The Festival Slot at Nine in the Morning
I read my best work to a janitor and two lost tourists.
The festival programme listed me between a sunrise yoga session and a demonstration on home composting. My reading was scheduled for nine in the morning in something called the Willow Pavilion, which sounds enchanted until you learn that the Willow Pavilion was a marquee behind the food trucks, within humming distance of two generators and the toilet block.
I did not care. I want that on the record. When the invitation arrived four months earlier, I read it in the stairwell at work and made a sound my colleague later described as a kettle being surprised. A real festival. A printed programme with my name in it, spelled correctly, page forty-one. I bought new shoes. I told my mother, my dentist, and a man at the bus stop who had only asked me for the time.
For weeks I practised my set: eight poems, twenty-two minutes, arranged like a tasting menu. Open light, go dark in the middle, finish with the one about my grandfather's allotment, because it reliably got a small gasp on the third stanza. I had the gasp timed.
The night before, I could not sleep in the bed and breakfast. Peach wallpaper, a radiator that ticked like a disapproving aunt. I lay awake rehearsing how I would handle the overflow crowd. Whether to be humble or wry. Whether I would sign books against my knee or ask the organisers for a table.
At eight forty I walked into the Willow Pavilion and counted the chairs. Sixty. At eight fifty-five I counted the people... One. He wore a hi-vis vest and was stacking the back rows onto a trolley, because the chairs were needed at the main stage for a novelist who had been on television.
"You the nine o'clock?" he asked.
"I'm the nine o'clock."
"I'll leave you a few, then," he said, and dealt six chairs back onto the grass like playing cards.
At nine exactly, two more people came in: a couple in matching rain jackets, holding a festival map upside down. They asked me, in careful English, whether this was where you collected the wristbands. I said no. They looked at the rain hammering the canvas, then at the chairs, and sat down anyway. I believe to this day that they simply did not want to get wet, and I have chosen never to confirm it.
So there it was. My debut festival audience: a janitor, two lost tourists, and fifty-four chairs leaving on a trolley.
Here is the humbling part, and it is not the part you think. The humbling part is that I considered not reading. I stood behind the little wooden lectern with my printed set list, my tasting menu, my timed gasp, and I thought: I could announce that the event is cancelled. Nobody here knows me... Nobody would ever find out.
The man in the hi-vis vest sat down in the front row and unscrewed a thermos.
"Go on then," he said. "I've got till half past."
I went on then.
The first poem came out thin and apologetic, pitched at a crowd that was not there. My eyes kept doing the thing where they sweep an imaginary back row. The second was worse. Halfway through the third, one of the generators outside coughed and cut out, and in that sudden small silence I heard my own voice properly for the first time in years: a man performing to nobody, projecting to empty chairs, doing his festival voice.
So I stopped.
I put the set list face down on the lectern. I looked at the three actual humans in front of me and did something I had never once done at an open mic: I spoke to them like people. I said the next poem was about my grandfather, who grew vegetables he did not even like so he would always have something to give away, and who read my first published poem twice and described it as "long." Then I read it at conversation distance, in my ordinary voice, to an audience of three.
The tourists did not gasp at the third stanza... But the woman translated a line under her breath, and her husband nodded slowly, the way you nod at something true in any language.
The man in the hi-vis vest said, "My old man kept an allotment. Leeks, mostly. Read that one again."
Nobody, in six years of readings, had ever asked me to read a poem again.
Rooms full of poets had clapped for me, warmly, generously, the way we all clap: politely, while waiting for our own turn. Not one of them had ever said again.
I read it again. It was better the second time, because by then I knew about the leeks.
An audience is not a number. An audience is anyone who could leave and doesn't.
We filled the whole hour like that. Dennis, the man in the vest, told me about his father's shed, the radio inside it permanently tuned to the racing, the biscuit tin of seed packets he still has not opened eight years on.
The couple, Ute and Stefan from Dortmund, asked whether all British festivals were like this, and I said no, some of them are badly organised. Stefan laughed so hard he had to take his glasses off and dry them on his sleeve. I read the dark middle of my set at conversation distance, and Ute cried a little at the one about hospital car parks, then apologised for crying, then cried again when I told her the crying was the entire point.
At half past, Dennis stood, screwed the cup back onto his thermos, and shook my hand.
"Best thing I've heard all festival," he said. "Mind you, mostly I hear the generators."
I laughed the whole walk back to the bed and breakfast, and then, in the peach room... I cried for a bit too. Not because the reading had gone badly. Because I had spent four months preparing for the wrong thing. I had rehearsed being admired.
Nobody had ever taught me to rehearse being useful.
It took the rest of that year to understand what changed in the tent. I stopped chasing the size of the room. That autumn I started entering a monthly poetry contest, not for a crowd but for the deadline, the way a runner enters races to keep herself honest. I posted the allotment poem on a community wall for poets, where a stranger commented that her grandfather had grown marrows nobody wanted, and that one comment reached me further than any applause I can remember. Later I found a page of profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, and I realised the phrase described every single one of us at nine in the morning, and that it is not an insult. It is a starting line.
Two weeks after the festival, a postcard arrived from Dortmund. A football stadium on the front. On the back, in careful English: "We were not lost. We were early for the right thing." Tucked into the envelope was a photograph of their fridge, and on the fridge, held up by a magnet shaped like a lemon, was the allotment poem I had copied out for Ute that morning in my terrible handwriting.
I have read to bigger rooms since. Proper rooms, with microphones that work and chairs that stay. But at every reading, whatever the size, I find one face near the front and read to it at conversation distance.
Somewhere in every audience there is a man with a thermos who has until half past. I write for him now. I recommend it.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.