Mike Levens, associate professor of Modern American Literature

Lawrence Plotworthy steps onto a makeshift stage behind a slightly leaning metal microphone stand in the utility room of the newly constructed Main City Library in Soytown, Two States Away. He has in his grip a half dozen chapbooks and a recently published novel flagged with colored tabs marking the poems and passages he intends to present to a handful of people seated sedately in front of him on shiny metal gray folding chairs. A large listless fellow in the front row yawns. Three others follow suit. Plotworthy lowers his parcel of books onto a table flanking the lectern, takes a sip of water poured from a sweaty “Reading Is Fun” pitcher, and says “hello” over his glasses as he thumbs through Chapbook Number One. A fan’s husband’s head bobs, and the drone begins. … An hour later the drone ends. And in between there were a half dozen chuckles, a few ahs, and the predictable patter of polite applause.
“It was like staring for an hour at an oil painting hung in a marble museum. Last one out hit the lights and close the door.”

If you haven’t been to Lawrence Plotworthy’s reading or one like it, you haven’t been around the author’s presentation circuit very long. It has many variations that slide up and down the interest scale from “It was very worthwhile.” to “I guess it was okay. I guess I’m glad I went.” to “Excruciating! Torture! Don’t ever force me to go to something like that again.” All these readings, whether redeemed by the author’s wit or sexy mystique, have one thing in uncommon, they’re amateur. The presenters have given little or no thought to how they will voice the words they labored over with so much “page” care.
In today’s writing market it is not enough to assembled words, ideas, phrases, and verse into artful packages of printed precision and insight. If your goal is to attract an audience larger than Mr. Plotworthy’s in pursuit of coveted commercial success, writers today have to publicly communicate their words -- out loud -- with the same skill and precision present in their texts.
Books, articles, essays, and poems are not marketed in the privacy of an author’s den, they battle for attention on the public front at book fairs, university symposiums, conferences, festivals, libraries, on the TV, over the radio waves, and wherever else publishers and book distributors set up shop to sell. But how many exquisite writers ignore, or even scorn, the idea of presenting their art with the passion and expertise they employed when writing them?
Legends of them. Sometimes due to snobbery. Sometimes because of fear. But mostly out of ignorance. And who suffers from it. They do. Writers with a fraction of their talent and skill corner markets and garner audiences that could be theirs if they paid attention to the spoken art.
Yes, communicating verbally to an audience is an art, as much an art as crafting words on a page, and if you’re contracted (or pressed into service) by a publisher to read your work in front of an audience you owe that audience an effective performance. That’s right, a performance. Whether you’re reading a text word for word with the paper pressed against your nose or rifling through it from memory as you dance across the stage, it’s a performance, and it’s also entertainment.

“Entertainment!” shrieks the protector of all that’s holy in Halls of Literature. “Great writing and great writers are above entertainment. The scribbled arts are sacred, divine, timeless, and life changing, not mere entertainment.” Right, yes, exactly … about sacred, divine, and timeless. But all great art from Homer to Dante to Vonnegut is entertaining. It has to be. Before literature can elevate, it must first engage and entertain its audience, hold its attention. It must skillfully use the proven techniques and devices gleaned from the past and discovered in the present to cut through the distractions of our media-saturated lives, to crack the shell of the staid and let loose the unexpected hurricanes of raw imagination and fresh perspective.
Think about it. Do writing techniques cheapen high literature? For instance, the flashback. Does the novelist by inserting flashbacks into her narrative diminish the depth of her story? Does the reframing of the time sequence lower the common denominator of her readership? No, she enhances it by providing variety in the storytelling that makes the information from the past more immediate, more entertaining. The same can be said for almost all the devices of poetry, prose, drama, and speech. Technique is utilized to hold the reader’s attention, to entertain.

So why then do so many writers insist upon standing ponderously behind the podiums and lecterns droning their wonderful words in an unrehearsed monotone of dry coughs and gulps of water?
In some cases, because of pomposity; but in general, it’s because their high art peers expect them to be above “the mere actor of words” or “the politician of beliefs” or “the stand up comedian of light verse.” Or perhaps the elocutionists of the 19th century gave skilled and passionate public readings a bad name. Perhaps the rise of electronic entertainment diminished the public’s desire to support the oral tradition. Whatever caused this retreat into the mumbles and smugness of the dry droning exercise called author presentation, the time for the retreat is over. The lies of the politicians and the marketers are overshadowing the truths of our best writers. And because the art of writing (indeed all the arts) is sacred, writers must learn to communicate their art effectively with voice and passion on stages, in bookstores, on campuses, or wherever they gain a toehold and inspire a listening public, too easily hoodwinked by the audio and visual assaults of commercial media, to open books and enliven their minds with the richness of the written word.

By merging the art of performance with the art writing authors can add powerful tools to their communication enhancing the success of their own work and more importantly elevating the public’s awareness and its desire for words that outlive the latest media fashion and marketing blitz.