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

TOLHURST: My most unusual experience at a literary gathering?  I was heckled by a drunk Englishman at a very sedate and proper arts festival in Boyle, Ireland this summer. I watched in amazement as two burly men lifted him bodily from his chair and “escorted”  him out!

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

CARSWELL: On my last book tour, I did a reading in Brooklyn. A local guy who I didn’t know was invited to open up the reading. I’m always down for local readers on book tours because they tend to bring a local crowd. Not this guy. Five minutes before the reading was supposed to start, only one person he invited had shown up: his infant daughter. She was crying quite a bit, so the local guy said he’d take her outside for a minute. Twenty-five minutes later—twenty minutes after his reading was supposed to start, ten minutes after the crowd started getting restless—he comes back. She’s still crying. No other friends of his have shown up. So, rather than doing the classy thing and saying, “Look, no one is here to see me and I need to tend to my child, so I’m going to bail on this reading and tend to her,” the local guy parks the stroller in the back of the crowd and starts his reading. The baby apparently decided she’d been abandoned and started howling. The local guy asked a woman in the crowd to rock the stroller. The woman reluctantly did this. The baby decided she was being given away and howled even more. The local guy, undaunted by the most basic paternal responsibilities, bravely carried on, reading his story over the cries of his child for the next fifteen minutes.

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

ZAMORANO: ​At Skylight Books for her novel An Untamed State Roxane Gay was about to begin when a dog started howling. The owner, a man in the audience, asked HER to wait until the dog calmed down. I was agog, too speechless to protest. She began reading.

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

SMITH: Reading half of a single story out loud and having two separate people offer to step up and put the book out on their presses. The book wasn’t even written yet. It blew my mind.

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

NAOMI: At a library reading a few years ago, an elderly lady started heckling me! She was really mean. When one of the audience members pointed out the irony of her having a peace symbol on her purse, the woman punched them in the hand!

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

KNIGHT: I hit up an open mic in Downtown L.A. before The Neon Lights Are Veins came out. Hadn’t read in public in some time, so I went down to get tossed back into the fire. To my surprise, it was the first night ever for this open mic, so anything was possible, long as it pertained to the written word. There was a full turnout and names were drawn from a hat. The range of material people were reading was insane, from gut-wrenching true life abuse stories to dick jokes posted on twitter. There was no telling what the next name called would bring to the table. By the end of the night, the range of emotions covered by every reader was exhilarating. This total lack of reading rules had created a one time mash-up of creativity that surged into its own piece of art. A positively strange yet beautiful evening. 

A native of Los Angeles’ South Bay, NOLAN KNIGHT’s short fiction has been featured in various publications including Thuglit, Needle, Plots with Guns, Beat to a Pulpand Shotgun Honey. He was a staff writer for Los Angeles’ Biggest Music Publication, the L.A. Record, from 2007 to 2010, and holds a degree in Creative Writing from Cal State University Long Beach. He currently resides in Long Beach with his wife, son and daughter. His debut novel, The Neon Lights Are Veins, was published earlier this year. 

Come see Nolan read at Book Show in Highland Park on Friday, August 18 at 7:30pm.

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

HOWREY: Either nothing unusual has ever happened to me at a reading, or my bar for unusual is pretty high. But a girl can dream.

Meg Howrey is the author of the novels “Blind Sight”, “The Cranes Dance”, and the newly released “The Wanderers.” Before doing any of these things, she was a professional ballet dancer.

Come see Meg read at Book Show in Highland Park on Friday, April 14 at 7:30pm and at Studio Unseen in San Diego on Saturday, April 15 at 7pm. 

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

JAZZ: This kid came up on the street, “Hey, you’re Jimmy Jazz. I saw you naked when I was 15. I saw you read from your book 10 years ago, naked.” This delayed gratification proved better than the reading itself. We played this Avant-Garde fest at SDSU. It was fun, we spray painted FREE ART on the wall, Ted Washington came out glistening with body oil, we spit poetry and pissed on Salinger in a bucket, and some young couple started making out on stage and the whole thing ended in a cloud of dope smoke, cum, blood and broken glass. But the experience codified the next day, with a class of MFA students. This very severe adjunct with a German accent like a riding crop said, “This was not shocking.” Ha ha. And there was that time at the poetry slam, all the poets were inside competing for a high score. But I climbed up on the marquee of the condemned theater across the street and used letters I found to spell out our credo from Whitman ‘Resist Much, Obey Little.’ It’s the poem you don’t expect that wins.

Jimmy Jazz is a writer from San Diego. He is the author of several novels including The Sub & The Cadillac Tramps. His latest work is called The Book of Books.

Come see Jimmy read at 3rdSpace in San Diego on Saturday, April 15 at 7pm. 

Photo by Anthony Scoggins.

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

DEON: The most unusual experience I had at a reading was the first time I read for Vermin. I had planned to read an essay for the reading because at that point, I hadn’t read from my manuscript for Grace in over a year. It had been rejected multiple times by publishers and I had mostly given up. But, just before I came to Vermin, I felt inspired to read from Grace. To see if she was still alive and to breathe life in her. By the end of that next week I had two offers from publishers. How a person might interpret any of this is their own thing. What’s for sure for me is that Vermin on the Mount is a place for words to come alive. Or, come alive again.

Natashia Deón is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel, Grace (Counterpoint Press), and is the recipient of a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices fellowship. Recently named one of L.A.’s “Most Fascinating People” in L.A. Weekly‘s People Issue, Deón is a lawyer, law professor, and the creator of the popular L.A.-based reading series Dirty Laundry Lit.  Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Buzzfeed, The Rattling Wall, The Rumpus, The Feminist Wire, Asian American Lit Review, and other places.

Come see Natashia read at Book Show in Highland Park on Friday, April 14 at 7:30pm.