Reading at Writ & Vision Thursday

I'm going to be doing a reading at Writ & Vision in downtown Provo at 7 pm this Thursday.

I'm excited: I love to read my work, but I don't actually do so very often. And I have never before attempted to do a retrospective covering all five of my books plus work from four more that are currently in various states of production.

It's going to be a wild ride.

I'm still messing around with different structures for linking the different pieces I'll read together. I've played with a chronological approach, reflecting on 14 years as a very Mormon writer. I've played with a thematic approach, going through different things I think literature can do and giving examples. I tried one system my brother called "group therapy for our colonized self-shame." I've thought about just lining up the books like a buffet and doing a taste of the recently published, the "classics," and then closing with the sneak peaks.

As I was driving him home tonight, my brother suggested maybe taking passages from "Tales of Teancum Singh Rosenberg" (my short story in the forms of fictional folktales which is also sort of a speculative, fantastical autobiography) and then reading other works that expand on the themes. That would be a trip. I think I might do it.

Anyway, I hope you can come and I promise I'll do my best to help somebody laugh (in case they need to laugh) and somebody cry (in case they need to cry) and leave everybody seeing the world just a little bit differently because that's one thing I'm quite sure we all could use some literature to do.

-James