As we move into the long holiday weekend -- the long holiday week for me and my cat-tastic travels -- I have been gifted with the following: the long awaited audio files from the Kenyon Review Writer's Workshop participant readings!!!!
The readings are grouped by day instead of being separated out by individual speaker, which means that I won't be able to put my clip up on my website unless I get fancy with my audio file editing skills. And by 'get fancy' I mean develop any at all because I've never done that before.
Yours truly was only number three to read on day one, but if I remember correctly (and I might not as the adrenaline was fairly high) the girl reading before me was rightly hilarious. The woman after me ... I remember nothing of, at that point the adrenaline of reading in front of roughly 80 - 100 writing savvy peers had wiped my brain clean of any cognitive process.
Those of us up on the first day only had a couple of days to write and polish what we read because "the spirit of the thing" was to read new work, work that had been started there at the Kenyon workshop -- for my group that meant there were only three writing projects to pick from, one that had been written in the 24 hours prior to the reading. I ended up reading the very first piece that I wrote there. Not only did the extended 72 hours help, but it fit the best into the three minute time frame.
And hearing it now ... there's words, repetition I would cut. Argh. Are we ever really ready to let go of our writing?
