The Catch

Gwen Mullins

Procrastination

Sometimes I think I’d like for every writer to include a list of what she did when she should have been writing for a deadline. Or how she wrote when she was supposed to be doing something else. For me this week, the list would include the 21st century predictable: checking out Facebook, watching Netflix movies, reading friend’s blogs, as well as the seasonal: cleaning out closets, booking a summer vacation, mingling at the neighborhood pool, and also the suddenly necessary: looking up recipes for kale purchased at the farmer’s market, making a list for what to pack for a cruise (in a month), picking up the comforter that’s been languishing at the dry cleaner’s since March. Why am I doing everything but what I want and need to be doing? Procrastination is no friend of mine. At work, I answer emails as they are received and complete data analysis as the data becomes available. At home, I pay bills before they’re due, shop at Costco so that we don’t run out of toilet paper, and I even think about folding clothes.

But in writing, whether it be blog post or new story or revision, I postpone. I jot. I wait. I write an exquisite fragment then get distracted by a heavy rain (is that hail?).

For this post, I want to write about reading. Not reading a book, but attending a Reading, as in the forum where otherwise reclusive writers convene to read aloud from their own work. But is that rain?

The Comedy Catch

I’ve seen comedians and a hypnotist perform at The Comedy Catch, and sometimes I think of my middle school fascination with Evening at the Improv, at the comedians’ ability to make people laugh, especially at those stand-ups who could make my mother loosen her genuine giggle. All my life I’ve tried so hard to make people laugh, to be witty, sarcastic, funny. I’m not sure why, and I used to wonder if everyone else lacked a sense of the absurd or they were just more polite than I (the latter, I think now). I was voted Wittiest Girl during my Senior year in high school, and I made fun of the fact that I was not our Senior class poet. Back then, I would rather have been a poet than a comic. I am not a poet, but our class, that north Georgia public school class, did produce at least one wonderful poet, Paul Guest, a friend who has recently been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and of whom I am jealous in some ways, not at all jealous in others.

But I digress before I’ve even started, another form of procrastination. The Comedy Catch is a local landmark sharing a building with Red Queen Tattoo. The block supports book stores, art print and framing stores, and cafés, one of which is decorated with kites and served us all lunch, although we had to explain what pimento cheese was to some visitors from Canada. Each table at the Catch sported a small form to fill out for comedy-writing workshops along with a golf-course-style pencil stub and a list of upcoming acts (we had just missed an woman who calls herself The Tennessee Tramp). The place was a terrific venue for readings and for writers – one that felt seedy but wasn’t at all, although twice a reading was accented by thumping bass from passing cars.

The Readings

In celebration of VCFA’s 30th anniversary, Earl Braggs, notable poet and coolest man in town, organized an alumni reading. Nine of us gathered at that local comedy club with a handful of friends. Brilliant stage lighting obscured the audience’s faces and made some of the less-experienced readers (me) stumble a bit more than normal, but there was that atmosphere that you get sometimes among friendlies, folks who want you to succeed and who don’t mind when you do falter.

At my last reading I stood in front of a rather drab painting in a room stuffy with piped heat and snow-salt streaked boots; at this one I stood in front of black sign with pink neon script that read The Comedy Catch. No one laughed during the readings at the Catch, but I attribute that more to the steady sobriety of the early afternoon audience than a lack of humor in the pieces being read. My town is still small enough that I recognized many faces from those sorts of events that attract writers, so I got to see Beth Nugent (here on sabbatical from the University of Chicago) and Cathy Holton again, and I met some VCFA alumni I may have never have otherwise known.

But here’s the thing

My bio, that little introductory bit that some pleasant person reads before you take the stage, was short, naked, a veritable work-in-progress, like a child after a bath. And then I stumbled when I read. I was so tired of the piece, one I’d worked and re-worked so often that one more reading aloud had seemed undoable the night before. I’d chosen the story because it seemed appropriate in the sense that it was not like the last story I’d read to the familiar, slightly less sober audience in a noble room (that last story was entitled “Spank Me in the Morning,” so you can imagine it might have made me blush a bit too much for this sober, slightly unfamiliar crowd mixed with going-to-see-them-again friends), but my acceptable story was bit long, a bit too southern. I rushed through parts and skipped over others.

All of the other readers were so good, so accomplished, so much more. I tell myself all writers feel this way, but it never helps. I am quite impressed by my friend Paul, whom I mentioned earlier, but I wonder: Does he still cringe about that he’s listed in the same fellowship with Claudia Emerson, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet? Do Nobel Prize winners still feel like they have something to prove (all Nobel Prize winners are strongly encouraged to comment at this time)? I suppose many of us compare and find ourselves wanting. I hear some writers or actors or artists simply do not care about that dubious “success” that I long for, that they realize true success only comes when you stop seeking it. That’s cool.

But I’ve never been cool

In my reading that Saturday I soldiered on, hoped I looked young and therefore quite reasonably unaccomplished. I smiled at the funny parts (but no one laughed, and I remembered again why I never really wanted to be a comedian). At my last reading, I had sweated so that the back of my shirt was soaked; at this one I shivered so much that my voice quavered more and longer than it should have.

The other writers read truly lovely pieces. Earl Braggs read a poem (maybe a narrative poem, maybe CNF?) that worked so well in that venue with the audience that I felt viscerally grateful to be in the room where the words were spoken. Earl seemed to own the room when he read; he cupped us all in his palm. Even when the maintenance man limped into the room on one crutch, pushing a cart of cleaning supplies before proceeding to wipe down the counters in the sound booth (presumably to prepare for the show that was to begin four hours later), the crowd remained transfixed, swallowed up by Earl’s words.

Afterwards, when people I knew by face and some whom I knew by name came up and asked to read the whole story (I’d told them I’d skipped parts), I smiled at their kindness and felt supported, whole, strong. Then I felt embarrassed that I had not prepared more, read with greater authority, made them laugh.

Writing is work

And finally, I realize this (again and again): Writing is work. Preparing, repeating, steadily scraping, work. Work that cannot be put off, work that cannot be casually picked up and read, work that makes me happier even when it’s bad. And that, my friends, is something “real jobs” cannot do. So prepare for the damn reading. Proof-read. Write. Submit. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And you know what? Yesterday I received a call from Bart Edelman, who wishes to publish that piece I read, that one I’d spent so much time with that it had hollowed me. Luck? Sure. That and the 26 submissions I made because I love that damn story, even if I’m tired of reading it.

Tagged as: Earl Braggs, Gwen Mullins, Paul Guest, procrastination, Readings, The Comedy Catch