I’m STORYTELLING in Battersea, Ontario, Saturday, May 1st

At 7:30 in the Battersea United Church Basement, I’ve been asked to tell twenty minutes of stories (as though you could measure them out and cut them off after so many inches). There’s a great poster which I’d like to post here but I’m not technically able though maybe someone will help. Anyone?
Anyway I’m on with Michael Hurley (the only one I’ve heard and he’s mesmerizing), Ken Rose and Walt Freeman. I went immediatel to Facebook to see if I could friend these guys and get an idea if this sort of thing scares them too.
Tickets are five bucks each, six at the door. (They’re PAYING us!!). I’ve been working on my stories for a week now. What I’m afraid of is I’ll get up there, get scared and just blurt out my whole two stories in under five minutes and spend the rest of the time shaking and stumbling. I do talk faster when I’m nervous.
Seriously, I’ve gotten up in public before. I can do this. I LOVE telling stories. They’re like gossip, left sizzling just long enough to be fascinating. I love old gossip too, about long dead writers and how they cohorted and cohabitated and who was in their circle and who they snubbed and why. The last bit of research I did was the New York Intellectuals and boy o boy there’s some hot stuff in that crowd. Mary McCarthy and Robert Lowell and the author of the Executioner’s Song and the Armies of the Night (why can’t I remember his name offhand, begins with N, for heaven sakes and I call myself a bookseller) (I’ll come back and insert later – NORMAN MAILER!!, Sidney Hook, The author of Eichman in Jerusalem – Ah, Hannah Arent, (think I spelled her last name wrong), all these witty ponderous essayists and poets, there’s lots more, all trailing scandal in their wake, most with two or three biographies plus their own memoirs, I think Robert Penn Warren was on the fringe, E.B. White and Katherine got into that research somehow, being editors as well as essayists, I guess. A terrific group to read about.
Back to the Battersea thing. I’ll write about how it goes here. But it’ll be a great time and we have room in our car for two others if someone needs a ride though we’ll have to leave early and I think one of our tailights is out…
You can reserve a ticket at 613-353-2889