PRINTLetting voices be heard
Reading series offers local literary hub
Allison Smythe
J. Mark Bertrand reads his fiction during a Hearing Voices reading at Orr Street Studios in February. During the meetings, a poet and a prose writer read and then discuss their work.
November 12, 2008 | 6:58 p.m. CST
Drawings of muscular, nude figures dominate one side of the stark walls at Orr Street Studios. Colorful landscape paintings adorn the other. Poetry, the most ephemeral of the arts, resonates in the space between. The words, when shared, assume physicality like paintings.
Poetry and literature are often considered academic endeavors, but the Hearing Voices reading series at Orr Street Studios opens the experience to the community. Every other Tuesday night at 7, authors and students enter through the glass doors, and their voices emerge reading verse and fiction.
Now I understand
the story.
Not the world waiting
for a holy glow in the East,
a swaddled and haloed King
of kings,
the reckless erasure
of sin.
Not the particular Christ.
Just, huddled in hay with
an awkward carpenter,
a weary Mary
redeemed.
Every child
is someone’s savior.
--Karen Pojmann
On this evening, competing with a televised presidential debate, which made the crowd smaller than the usual 10 to 20 people, Orr Street Studios Director Elaine Johnson introduces Missouri’s first poet laureate, Walter Bargen, who takes his seat in a blue chair facing the crowd. In the middle of his poem “Kite,” Bargen says, “Let me try that again, it was my favorite line.”
Johnson then begins the discussion. “Are you distracted by your perspective (as a poet) on a normal day?” she asks. Bargen says that he’s not, and because his job with the MU Assessment Resource Center is divorced from poetry, the hardest part for him is finding time to write a poem a day.
Orr Street welcomes those without formal training in writing or poetry along with the many college students and community writers who attend. Typically, each meeting includes a reading by a poet and a prose writer.
MU English doctoral student Anthony Connolly began the readings in spring 2006 with former Orr Street Director Chris Teeter.
Connolly says that many of the readings he attended before Hearing Voices were “boring as dirt,” and he wanted to create readings that were engaging. Having the author sit with the audience, Connolly says, helps to demystify the experience of writing for everyone. “I wanted to create something in order to break down the barrier between the audience and artist in a salon style,” he says.
Connolly had been involved in a small writing group with graphic designer Allison Smythe in Houston. When Smythe moved to Columbia, Connolly asked her if she wanted to help continue the readings.
“Our intention from the start was not just to have a university or a community thing,” Smythe says. “We wanted everyone to have a common, shared space to enjoy things that were currently being written in fiction, poetry or nonfiction.”
Smythe says that the atmosphere at Orr Street is different from a lot of readings because people feel involved. “People leave feeling stimulated, excited and creative and that they belong there like everyone else does.”
One way that they try to keep people interested is through question-and-answer sessions that begin after each author or poet reads. Johnson now moderates each reading after Connolly left to concentrate on his doctorate.
In each reading, Johnson joins the author to ask questions. On this night, a conversation begins about the process of creation, including funny stories and insights, but discussion is never so deep that the audience can’t connect. Also, the salon style encourages the audience to ask questions and take part in the experience.
When Connolly was a moderator and reader for the evening, he taped questions under each person’s chair for them to ask when he was done reading.
Johnson says she was originally nervous to moderate because she doesn’t have an academic background in
English or poetry. She soon realized that her nontraditional background brought a new perspective to the conversation. “I guess my sometimes nonacademic approach makes for fresh conversation,” Johnson says. “The questions that I ask are nonacademic. The phrasing makes something new come out.”
One Tuesday night, Johnson noticed that an author had a stream-of-consciousness style. Her question followed: “This piece reminds me of Horton Hears a Who. What was the first “who” that you heard?” That insight allows authors to open up.
Karen Pojmann, editor of the online magazine Mizzou Wire, has attended Hearing Voices for a year and a half. She has read her poetry at Orr Street and says it was the best reading that she has done because of the relaxed environment. She also likes sitting back and listening to the work of others, which she does on the evening of Bargen’s poetry, sipping a glass of wine. “It’s inspiring,” Pojmann says. “It gives me ideas for my own work. There is a camaraderie that has developed among local writers outside of the university.”
For the readings, the studios are transformed with words among the static art on the walls. Eager to participate in the process of learning, sharing and enjoying literature, authors and others gather as artists in their own sense — artists of words.
EVENT INFO
What: Hearing Voices reading series
When: Tues., Nov. 18, 7 p.m.
Where: Orr Street Studios, 106 Orr St.
Cost: Donation suggested
Call: 875-4370
