I’m most excited about this upcoming winter salon on February 9. Its theme is Russia! and we have over 60 people coming to listen…
We’ll also have books for sale by published authors – Lara Vapnyar and Jennifer Gilmore – thanks to a smart little company Mobile Libris. And I thought – how interesting it is, that while an unpublished writer’s life’s desire is to get published, the main appeal of this upcoming salon (for me) is to hear Lara Vapnyar read from her unpublished book. For me, it’s as if I were allowed to peak into a closed room, or let in on a secret that nobody is allowed to know but me. And as I thought all this, I realized that hearing works that haven’t been published is indeed the main attraction of my salons and the reason I started them. Because let’s face it. Some writers will never get published (even though they might be very well deserving), while published authors might take a long time to write something new… And here you have it – access to something that can’t be found anywhere else… The secret only you can know.
I’m one of the unpublished ones (for full length fiction that is). Yet I realize that getting published for me is not a goal in itself (I’ve only sent out two queries for my book). It’s about being heard, it’s about being on stage, watching the sparkle in the eyes of the listeners and knowing (or hoping) that they want to know more…
I believe that storytelling will never go away, the kind of storytelling where the reader and the listeners are in the same room, seeing each other’s facial expressions, postures, gestures, watching lips move and eyes dart over the page. We might live in the age of the Kindle, but listening to a good story (just for you) won’t perish. Because it’s going back to your childhood: when your mother read to you before you went to bed, and you treasured every moment of it.
Those memories sustain you, long after the stories are forgotten and the mothers are dead. “And that’s all I have to say about that.”
Vica Miller Literary Salons 