Meg Stone and I read our work in March (I’m behind) as a benefit for IMPACT Boston, in space generously donated by Queer Soup Theater (I’m sure they’ll still take your money even though months have passed) and the audience was small. Passionate and small. They were fabulous and some of my most important people ever were there, and it’s always good to have family hear you do your thang.

I will admit that I didn’t hype the reading as much as I might have. Part of that is that I didn’t know *what* I was going to read until about eight hours before the event, and it felt silly to tell people to come hear stories I hadn’t chosen. But really it’s because I have much bigger questions about publication. Publication (n.), the process by which the private becomes public.

Meg read from her memoir. I can’t overstate enough how important I think her book is for the world. I can’t wait for it to be out there. I want thousands of people to read it and think about the truths it mines. It is work that matters. Big time. I want it published, and publicized, and all that good stuff.

I don’t feel that way about my work. I don’t see what I do as public, I see it as deeply interior and private, a tuning of words and stories to my own particular heart.  I’m always touched and surprised when other people like it and even more so when they are moved by it. It rocks, but it still rocks me to have them say that. Even so, there is a public piece to this writing project.

I’ve been reading a fascinating book by Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. In it, he talks about possible evolutionary explanations for our devotion to stories (and I think there is more to come, but I had to give it back to the library). Two main reasons he talks about are the ability to explore and pass on situational knowledge… what does happen when you skate on thin ice, what happens when you are married to a man you don’t love, when you encounter the big bad monster, etc. The other is cognitive play. Stories and structure are open ended patterns that we as humans are particularly tuned to, and want to draw deep inference from.  Each storyteller can make a different pattern, and audiences can draw information from the ways that pattern is both expected and unexpected. Maybe I just like to have science explain the daydreaming I’m prone to, but I found these explanations compelling, and they require at least an implied audience.

When I read in March, I loved that the house lights were off, and the audience hidden.  I couldn’t tell that the audience was small, and so I was just doing my thing. As I read the audience moved from being small, to invisible, to this larger implied audience. Even though I knew everyone in the audience by name (at least by the end of the night), I was doing my thing, doing a storytelling (okay, reading) שטיק/schtick that wasn’t dependent on the audience, just its existence. And there was a moment when the open ended patterns that I had created felt valuable, felt like something that wanted a public. The magic crystals from James and the Giant Peach that are absorbed by the first living things that see them, so too my stories seek to get out. And I want them to nourish, entertain, and challenge others; it’s just not *where* they start for me. They start somewhere deep, dark, and private.

So, I like it when the house lights are off, as much as I love the people who were there that night, I like the idea of a public that is implied and possible more than an audience in seats.

And now, with a sense of irony, I will hit the publish button.