaP 2012 audio series ‘Podcast Dreadful.’ He is currently working on an ongoing comic book series, Curves & Bullets, with Eisner-nominated artist Rodolfo Ledesma. Keith is an MFA candidate at UCSD, and received his BFA in Film & TV Production from NYU, where his thesis film ‘Australia’ won a Warner Bros Production Award in 2002.