On October 13, students and community members alike gathered at the Broome County Arts Council in Downtown Binghamton for a literary reading as part of the Literati Reading Series.
The event featured Annie Christain, an assistant professor of composition and English for speakers of other languages at SUNY Cobleskill, and Carolyn Keller, a first-year graduate student studying English and creative writing at Binghamton University. Both featured authors read selections of their work.
The Literati Series is put on as a partnership between the Binghamton Center for Writers at Binghamton University and the Broome County Arts Council. Each month, a featured reader — who, in most cases, is an established writer — is invited to read a selection of their work alongside a current graduate student from the English department.
Heather Dorn, the director and host of the series, says that one of her goals is to create diversity among the selections by featuring fiction writers, creative non-fiction writers and poets.
“Usually, we try to choose people who have never read for us before, so that the Binghamton community and the University community have a chance to hear all of the writers from our program,” Dorn said. “The arts of your community are really a part of [your education].”
Christain is an award-winning poet whose works have appeared in publications such as The Seneca Review, The Chariton Review and The Lifted Brow. She explained to the audience that her current method of writing poetry involves getting into a character’s head and writing from their perspective. For the poems she read on Tuesday, Christain cited the West Memphis Three and South Korean school children as inspiration. One of her poems was drawn from her experiences teaching English to non-English speaking children. The lines of her poem “Thorns to Rescue Their Bodies,” are taken from sentences that these children wrote.
Another one of her pieces was inspired by a photo taken at the wedding of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, in which another woman is captured in the background. Written from the perspective of that woman, she imagines that she was in love with Ono, stating her jealousy for Lennon through lines like, “Does he use his heat to warm and relieve her ache?”
Keller read an excerpt from her master’s thesis in creative non-fiction, drawing from her experience teaching Saudi Arabian students in Southeastern Pennsylvania and the identity crisis that came with it. She explained that she wanted to tell stories that were not necessarily about herself. Since she loves teaching ESL and cares deeply about her students, she decided to write about them.
“I come from a really rural community … so many people would [say] ‘Are your students part of Al-Qaeda? Are they secretly terrorists?’” Keller said. “We need to understand that Saudi guys just want to know how to talk to girls. They’re people, and we don’t often get that side of the story.”
For her, the reading offered a chance to break out of her comfort zone.
“I didn’t expect to like [reading my story aloud],” Keller said. “I thought it was going to be awkward and uncomfortable, but I’m already thinking about when the next time I can do something like this is.”
As listeners chatted with her and Christain after the show, it was apparent that they too were thinking about the next time they could listen.
The next event in the Literati Reading Series will be Tuesday, November 10 at 7 p.m. This event will feature professor Jaimee Wriston Colbert and Ph.D. candidate Josh Lindenbaum.