BY ZOE DOUGLAS-KINGHORN, LEAD WRITER
My horn-playing friend recently told me she was considering quitting music.
I was astonished. All the years I had known her – since we were handed our shiny instruments in Grade 7 – she had been a stalwart player in orchestras and a solo player of persistent success. So when I asked her why she felt this way, she explained how nerves overshadowed every performance she had done, and after speaking with her mentors they told her that the stage fright never goes away.
I had never really shared this stage fright, until I was recently invited to read an excerpt of my work at the Word for Word festival, something I have never done before.
After all, the whole point of being a writer is that you get to stay in your sharehouse garret and never have to speak to anyone, right?
Uh, wrong.
You do actually have to talk to a lot of people – much like you have to network as a musician or any kind of artist. But there’s a big difference between speech-making and exposing your six months of work to a crowd of strangers. I’m not the world’s shiest tortoise or socially adjusted butterfly, but I could interview whistle-blowers and music geniuses all day (though sometimes it’s quite nerve-wracking). Reading in front of Helen Garner? Terrifying.
I said yes to the reading.
The first challenge was deciding on an excerpt to read from my 8,000-word story, which is about fracking, global warming, and the social and environmental challenges for the Northern Territory. Kind of the point is that fracking in the Top End is part of a long and troubling history of colonisation, and fossil fuel expansion during a climate crisis turns out to be a very complex issue.
So I have the dilemma: which paragraph could encapsulate the whole melting pot of global warming, institutional racism, and white-collar crime embedded in the fracking debate? At the very last minute, I chose the final three paragraphs of the essay, which upon looking back may have lacked context. And here we have Captain Hindsight, with her 20/20 x-ray vision: I should’ve gone with the introduction.
The other problem was that I found couldn’t pronounce some of the terms I had written. You know those words you read but never say out loud? I stumbled nervously over a few words I’m pretty sure I know how to say, but which I probably should have run by Microsoft Sam before the reading.
All in all, it was a pretty intense experience for my first public performance, and I’m not quite sure I’ll ever be able to look back on it without my face burning and the desire to erase it from my memory.
For the future, I’ll make sure to practise my reading in front of the mirror or an understanding friend (and perhaps get my hands on some beta blockers).
READ NEXT: Did you catch Zoe’s interview with Eddie Ayres about his Word for Word event?
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Zoe Douglas-Kinghorn’s festival attendance was generously supported by Word for Word.
Images supplied. Credit: Mike Dugdale
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