A reason to be in a room together
Notes on our London reading
Hello,
How are you?
I am writing from the train from Oxford to York. I am going home to visit my family. I wanted to write to you about the reading in London while I’m on the train. It was last Friday night and it was the fifteenth reading we have done this year to celebrate Log Off and The Island. Here is the list of places we have done events:
Lisbon
Philadelphia
Baltimore
New York
Easthampton
Syracuse
Rochester
Buffalo
Toronto
Los Angeles
Provincetown
Woods Hole
Berlin
Paris
London
Thank you to everybody who attended any of these evenings! I feel happy that we have been able to bring people together in fifteen different places, in six different countries. I just tried to count and I think we have invited about 35 other writers to join us to read. And yeah, it just feels like, after all of the emails and all of the travel and all of the organisation, this is what it’s really about: Just giving people a reason to be in a room together. A room or a garden. Helping people meet other writers in their cities. Catching up with people we haven’t seen in a while, and hearing what they’ve been working on, finding out what they’re thinking about. Eating and drinking together. Encouraging them to make books with their friends too, if they feel like it.
Friday’s reading was at a pub called The Bell in East London. They just happened to have these lovely statues that matched our vibe.
I was in London a few months ago and met up with Crispin at this pub, around the same time that I was looking for venues for the Euro Tour. While we were enjoying a pint of their house lager, bin juice, someone came in and asked us if we were with the improv group, and we said no, and someone else told them that the improv group was meeting upstairs. A couple of weeks later when I was contacting local bookstores and finding that they wanted to charge us quite a lot of money to host readings (?!) and feeling discouraged by how difficult it can be to find an empty room to have people read poetry together in a big city, I remembered the pub and the upstairs room that apparently hosts improv groups, and so I reached out to them and they said they loved the sound of a reading, they hadn’t had one before, and we could have the room on a Friday night. So it seemed perfect.
I love doing readings in bookshops because obviously it just makes sense. It’s important to have good relationships with the people who work there, and it helps our books find more readers in the wild. But on the other hand, I love a reading that’s also a party. And the best thing about doing the reading in the pub is that we’re already in the pub when the reading is finished, so we don’t need to think of a place to go, and try to move a large group to a new location.
Just after the reading in Paris, I got pretty sick. I got the flu! And I had to spend several days in bed. I recovered just in time to go to London, so I was particularly happy to be at the event, to be back in my home country, and to see all the people who had come out to be with us.
Our first reader was the Amsterdam-based writer, Nadia de Vries.
Nadia’s novel, Thistle, just came out in English. I’m excited to read it. Nadia is a writer I’ve known for a really long time, but I hadn’t seen her in person for a few years. It always makes me feel comforted and hopeful to know that she’s out there writing and publishing and making things happen for herself. And it made me super happy that she could come to London to join us. Her reading was really funny and you should get a copy of her book next time you’re looking for a new novel to read. It’s the first time one of her prose books has been published in English.
Our second reader was Bertie Hobbs. I met Bertie in Zine Writing Club earlier this year and I loved the energy he brought to the group every week, so when I found out he was living in London, I wanted to invite him to read with us. He read a piece that he wrote during the club back in May, a kind of travel guide to the town of Jaén in Andalusia. He seemed really comfortable in front of the audience and I felt proud of him, for the piece itself and for his delivery.
Next up was Crispin Best. It was the first time I had seen Crispin read in maybe eight or nine years (?!) I introduced him as one of my favourite poets and one of my favourite people, which I just came up with on the spot, but it is true. It made me really happy to hear him read and to hear everyone laughing in the audience. If you haven’t read his book, Hello, then you should do that.
Kristen seemed a little emotional before she started reading. I think it was just dawning on us all that this was the fifteenth and final time we were doing this in 2024. We’ve successfully done everything that we can to launch these books into the world, spent so much time and money traveling and trying to share these stories. And soon maybe we’ll turn our attention more towards other things…
Kristen finished her reading with the LiveJournal survey that ends with the question: Could you live without the internet? and Ellora answers, I think it would be very hard at this point, which always makes me smile.
Our final reader was Oscar d’Artois. He’s so good at reading from this book now. It’s kind of sad to think he won’t be doing it so often anymore. Maybe we should go on another tour… I love when he reads that last line, Step on my face Michael, and send me to hell, and the audience is never ready for it.
If you haven’t read The Island and Log Off yet… What are you doing? Here’s the link. Go and order them! You’re going to love them.
We closed out the evening’s entertainment with a special guest appearance by the outlaw/popstar, Beef Gordon. He performed some of his classic hits like Suspicious Drifter and Unabomber, as well as my favourite song from his new album, Wheat is Poison in the USA. If you haven’t heard it yet, check out his new album, American Paranoid.
Here we are all together. I remember when we were at the hotel bar later, after the pub closed, and someone asked me how I was feeling, and I said simply, I’m really happy! I’m with my friends!
Oh I also bought this advent calendar, and I was intending to make up some kind of game so someone could win it as a prize, but then I didn’t have a good idea for a game, so I just went around the audience after the reading and asked everyone hanging out to pick a number and gave them each a chocolate. It felt nice to have a reason to talk to everyone individually.
What are we going to do in 2025?
I have no idea.
Maybe we’ll take a moment to recover and then think of something else to do.
I’m sure I’ll have some reason to write again soon anyway,
Thank you for reading!
The train is arriving soon,
<3 Lucy