Five Tips on Giving a Reading from Jeannine Hall Gailey

Jeannine Hall Gailey is the author of Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books, 2006) and She Returns to the Floating World (Kitsune Books, 2011.) Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in journals like The Iowa Review, The Seattle Review, and Prairie Schooner. She volunteers as an editorial consultant for Crab Creek Review and currently teaches at the MFA program at National University.

Ah, the joys of the new book. We writers get all excited, and we want other people to be excited about our new books, too. So we book a bunch of readings in the hopes that sharing our work with others will be, you know, a good experience for us and for them. What can we do as writers to make it as pleasant an experience as possible for the audience?



1. Do not go over your time. The best readers stop early. Leave the audience wanting more. Do not hog the limelight. If you are first and reading with two other readers, believe that they will be staring daggers through you if you go one minute over your ten minute limit. I like a fifteen to twenty minute reading, tops, myself, and then maybe some Q&A. I like interacting! Audiences often, for some reason, prefer talking to listening. Let them!


2. Organize your material and practice. Think about your audience beforehand. Will there be children in the audience? Maybe leave your F-bomb sex poem at home. Is the reading being recorded? (See this link for radio reading tips!) Pick out your “set list” beforehand and read it out loud, timing yourself. You don’t want to be up there, shuffling your papers while the audience yawns. Nightmare, right?


3. If possible, open with humor. Not all of us are hilarious comedians, but most of us can come up with a funny story about something in a poem, or maybe just read a slightly lighter poem if your entire set is fairly dark. And end with a bang–think about last line you’re leaving them with. That’s what your audience will remember.


4. If you’re nervous (and even the famous poets I’ve met before readings get nervous, I swear) be sure to wear lip balm, bring a drink up with you, and maybe pack hard candy to soothe a scratchy throat or dry mouth. Try not to get too drunk to calm your nerves. The one time I saw (yes, I’ll name names) John Ashbery read, he was so drunk that I sort of never felt the same about his poetry afterwards. Do I sound like your grandmother now? And wear a sweater!


5. Bring along support. People at readings often comment on my very helpful husband, G, who drives, carries heavy bags of books, and is often the bookseller at my readings as well. (It’s also helpful that he’s a six-foot-four imposing blond guy, you know, in case anyone gets rowdy, he can be a bouncer too!) Now, I can’t lend you my husband, sorry. But you probably have a friend or family member who would be happy to help you out at your next reading. At one of the most fun readings I’ve been to lately, I got to be the support girl for one of my friends–I sold her books, made change, chatted up people standing in line to get their books signed–and I had a blast! Ask for help from friends and family and it insures one more friendly face in the audience.