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Tuesday, April 01, 2003 Fiction and Theatrics I realized something when I went to Jonis Agee’s reading at Shaman Drum on Friday: how an author reads aloud is almost more important than what is being read. This, of course, could be taken with a grain of salt coming from an actress and (English and) theatre major, but as I watched Agee standing behind a tall table-turned-podium holding a copy of her collection of short stories, I just couldn’t concentrate, dripping from the onslaught of spring rain that I’d just run though. Not that she was that bad of a reader; she just wasn’t an actress. Since her words didn’t immediately strike me as particularly noteworthy, my mind allowed itself to run in frazzled circles, trying to catch its breath—I’d played a short set of music in singer-songwriter style at an Arts at Michigan event right before dashing into the rain to make it to the bookstore on time—and wondered what Agee’s reading would have been like were she a theatrical type. What if she hadn’t limited herself to leaning on the table, book bent in half as she stared intently at the pages? Or if she’d maintained her position but spoken with more conviction, more emotion? A reading is more than a mere glance through the pages of selected work; it is a performance. Most poets have discovered this. A fair amount of prose is workable dramatic material; when I was in high school competing in prose interpretation for forensics I myself learned to see the theatrical possibilities of non-theatrical works. If only more authors would. ^ Top | 1:24 PM | | | 
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