Narrative Outloud

An Essay

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Text of the essay:

If it were fiction, you couldn’t call the place Newtown. That would be too much. You couldn’t name the devoted, martyred principal Dawn. Or the shooter Adam Lanza—lanza meaning “lance” or “weapon,” but also “thief.”

You couldn’t have twenty first-graders as victims—for first grade is a most magical age when the doors to reading swing open, and every grin has two missing front teeth. First grade, when every child is a Picasso.

I spent my own first grade year not far from Newtown, in New Britain, in Mrs. Donovan’s class. Her face is indelible, even now, as are her lessons of no-frills kindness and dignity. There were kids in our class who came to school unwashed and hungry. Mrs. Donovan sat us in pairs: those who could beside those who needed a bit of help.

New Britain in the late 1960s was old, as forgone and polarized as Newtown before December 14 was idyllic and privileged. Racial tensions, socioeconomic divides, and violence were part of our lives. One sunny afternoon my fourteen-year-old brother and his friend were mugged by a gang while walking downtown. Just up the road from our house, the first black family moved in, and on any given summer’s evening their bigot neighbor sat in a chair on his front lawn and bellowed racial slurs.

Most nights after dinner, our family retired to our den to watch the evening news—my parents in their given chairs and the kids on the floor; together we absorbed the day’s graphic footage of the Vietnam War.

In other words, life wasn’t any less troubling or violent—the human animal was as given to evil, avarice, and foolishness then as now. But the scale seemed more human. Life wasn’t so jacked up. It wasn’t a hundred bullets a minute in a schoolroom. It wasn’t video-game carnage, techno-hyper-stim, and endless cable talk loop. It was angry but less cynical. It wasn’t so numb. There was more innocence to balance things.

When living in Connecticut, you can’t see the horizon. For every expanse of lawn, there is a row of bushes and trees, the shadows beneath, the leafy canopy above, blocking the distant view. In other words, you can’t see what’s coming until it’s on top of you.

I keep thinking of that one brave girl who had the presence of mind to play dead while the rest of her classmates were slaughtered. What a terrible burden she now has, to live as their witness. That goes for the rest of us too.

Hope. Resignation. Willa Carroll, reading “Pilates with Monica Lewinsky” and her prizing-winning “No Final Curtain,” explores the unpredictable consequences and provocations of notoriety.

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An Audio Reading

With wit and charm, Matthew Dickman read to an enraptured audience at Narrative Night 2012 in San Francisco. He read from his collection All-American Poem, portions of which are available in our Archive. Here, you can experience a virtuoso performance by a preeminent young writer who delights in giving pleasure to readers.

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An Audio Reading

Geography is destiny. At Narrative Night 2012 in San Francisco, Abraham Verghese read from his New York Times best-selling novel, Cutting for Stone, and talked about his beginnings, his life as a doctor, his genesis as a writer, and the fateful connections between life and art.

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An Audio Reading

Train Dreams tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer who grows up working on the construction of the railroad across the Pacific Northwest. The year is 1917, and the country is poised for unprecedented change, when Grainer participates in the attempted murder of a fellow worker, a Chinaman. In this excerpt from the first track of the audio novella, actor Will Patton intones the story in his measured, husky voice, baring Grainer’s physical strength and psychological vulnerability.

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October 2010

Narrative authors took the stage at The Lab in San Francisco’s Mission District during Litquake’s 2010 Lit Crawl, the culmination of a weeklong celebration of literature. Here Narrative cofounder Carol Edgarian hosts Bridget Quinn, Renée Thompson, Will Boast, Pia Ehrhardt, and Skip Horack as they share their work with the standing-room-only audience.

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A Video Reading

Carol Edgarian shares a passage from her new novel, Three Stages of Amazement, in a reading given at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California. Set on the cusp of the new millennium and the recent economic collapse, the story involves the plateaus and precipices of marriage, as a husband and wife try to balance ambition, familial duty, love, and the intrusions of fate.

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Don read his work and talked, at his home in Wilmot, New Hampshire, with Narrative’s consulting editors Pat Gage and Caitlin McKenna. Despite an ongoing battle with his health, Hall continues to write every day, as he has for the past forty years. In these audio excerpts from the interview, Hall shares his thoughts on the interplay between biography and imagination, his writing process, and the history of poetry readings. His personal story, Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry, is excerpted in our Archive.

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An Audio Reading

Nathaniel Bellows’s revealing and enlightening short story introduces Nan, a compassionate reader who tends to get lost in other people’s stories. An invitation to read unsolicited manuscripts for a local literary magazine challenges her optimism as she learns to trust her own judgment and intuition. Bellows reads this story in his deep, reverberating voice, adding to our sense of Nan’s bafflement about her place in the world.

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