One of my favorite authors, Augusten Burroughs, wrote an essay in which he discusses why "writer famous isn't like movie famous." He writes: "Movies are consumed in public, along with hundreds of other people, and the actor's face is enlarged to the size of a minivan," while "Books are read... always in solitude" with "The author's face [on] the back of the book."
Washington College, a supposed "Liberal Arts School," has been trying to bring authors and poets out from under the covers and put them in front of "hundreds of other people," but no one is showing up. These readings are advertised on sixty posters throughout campus, daily campus-wide emails, links off the college homepage, and publications like the one you're currently holding in your hands.
Any given week there is at least one visiting author/poet sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee (in charge of spending the other half of the Kerr endowment on bringing such speakers to campus). Odds are the reading will be at 4:30 p.m. on any given afternoon in the Sophie Kerr Room, top floor of the library. But the odds are that a large percent of the college will never attend a reading in that room in four years.
These readings are free (enjoy it while you can) and give everyone an opportunity to interact with literature in a way reading can't fulfill. I've sat in the Sophie Kerr Room with ONE other student and felt so embarrassed, not for the speaker, but for our school.
After so many pathetically attended readings where the faculty members easily outnumber the students, this is my plea for more students to attend by these famously published persons. Maybe you'll love the book, get it signed, and be a better person for it. At the very least you're leaving your room and making these readings worth it before professors wise up and make them mandatory.
- Peter Knox '06
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