1st Literary Event - Skip Horack

           

It wasn’t really a reading. It was more of a question and answer type deal. I arrived to a practically empty Terrace Room five minutes before the event was meant to begin. Harriet, who taught my first creative writing class, walked in and suggested we adjust the tables. Molly, who is teaching the last creative writing class I will take here, followed shortly after carrying snacks. By the time Skip arrived we had a long, narrow table arrangement and enough people that the other two writers had to be careful to reserve a seat for him. Molly’s introduction was accompanied by her normal wide smile but in addition there was a kind of warmth in her tone as if Skip was an old friend who had finally come home.

            He looked a little bit like somebody I recognized, which at first made it hard to focus on anything he was saying. One of his short stories we had read involved criminal behavior and when asked about how he wrote so clearly about this he joked about having been arrested multiple times. This earned him the same glance from Molly that I got when I asked Dana Kletter if she ever liked to drink while writing. From that moment I remained mostly attentive.

            We had been asked to email questions to Molly earlier in the week to make sure that his visit wouldn’t be met with a disinterested silence. Molly had warned us that out of the mixed audience she would call upon us if there seemed to be a lull. She called upon me and, having completely forgotten the questions I wrote, I kind of mumbled something about his southern origins. The best thing about Skip’s responses throughout this talk is that they were as unprepared as my question. A lot of time when authors talk about their style or tell anecdotes it is clear that they are recycling words and images they have used before when in a similar situation. If this is at all obvious to the audience it seems to immediately hollow out the person in the limelight. Instead, Skip would raise the tips of his fingers off the table and then let them drop in a light thud as he thought. He would start an answer and then backtrack a little and head in a different direction. It was clear that he was honestly taking the time to produce a meaningful response.

            Perhaps the most exciting part of Skip’s technique was revealed when a student asked him how he selected the subject matter of his pieces. He said he worked with what stuck out to him. For instance he had heard the word ‘Redfish’ and decided he wanted to name a character that. In the course of his story he had to develop a protagonist who somehow would have earned that name. In this case the character had beaten someone to death in a fight that took place in a river, which left him standing in a swirl of bloody water. I liked this idea of being so captivated by something as small as a name that it can work as a catalyst for an entire narrative.