Last week I stepped out to my first official ‘event’ in Toronto since moving here in August. It was a little ditty put on by CBC Radio personality and producer Dan Misener, called ‘Grownups Read Things They Wrote As Kids’.
From his official site:
Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids is an open-mic reading series in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It’s a night of juvenilia — book reports, diary entires, poems — read by adults to a room full of strangers. It started out upstairs at the Victory Cafe, and the last one was at the Gladstone Ballroom. It’s a lot of fun. Oh, and there are three rules.
- You have to be the one who wrote it, as a kid
- You have to be the one who reads it, as an adult
- It has to be short (<5 minutes-ish)
It’s a funny thing, trying to find the perfect piece of pre-teen prose - and knowing you’ll be standing before an audience reading it raises the stakes that much higher. But after spending just a little time rummaging through my box of memorabilia - I found it.
Stuffed between my Grade Six report on a class trip to Silver Lake, and my elementary award for ‘Best Homemade Kite - Junior’ was a creative writing assignment I had penned back in Grade 7. My very first year at Nicola Valley Junior Secondary School. Mrs. Shewchuk’s English class.
It was a cute little piece, called ‘The Cat’… and standing in front of a packed house at the Gladstone reading it aloud, I have to say I was momentarily transported back in time. It was full of sweetness, unintentional hilarity and blind writing ambition.
So imagine my surprise when Dan emailed me a few days back to tell me that he’d featured my reading in the official Grownups Read Things They Wrote As Kids podcast!
Click the link above to enjoy me, reliving a brief moment in time… and yukking it up along the way.
Mom - you are gonna love this. And Dan - thanks so much. Now I have another memento to add to my collection!
Cheers,
Roz
