PREPARING FOR MY BOOK LAUNCH AT COLLECTED WORKS IN SANTA FE, NM

When owner Dorothy Massey offered me a Reading/Signing at Collected Works,  I was euphoric.  Reading at Collected Works, Santa Fe’s #1 independent bookstore, would be a dream come true.  But what parts of my 300-page memoir would I read?

“You need a program,” said editor Morgan Farley, who suggested I take a look at some author videos on YouTube.  I clicked on a YouTube of one author who impressed me because she looked and sounded spontaneous.  Much to my surprise, I found when clicking onto her other YouTube videos that she’d repeated the same “program” time after time.  Heartened by the idea that I might put together a reading I could use more than once, I selected passages that followed my story line without revealing the ending. 

For a practice reading in front of Morgan, I copied pages from a pdf of my book.  Squinting to read without my glasses and rushing through the passages, I could see the disappointment in Morgan’s face.  “You have time,” she said, “to make this good.  I’ve heard you read before; I know you can do it.  You can find a recording machine at Best Buy for $100.  Get one and listen to yourself.”

Over the next few days, I made a few decisions: 

1. No glasses -- To read effectively without wearing my glasses, I typed out the passages with a font size of 14 or 16.  I would not be reading from a hand-held book.
2. Develop patter (connective tissue) between passages – My goal was to be as seamless as possible from the moment I started speaking until I stopped.  I had to think about what was happening between passages and how to summarily cover those happenings without revealing everything and at the same time, bridge the gaps without losing the story line.
3. Find a recording device -- My husband Frank offered me his iPhone with voice memo app I used to record before finding the same app on my own iPhone. 

Hearing myself read was enlightening.  “Drop yourself into your story,” Morgan advised.  When I did, I found myself reliving the story with feeling that I hadn’t expressed on my first practice read.

For the next few mornings, I practiced my patter aloud during 30-minute  treadmill sessions.  I wanted to memorize it so that I could look up and out at the audience except when looking down to read the passages.  In the afternoons, when nobody was around, I’d tape myself.  Eventually, I was satisfied with my reading, my voice inflections and pauses.  (Morgan, a poet who reads beautifully, was a great help with this.)

And then there was the question of using a microphone.  At Collected Works, I would be on a small stage, a platform three giant steps above the main floor.  One afternoon, about a week before my reading, Dorothy arranged for one of her staff to set up the microphone so I could test the sound and determine how close I needed to be to the mouthpiece.  She offered a music stand onto which I’d drop my pages as I read. 

The day of my reading, I awoke feeling a little nervous but as ready as I could be.  That evening, before an audience of 115, I learned that my initial concerns, subsequent decisions and practice paid off.