Women of Letters is an Australian organization seeking to revive the lost art of letter-writing while supporting female talent in writing. To do this they give five women writers a recipient, and the writers read the resultant letters to a crowd of people they don't know. On Wednesday (3/27) the organization came to Housing Works in NYC with the prompt of "To the Person I Misjudged".
The first reading (NAME) was not my favorite, but perfectly illustrated the havoc that an audience can wreak on good writing. The author was nervous about sharing intimate details about a person's life that may or may not know that the details were being revealed to a room full of strangers. She had written the entire letter, and the parts that the audience actually received intact were well written and compelling, but the anxiety of oversharing made her gloss over many of the details and much of the meat of the letter itself. The exercise was, it seemed, therapeutic for the writer, but utterly unsatisfying for the audience. In the end I felt uncomfortable, like I had looked in on something too intimate, despite the fact that I hadn't seen a single thing.
The second reading was much more tell-all. Reminiscing about her college years and specifically about a skeezy ex boyfriend. Her piece was alternately funny and serious, a voice that is very familiar to modern readers. The message, in the end, was that she had needed the anger that he had planted in her to fight her own demons. The delivery was confident, fluid. It was fine. Nothing I would write home about.
Reading number three was almost the exact opposite of the first. The problem with that reading was she read the exact text of the letter, then proceeded to give too much backstory behind it. The letter itself was simple, compelling, open:
"Dear Babydoll,
Where are you?
Where are you."
I would have preferred to have only the letter. But instead the writer explained the entire story behind it, about a Russian singer who she took to London and then was ripped off by. The story was charming, it made me like this woman, but the letter would have been more powerful without it.
The fourth reading. My lord, the fourth reading. Heartbreaking, beautiful, well written, funny, endearing. Everything. She was writing to her father's alter-ego, a clown named Scruffy that took up space in their life for a few years when she was in school. The embarrassment of a young girl being greeted at school by her father in clown gear moved away from adorable and funny and into haunting as the audience was made aware of the mental illness behind both the clown and the embarrassment. When she calmly and evenly stated that her father killed and burned his own sled-dogs before shooting himself on a lawn-chair in their driveway, an audible gasp circulated the room. That's when you know you've got your audience. In short, she was incredible. It was incredible.
Obviously having more than one incredible reading in one night is a long shot, so I was immediately wishing there were only four when the fifth stood up. Unfortunately my expectations weren't wrong. She began the letter by explaining to us the different ways in which misjudgment occurs, including the cliched "We see the world not as it is, but as we are." Needless to say, by the time she got to the actual person she misjudged, I was feeling preached at and zoned out for most of it. Note to self: don't spend half the piece talking vaguely about the idea before you actually get to anything the audience can sink into.
The entire experience was a positive one, despite the crowding (Housing Works is always crowded but I always forget and get there right when things are starting. Get there early for awesome seats) and the mixed quality. The idea was inspiring, and letters will definitely figure into my work in the future, and the readings themselves taught lessons about how writing and reading aren't always the same, and the best way to present my work.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete