The secret beating heart of literary Dallas is a painter in Richardson, Texas. She knows that she is fed by what she reads, hungers for it. So she gathers writers at her table, serves them dinner, and asks them to read their work out loud. I love being read to, and I love reading aloud. For a long time, I have called my mother when I am working something out, when I’m close, when I might just have done it, when I am downright tickled by what has come into being, or when I suspect I may have never been this good before—which is to say, when I need a witness. It’s one of the marvelous things about writing, how the writer only ever does half of it. Like erecting a screen for someone else to project onto or shaping a vessel someone else will fill up. I would read out loud regardless, for the sheer pleasure of cadence and sound and fit, but how much more do I understand what the writing is doing when it is realized like this: with someone else, a thing now alive on the page and embodied anew.
—A. Kendra Greene, author of No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity
(Tin House Books, 2025)
Photo credit: Space Giraffe Studios