Bring What You Have

Last night, the Wisconsin Writers Association held an Open Mic.

They put out a call for presenters a few weeks ago and I signed up. My thought was to try out a piece I’m working on for submission but as the time grew near, the piece seemed too unworked, so I picked another essay, this one probably the most read of all the pieces posted on this blog. It’s called Book Mark, and is about the struggle to do or say the right thing when a friend is grieving. More specifically, the piece is about what to do when a friend is grieving the death of a child by suicide.

While I was waiting for the Zoom call to go live, I looked at my essay and decided it was terrible. For the first time, remarkable for a piece written in 2016, I noticed things that needed editing, most horribly, a misplaced modifier (at least I think that’s what that was), and I scrambled to think of another piece to read. Maybe something brighter, cheerier. It is the holidays after all. But there was no time to look.

There were six readers before me. They read excerpts from works in progress, poems, and holiday essays. The woman before me read her beautifully illustrated children’s book, holding the pages up to the camera so we could all see the elephants dancing on the bed. Her reading was endearing and joyful and I dreaded following her with my deep forlornness.

I like reading my work. I am never nervous. I would be nervous if I had to wing it, tell a story off the cuff like some folks are able to do. But reading my own words is just a matter of taking it slow and keeping my eyes on the words, not racing off ahead to see how much more there is to go. As I started to read, I remembered that I loved this piece, that it was raw and honest, and had a message for people standing on the sidelines of a friend’s enormous, catastrophic grief.

There were silent Zoom hand claps when I was done and lovely comments in the chat.

And then a woman who hadn’t been scheduled to read but offered to fill in for someone who was absent said that, because I’d opened the door on the topic of suicide, she wanted to read a poem about her brother who had died by suicide several years ago.

The poem was perfect like an ice sculpture on the coldest day of the year. Clear and sharp, piercing in the way that only great love and tremendous sorrow can be. She read her poem unflinching like she’d read it many times. In fact, it seemed like it was taped to her computer screen, an elegy within reach all the time.

There were twenty writers, ten of us reading. And, because that’s how writers are, the comments were kind, finding in each piece a phrase that stuck, maybe the one time a writer got the pearls strung on the necklace just right. The evening made me glad again to be a writer and grateful for a place where, no matter how imperfect I think it is, I can bring what I have.