A Review of A Reading

Last week, I had the extraordinary opportunity to watch a live reading of a faculty member at my school read from his memoir. As a person who is bisexual and served in the United States Army under don’t ask, don’t tell, his perspective was very interesting. He had recently been published, so the experiences he shared hadn’t really been shared much before, and as he noted in his talking about the work and a brief history.

Onto the talking itself. He gave a brief background of himself, and had some remarks jotted down on an index card. His speaking manner was nervous and his voice raised in pitch when he was speaking off the cuff, however once he began reading from the book itself, he settled in and stood a little straighter. While reading, he didn’t typically look up at the audience, however, his eye contact was very good when discussing the details of the excerpts he read.

The structure of the book itself was very interesting. He used the idea of a series of pairs very often in his descriptions, which helped make the point and built a rhythm. The descriptions themselves were very detailed. When talking about a person, he would go into detail about that person’s looks and behaviors in general as shown by the moment he was describing. The writing also had a poetic quality to it, as explained by the fact that he considers himself primarily a poet who wrote this particular work in prose with a fair amount of flourish.

The other structural detail of his writing was interesting. In between describing narrative moments, he would describe a photograph he had come across in looking back at information he had for writing the memoirs. Those photographs were one part of extensive research he did, when discussing facts and figures. It was fairly refreshing to hear, for once, that writing even fiction (which this was not) required a fairly intensive amount of research to ensure that what is written has an accurate or believable enough feeling to it.

The photographs would be described, in detail, including the settings, and people within them. However, around that, the situation of which the photograph was just one moment in would be described. One such situation was the author’s first pride parade in Baltimore. The characters surrounding that event were described in vivid detail, and a recollection of the majority of the day was given in addition to the photograph. Another photo was of the author and his childhood friends in Nevada before he left for the army.

Overall, the reading was quite an interesting experience. In addition to getting an uncommonly spoken perspective: of someone who wasn’t straight in the military in the time right after the September 11th attacks, the style and way in taking those memories and putting them into words was entrancing. I was also impressed at a point trying to be made: it’s disappointing that for so many, the army is the only way out of a rough home life.