THE LAUNCH PARTY! Part Ten on Publishing an Essay Collection

It rocked! The room was packed with people, mostly women, a good percentage lesbians, some who had supported my work for over thirty years. So the crowd was full of celebration and caring and sweet tendernesses. And Jeremy, my publicist for both the memoir six years ago and this book, had traveled from Barcelona to Gainesville! We had never met in person before! He made sure he saw an alligator before he left.

Still, I was not going to take the audience for granted. I needed to make sure their time was not wasted by me presenting anything slapdash. And I didn't want to just read my work. And I knew the listeners, in person and online, would include other writers as well as people who weren't. I wanted to show appreciation for all of them.

And here's where this Substack newsletter helped. I've posted essays on this site, both ones previously published in journals and ones I wrote specifically for y'all. And the more conversational tone I've come to use here led me to add a couple of paragraphs below some of the essays about how they came to be. Sometimes it was their publication history and other times it was about the context they rose up out of, both the personal situations and the social or political events.

Many people in the audience and I shared a long history of friendship and all of us, depending how old we were, had over a half century of living in and through similar political events and social movements even if our relationship to them varied. Using these possible commonalities, I came up with the plan.

I looked for essays in the book that were short enough (under ten minutes) to read in their entirety. From those I selected two where I could talk about them in ways that were more personal rather than craft focused. And then I picked slides which meant I spent hours looking through images of my mother's life from toddler to five days before she died. But eventually I was ready to practice out loud and then revise and then practice again and revise again.

It seems contradictory, but the only way I can come off genuine and casual is to memorize the words, the pacing, and especially the hand motions. This serves me well when I get in front of the audience and forget everything. The body memory of certain movements helps me to remember phrases and will jump start my brain.

It would have been good to rehearse in front of someone. I don't know why I chose not to. A writer friend did tell me to make sure that I read my work long enough because I never read my work long enough. So I added a final short reading to the end.

The quality of questions after a presentation means something about the reading but especially about the audience. The astute, thoughtful, challenging, and engaged questions from this audience made answering them my favorite part of the afternoon.

Oh, and I looked good. Or at least I thought I did. I wore my mother's freshly polished silver torc with her Viking ship pendent. For the first time since breast cancer surgery, I strapped on an underwire bra and had a little cleavage showing. And it was a good hair day. Mostly, I was complimented on the shiny silver sneakers

Audio version: