Ode to the Writers

Last night I had the great honor of hosting a reading featuring some of the contributors to issues 6 and 7 of Los Angeles Review.  Being the one LAR editor living on the East Coast, I was the obvious person to plan the event, but I had never done it before. I’ll admit, I was nervous right up to the moment we started, even though everything had come together fairly easily.

I had managed to secure a well-known venue, The Nuyorican Poets Café, I was able to book a good number of readers in both poetry and fiction, and I even managed to finagle a few friends into coming.  Yet, my blood pressure was likely high enough to make my doctor’s hair stand on end.

I needn’t have worried. Despite the rainy weather and the fact that it was the first night of Passover, the venue was packed.  Despite my overwhelming lack of physical grace, I managed to step on and off the stage approximately 12 times without falling on my face.  I might have stammered a tiny bit during my introduction, but nobody seemed to mind. Lots of drinks were sold at the bar, every single reader did beautifully, and the audience was responsive. There were many congratulations and thank-yous at the end. It was a wonderful evening.

Even if none of those things had happened the way I planned, though, the night would still have been a success, and here’s why: because meeting the contributors was, to a person, a wonderful experience. It’s remarkable that, of ten total strangers (aside from knowing one piece of work from each of them), all ten would be delightful people. We all connected immediately, kindred-spirit writers trying to accomplish something through words.  I feel as though I didn’t just find a way to showcase some of the talented LA Review contributors, but that I made some new friends as well.

We LAR editors have always felt that we are nothing without our contributors, and it’s true. But not only are we not the remarkable journal we’ve become, but we’re less as people and writers without our fine contributors as well. Congratulations to everyone who read in New York City last night.  You guys rocked!

– Laurie Junkins, Poetry Editor