December 5, 2007
Wednesday

Each month, during the third week of the residency period at Jentel, those in residence are offered the opportunity to present their work to the community at an evening program held at the Sheridan Public Library. When we asked how many people to expect, we were told that the room, which seats about 125, could be packed or it could be nearly empty, depending on the weather and other concerns of the season. (A perfect summer evening can keep people from an indoor library lecture possibly even more than a dark and stormy winter night when there is nothing else to do and you just have to get out of the house.)

Wyoming community libraries are like community libraries everywhere — warm, welcoming places where many social and educational needs can be met. During my 2005 trip to Wyoming I used local libraries a lot. A librarian who read my report of my visit to Lander’s facility said that it captured the essence of what she hopes everyone who visits her library experiences.

By 5:30, the start of the program, about fifty people had arrived. One woman looked awfully familiar. I heard her speaking to others and she even sounded familiar. I would learn later that she is a print journalist who lived in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, a suburb just across the river and a little south of where I live, from 1987 to 1998. We couldn’t place each other in any particular common activity, but we had moved in the same circles, and it’s possible our paths crossed. Although the other Sheridan residents were like people everywhere who go to library literary events — interested, supportive, friendly — it was nice to have someone there who knew my stomping grounds, who’d walked along the same river and crossed the same bridges I had.

I read first. We were allotted ten minutes each. I chose two pieces. The first is an adaptation of material that has appeared on this site. I wrote it in 2004, when Lynn was getting ready to go away to college. Come spring, I’ll be writing about her getting ready to go away into her life beyond that, and the poignance of the earlier piece made my voice break. I also read the opening section of the fiction manuscript I have been working on. It began as a piece of backstory for my novel and was well-received by two readers who urged me to develop it as a standalone story. Early in my time here it did emerge as the piece that was engaging me the most, and I determined to work on it steadily.

The other fiction writer here was the last of us to present. Thus we made a sort of sandwich around the visual artists. The work the visual artists are doing is difficult to represent in slides, particularly that of the video artist who does “installations,” works that occupy a particular space for a limited time and then are taken down. She also does interactive pieces that depend on sound and movement that the person viewing the piece can manipulate. She is no less driven than I am to explore particular themes through metaphor and personal engagement, but her work is difficult to appreciate outside the context for which it is created.

So too with the artist who has been working with the reels of educational and public service films that have been discarded by public institutions as newer versions of those ideas on digital media have replaced movies. She unspools the film and lays it out and photographs it, and photographs the canisters with “Discard” written across the bar code that once kept the material in circulation. I would like to see her work in its true size and form, “live” as it were, because the concept of loss and regret runs like a ribbon through my own work.

I can’t remember now how many people came out for the presentation. I used to be able to make eleventh graders listen to me talk about Emily Dickinson or E.E. Cummings for forty minutes at a time. But reading my own creations to an audience of my peers leaves me self-conscious and nervous, and I’m not sure I looked carefully at the people who had so graciously given an evening of their time to see what we were up to here on the Thousand Acres. They were a warm and receptive audience, and I sat down hoping my Queen Elizabeth voice (the nervous, almost shrill intonation that can take over when I give a reading, especially of emotional material) was not too evident.

Readers who would like to sample the work I consider ready for a reading can sample “The Red Balloon” and “Gina and the Cat.” Feedback is appreciated.

And thank you for reading, so much, so often..

To be included on the notify list, e-mail me:
margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the brackets with @ and a period)