Big Score will be opening for submissions on Sun., May 24th at midnight
& post-reading recap (thrills! chills!), etc.
On midnight, Sunday, May, 24th, Big Score will open for both poetry and narrative prose submissions. For more about our guidelines and ‘how to,’ read here (scroll down the page) aka bigscorelit.net/about/
Freshly back in Brooklyn, I had a nice time kicking off the Crown Inn Reading Series (first reader on a strong slate). Reading new work to the people: that’s what it’s all about, right? Well, unless what it’s all about is reading. Let a writer out the writing cage every once in a while, OK? Better that way for all involved, I think.
Highlights from my time in the audience included Sasha Fletcher’s dramatic reading of a story about illicit lovers working at an inhumanely capitalistic hospital (total fiction, right?) on a hand-taped scroll, which expertly headed off the problem of how to flip through printed pages when one hand is holding the mic and the other holding the pages. Then, Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s Katharine Hepburn voice in the story she read about a young woman whose body hair is magically transfused into a tail. The mic during my opening reading was cutting in and out, as must be my deserved punishment for hubris before the literary gods, or do I mean, just the gods?—the kind of thing where I gave up on the mic, put it down, then one of the emcees did her best to repair it, put it back in my hand only for it immediately to crap out again. Kind of fitting given what I was reading: “‘Sometimes I think that I’m bigger than the sound,’ Karen O sang at the Beacon in late July of 2025, escalating in tone and urgency toward crescendo…”’ Maybe I’m the only person who noticed that, although could swear I caught an audience laugh or two at the concordance.
Then, at the end of the reading—if I really had felt like the mic thing mattered, which maybe you’d think I did since I’m making hay of it here (although I swear I didn’t, I’m well-adjusted, so well-adjusted, look, you’d never believe how well!)—during Melissa’s animated story, someone in the audience just flat out collapsed. Dropped to the ground. Which was pretty scary. I’ve been to probably, oh, don’t know, five or six hundred readings in my life, and that was the first time I’d ever seen that happen.
Crazy thing was? Same thing had occurred toward the end of the night during a piano performance at Black Spring Books two nights earlier, and I’m pretty sure I was the only common thread between the two events. Both of those who fainted were party to a couple, and both apparently are (let’s hope) fine. A writer from among the Crown Inn audience speculated afterwards that there has been a statistical uptick in fainting episodes among younger people following repeat covid infections; someone else commented that circulation to the legs gets cut off when people are too stationary for too long.
So… Well! Sunny times all around.
Wait, what’s that? You want to see more photos from Santa Monica art galleries before I sign off here?
OK, you got it.
I live to please.
Tomorrow—or, well, today?—I’m going to see the Roald Dahl bio-fic “Giant” starring John Lithgow. Imagine, you know, taking a real historical figure and things that that figure actually said and lacing it all into an encompassing fiction.
Question: Who’d do such a thing?
(Answers: Joyce Carol Oates. Stewart O’Nan. Paula McLain. Ron Hansen. Zachary Lazar. Kevin Barry. Michael Imperioli. Colm Tóibín. Michael Cunningham. David Foster Wallace. Curtis Sittenfeld. Me ah the hubris the hubris)