Reading “Why Don’t You Dance?” by Raymond Carver Aloud
“What do you want to do tonight, do you want to watch a movie?” my partner asked.
I hesitated in the way I’m wont to do when I carry a small but meaningful desire. I looked up, gathering my confidence. “We can watch a movie, but I was also thinking I wanted to read that story to you, the one I was telling you about. I brought it with me.”
While tidying my apartment this week, I sifted through several notepads on my desk, clearing out old scribblings, mostly from voice memos with my friends, but also early notes I took several years ago inspiring the book manuscript I recently finished re-mapping.
A wad of torn out notes hit the recycle bin but I kept one aside: “Raymond Carver meets Alice Walker.”
I told my partner I’d forgotten this North Star I’d chosen before I began writing in earnest. And, when I reviewed my manuscript, I told them with my habitual hesitation to fully own a potential accomplishment, “I think I did it; I at least got close.”
“I don’t know those writers,’ they said.
It’s true that the shoes still feel a little big. When I told one of my first writing teachers this direction, his head cocked in the Zoom box and he wished me luck. The exchange left me with the same feeling I got when my grandfather used to tell me I was “getting too big for my britches”.
“I want to write the starkness of Carver, but infuse that bleakness with the love and hope Walker offers,” I added, hoping to be seen.
“I can’t wait to see what you come up with.”
I got the memo that I was embarking on a challenging task, my signature move.
One of the reasons my partner is my partner is because their face lit up immediately with the kind of enthusiasm that cannot be manufactured. “I love when you read to me,” they said, “let’s do that instead.”
“You love it?” I asked. This was news to me. In general, I’m books, they are movies. I have maybe read to them twice before this.
They looked at me with confused eyebrows. “Yes. I love it.”
“OK,” I reached for my backpack and pulled out the hardback copy of Where I’m Calling From. I settled myself, knees up, adjusting a pillow behind me against the headboard. My partner draped themself across the bedspread diagonally, elbow on mattress, head in hand.
As I read it again, this time aloud, I realize more about what I have always loved: how Carver wrote about ordinary people, how he left negative space on the page to allow the reader into the story for their own romp, and how these qualities reflect a deep affiliation and trust in humanity.
You can be the judge of whether or not I hit the mark. I am querying literary agents with my memoir about how finding trans joy in middle age means surviving a lifetime of invisibilized gender violence. When you subscribe to postcards on my blog, I’ll let you know when it is available.
