Glitter & Mayhem Story Live at PodCastle

I’m very happy to announce that my Glitter & Mayhem story, “A Hollow Play,” is now live at PodCastle, read by the amazing Tina Connolly. Delightfully, it’s rated R for “Cabaret, Roller Derby references, and F-bombs.”

Another story of mine, “Wing,” will be live on PodCastle soon, and sometime next year on a soon-to-be-named podcast. I’ve heard the reading for the latter, and it’s done something to me to hear two of my stories read by other people in so short a time.

There’s something incredible about hearing someone else read your own words to you. The intimacy of it is staggering. When I write a story, I’m taking something that was inside of me and putting it on the page. When I read what I’ve written it’s like closing a circuit, letting what I’ve poured out come back in, but it’s familiar, unchanged: I pour it out, I take it in, it’s all me. When I read it out loud for an audience, there is a difference: those words are leaving the page and penetrating others to whose interiority I have no access, but this thing that was in me is now in them.

When I hear someone reading out my work, though, it’s something else again.

I read the things I’ve written over and over. There’s a degree to which they’re inscribed in me as well as on pages in a book or pixels on a screen. There are cadences that I hear with my own voice. To hear those inwardly-grooved words spoken with different cadences, a different accent, to have that pouring into me as I listen, my own words in another voice, is amazing. It’s giving me the gift of someone else’s experience of my story — not just their enjoyment, but their experience. This is how it happened in their head. This is what my words conveyed.

It’s a gift for which I can feel myself becoming greedy — I’m aware of a desire to hear the same story read by different people, each one a unique performance. I imagine myself collecting them like figures on an aural mantlepiece.

Then I see myself turning into a villain in a story written by Mike Allen and just listen to Tina’s reading over and over again.

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