I’ve never been a person who enjoyed speaking in public. I’ve always hated reading selections out loud in class, I’ve always hated giving presentations in front of groups, I’ve always hated being where other people could look at me. Maybe that’s why I’ve always wanted to be a writer: I wanted to be able to say the things that I wanted to say without being in front of people while doing it, and books offered me that loophole.

Why, then, did I find myself just last week standing in front of a packed UConn Co-Op release party for The Long River Review with a microphone before me?

The simple truth of the matter is that writers can no longer simply be writers. Writers need to entertain, they need to attract readers, they need to sell. And, more often than not, this means standing in front of (hopefully) crowded bookstores or coffee shops or classrooms and reading bits of your work. It’s a way of getting your words out there where they may not otherwise have been heard. After all, readers are lazy. If they can have someone read to them, it saves them the effort of reading something themselves. They can focus on breathing, or gum-chewing, or that cute redhead in the third row. Or, if it’s boring, they can doze.

So that’s the reason I was up there reading my stuff last Thursday: I wanted people to want to read the rest of it. I wanted to tease them into buying my work. I wanted them to like what they heard.

It’s kind of funny that when you actually want something, it isn’t so bad doing what needs to be done to make it happen.

-Tim Stobierski