377 days - Blog #73 a bit of Oakham culture

So tonight, Oakham surprised me.  I can’t deny I have prejudice against what this town can offer me for a cultural experience, but I keep finding ways in which it and my fellow townspeople prove me wrong.

Tonight the town library had a local author reading.  It caught my attention because I love local authors – especially the ones who determine to become entrepreneurs by tackling the publishing business on their own.  But also because, well, this is Oakham.  I’m glad to know there are more writerly folks in this town .

It wasn’t a very long event.  Or, rather, I didn’t stay for much longer than a half hour.  It was the first reading for this young author.  And she was young – still in high school.  Most of the audience were familiars, and in a lot of ways I felt like I was crashing a party.   But I get that.  My first readings were full of family and friends, whose conversations usurped any supportive strangers waiting in line for a question or a signature.  Good lesson there.  Always make your customers feel like they are part of the party.

But I crashed that party.  The reading was in the room of the library where I spent many hours as a middle school kid.  Now it is the fiction room.  In my day, it was non-fiction.  I would hang out there after school to wait for a ride (in that awkward half a year when I was in Oakham’s school, but our house wasn’t finished so we lived in another town).  Or summers  - in the days before internet trolling – and I would go in that room to look up… whatever.  I’d read biographies of 40’s movie stars.  Or flip pages of a picturesque encyclopedia (remember those things?).  Or open those dusty volumes with genealogies of the town’s history and I pieced together random information about the family for which my road was named and who owned the house whose foundation remains in the woods across the street.  I loved that room, that library… and the atmosphere of books.

It was a great place for a book reading.

The unexpected twist was a number of my elementary school teachers were there.  They knew my face (I also look a lot like my mom who was active in the town), but I’m sure the memory of who I was exactly was a little fuzzy.  Still, it was nice to see them there, supporting a student from the school to which I went.  Knowing that the school to which I went created another writer.

It was curious, too, to be there and put my own experience as a novice writer into a different perspective.  Things I’ve learned since that first reading/signing three years ago.  I was impressed at how not red her face was.  I can’t get up in front of any audience to read my own words without burning to nearly purple.    I was very impressed with her reading.  I wrote a lot in junior and senior high.  But much though I dreamt of being published at that age, I couldn’t imagine those tomes (even if self publishing were an option then) that I would have the discipline or knowledge to get myself to that point.  I was wowed.

I gave her my card and a rushed explanation of the WWC.  Maybe she might take up the invitation.  Maybe she’ll just think I’m some crazy Oakham person.  But I will give the girl a bit of a boost.  Her name is Erin Foreman.  She wrote a novel called Remember Me.  You can order it online… or check it out of the Oakham library.  She’s 16.  I think she's just getting started.

Also, give the (Oakham) Fobes Memorial Library a Facebook like.  There is a young new librarian who is doing great things for this small town.

And now, I have to go back to writing my manuscript – the one I was writing at 16.