One of the great thrills for us at Lit Fest is hearing over 2 dozen participants of Lit Fest read short passages from their poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. This year we got to hear from 28 stellar readers, and the second to last reader, Ilona Fried (pictured on the right, below), shared her thoughts with us.
“Confessions of the Penultimate Reader” by Ilona Fried
If you missed the Lit Fest participant readings in the cozy downstairs lounge at the Jet Hotel on Monday night, well, that’s too bad. Unfortunately this blog post will not fill you in on every last detail because this writer, the penultimate reader of the evening, was too preoccupied by thoughts of stage fright and trying to decide if should she say something funny, or not, when introducing her piece to really catch 100% of the readings.
She does remember hearing a true tale about an aggressive Irish goat who butted tourists, including the writer, another real life story about fabulous footwear that got the wearer into trouble, and about a woman moving on after her marriage ended. One writer’s visit to a medical marijuana dispensary made her (the reader) and the audience giggle, and a poem about Penelope Cruz cracked up the house. A silver haired novelist read about a man and his dead dog (that’s correct) and a fresh faced fellow wrote about a character who finds himself in an odd costume in the back of a police cruiser. There were some teenage novels, one which involved a dragon.
This writer happens to love the word penultimate, a word that can be flipped to create “ultimate pen”, a cool phrase for someone who writes, even if she typically types on a computer. This is one of things that ran through her mind as she waited, breathing shallowly, for the 90 minutes until it was her turn to read, her very first time doing so in public.
In fact, she was so anxious about this event that, to prepare herself, she decided to do something even more terrifying. She took a rock climbing class the week before and found herself, despite her fear of heights, rappelling off a 25 foot wall, inching her way down the rope to the floor. When she finally landed, the adrenaline that flooded her central nervous system made her left leg tremble for the next 45 minutes.
Thanks to this preparation, she did not wobble on her way to the microphone and managed to get through her reading just fine, according to audience reports. What did she write about? Angst, of course. If you want to know more you’ll have to come to next year’s Lit Fest.
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