Tongue and Groove Reading Series: Lineup for June 22

LA friends--please join us, and help spread the word!

SPREADING THE WORD for 10 YEARS!

A monthly offering of short fiction, personal essays, poetry, spoken word + music produced by Conrad Romo. This  month features:  Ann Gelder "Bigfoot and the Baby", Chris Wells - Secret City, Adrian Todd Zuniga - Literary Death Match, Xavier Cavazos "Barbarian at the Gate", Amanda Montell and our  musical guest is Josephine Johnson

Sunday June 22nd  

6-7:30 pm

The Hotel Cafe

1623 1/2 No. Cahuenga Blvd.

Hollywood, Ca 90028

$6.00

https://www.facebook.com/events/640114956071341/

Ann Gelder's work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Crazyhorse, Flavorwire, The Millions, The Rumpus, Tin House, and other publications. She has taught literature at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, and has worked as an online producer and marketing consultant. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bigfoot and the Baby is both a love song and a Molotov cocktail to the American myth of self-reinvention

Chris Wells is an award winning writer/performer who divides his time between New York and Los Angeles. As host of The Secret City, an Obie-award winning gathering for artists and art lovers, Wells curates, produces and emcees a monthly event that is part salon, part cabaret and part ceremony. As a writer, Wells creates original solo work and first person stories about his life. He lives in Woodstock with his boyfriend, Bobby Lucy, where he is at work on his first book, The Bermuda Triangle Inn, a Memoir in 29 Stories. www.thesecretcity.org

Adrian Todd Zuniga is the host/creator/CCO of Literary Death Match (a literary event now featured in 53 cities worldwide), and founding editor of Opium Magazine. His fiction has been featured in Readux, Gopher Illustrated and Stymie, and online at Lost Magazine and McSweeney's. He lives between Los Angeles and guest rooms all over Europe. He longs for a Chicago Cubs World Series and an EU passport.

Amanda Montell is an East Coast-born writer, blogger and pizza enthusiast living in Los Angeles. She graduated magna cum laude from NYU in December 2013. She has work published in Thought Catalog, Underwater New York and Trop magazine. One day she'll have an MFA and a book, but until then, you can find her at Instagram.com/elysianplain.Xavier Cavazos is a former Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam Champion. He is the author of "Barbarian at the Gate" and "Diamond Grove Slave Tree", was awarded the inaugural Ice Cube Press Prairie Seed Poetry Prize and is forthcoming in 2015. He currently teaches in the Writing Specialization Program at Central Washington University.

Josephine Johnson grew up in Greentown, Indiana, a small farming community where she learned to work hard and follow through with things. She first sang to trees and listened for the melodies in the nature around her to tell the stories of the things she'd heard and seen.

Come early!  Seating is limited and we start on time! tongueandgroovela.com

There is usually ample street parking, but meters need to be fed till 8pm.  Read the signs carefully, but don't park on Cahuenga other than a parking lot or on Selma. 

Why writers must become better actors

For two reasons.

One: writing is quite a bit like acting. Your characters inhabit you, of course, but you also inhabit your characters. As you write them, you see the world through their eyes, acting and reacting as they would. For this reason alone, it seems to me, learning a bit more about how actors practice their craft can only benefit writers. How do actors access and express those parts of themselves that coincide with their characters'? How can you convey emotions and concepts indirectly yet effectively through body language, voice, pacing, etc.--all of which you can convert into words?

Two: at some point in your life, you are most likely going to have to read your work in public. And by "read," I actually mean "perform." For a long time, it has been something of a mystery to me why people go to author readings. I mean, we can read the book ourselves, right? So what's the value in having something read to us, especially in the rushed, hushed, even apologetic monotone that too many authors employ? Does having the words come out of the author's mouth really add anything to the story?

It can, if the author interprets the story through her performance. Now, here come the caveats: we are writers, not actual actors. We can't be expected to put on costumes and cavort around the narrow and labyrinthine confines of, say, a bookstore. However, we can learn to read from our work to help the audience better understand and--this is no small thing--more fully enjoy our presentation. We can learn to use pace, timing, eye contact, gesture (within reason), voice modulation, and other techniques to convey not just the words but the meaning of the story as we understand it.* This is why series in which actors, not authors, read short stories--such as Word for Word in San Francisco or the New Short Fiction Series in Los Angeles--are so damn fun.

And this is also why I've signed up for some private coaching from actor and teacher Valerie Weak as I prepare to read at various venues this summer. Having experienced just a single session thus far, I can say that learning to perform one's fiction is, first of all, exhausting. The level of concentration required just about drained me, to the point where I spent the rest of the day on the couch (not the casting couch, ha, ha). However, as I worked to inhabit, not just quote, my characters, I began to discover layers of emotional nuance in them that I hadn't actually been aware of. As Valerie told me, even small physical gestures can help you unlock the voice and meaning of the words--even if the audience can't see the gestures, which a podium might obscure. These discoveries alone have amazed and even thrilled me. I can now say I'm truly looking forward to upcoming readings, rather than mildly fearing them.

So, I say, fellow writers, get your actor on!

*Which is not to say that writers own the meanings of their stories, or that public readings serve the purpose of instilling a particular interpretation in the audience's mind. We're just offering some possibly helpful or provocative insights, which the reader can then respond to at his leisure.