Hear Ye, Read All About It: Out Loud
by David Loftus
[This feature appeared in the Portland Oregonian on March 18, 1998.]
When you were small, did a parent tuck you into bed and read you stories?
Remember the happy thoughts and feeling of security that accompanied you to your rest?
Despite the ubiquity of television, the advent of audio books and the vast amount of facts and fiction available on the Internet, some grownups still go out of their way to be read to.
"There's something almost lulling about somebody who reads very well," says Anne Hughes, who remembers being read aloud to as a child. "I was not raised with television, and I still don't have one."
A decade ago, Hughes got Portland actors to read from their favorite books at her coffee shop in Powell's Books at 10th and Burnside. Vana O'Brien read Truman Capote and Joyce Carol Oates. A David Heath rendering of James Joyce's "The Dead" had listeners in tears.
At roughly the same time, Mary Catherine Lamb read from the works of women writers on her live KBOO show, "Woman's Voice." "I know I had a devoted little following," she says.
Although Hughes ended the Coffee Shop series after several years because "it got too big and disturbed the regulars," and Lamb gave up her show to pursue other creative ventures, live readings have caught on both locally and nationally.
For the past three years Portland actors have read aloud from works of literature at Powell's every Monday evening. "I was looking for a reading series that wasn't focused on new books," recalls Joanna Rose, a bookseller at Powell's who asked actor Keith Scales to line up the readers.
Dick Lewis and Carole (with Del and
Carolee Allen behind them), enjoy my
reading at Powell's of Lewis Carroll
January 1998
People have read everything at Powell's from the beloved (Lewis Carroll and A.A. Milne) to the amazingly obscure, such as excerpts from Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon and Finnegans Wake.
Most readings at coffee shop hangouts such as Umbra Penumbra and Cafe Lena feature locals reading their own stuff, but spontaneous eruptions of Shakespeare or William Carlos Williams have been known to occur.
Recorded live readings have invaded the airwaves, too.
Three years ago, KOPB (91.5 FM) began to carry "Selected Shorts" -- stories read by name actors of stage and screen recorded at Symphony Space in New York City and syndicated to 135 stations nationwide. The show airs at 8 p.m. Monday evenings.
There are even groups of people who get together in private homes to read aloud to each other.
Gail Gurman, a Berkeley, Calif., resident who owns the "Storyreading Home Page," says such a group started at Yale University in 1982. As its members pursued studies and took teaching jobs elsewhere, new groups sprouted in Boston; Princeton, N.J.; Berkeley, Palo Alto, and Santa Cruz, Calif.; and Seattle.
"I like listening to good books that I wouldn't otherwise read," Gurman says.
Her Web site, which includes lists of books and stories the groups have found successful, is at http://www.wco.com/~gailg/storyreading/story_body.html.
But all these readings -- whether for readers or listeners -- are free. Would people pay for such pleasures?
Cygnet Productions is a troupe of Portland actors that charges for shows of written texts, sometimes with script in hand and sometimes in carefully rehearsed word-for-word recitations that include the narration as well as dialogue.
Louann Moldovan, an actress and writer who moved to Portland from Los Angeles six years ago, is Cygnet's guiding light.
"I loved the idea of producing literary works in a theatrical venue," she says. "I think it opened up one's approach to conventional theater. We felt less bound to convention."
Other local people manufacture recordings of books and writers they love.
Linda Odenburg has produced tapes of O'Brien and Scales doing works by George Sand and Rabindranath Tagore. Derek Holzer, a student, metalsmith, and writer, is working on an hourlong tribute to Kathy Acker, the experimental novelist who died at 51 of cancer last November.
Steady growth in sales of audio books nationally suggests a market of hungry ears. According to Publisher's Weekly, Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People was the industry's first million-seller; Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus and The Bridges of Madison County have each sold more than half a million audio copies.
Still, some people take the trouble to walk, drive, park, and sit patiently for a reading that, unlike an audio book, does not occur on their time and at their convenience.
Who are these people, and why do they come?
"My impression is they come largely for the person who's being read," Scales says, though sometimes a popular reader such as O'Brien, Heath, or Portland actor Ted Roisum will bring out a crowd.
On the other hand, a reason to come can change into a different reason to stay.
Alan Shusterman, a chemistry professor at Reed College, attended his first reading in December with his teen-age daughter Kristin, in expectation of hearing one of his favorites, Isaac Bashevis Singer.
The readers for the Singer performance had cancelled, however. Shusterman considered leaving, but he lingered to see the poems and tales Scales cobbled up on short notice.
"It was really delightful, right from the beginning," Shusterman says. "There were points when we were nudging each other because there were things Kristin had heard me read or say."
When Scales invited the crowd to join in on "The Walrus and the Carpenter," Shusterman did. "But he was such a pleasure to listen to that I stopped."
Rose notes that "suicide poets" such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton have been among the biggest draws, but a large crowd of senior citizens showed up for a reading of Charles Kuralt.
She also has noticed a contingent of "street kids" drift in and out of readings
Scales isn't surprised. "I think we go to literature for meaning whether we're 16 or 60," he says.
Hughes has a more particular theory: "There are people out there who want to feed their minds, and they tend to be quiet. They're not looking for big, loud entertainment. I like to be in a room with such people."