Philip Graham's Book Disaster Story, a Two-fer!

On tour for my first novel, after giving a bookstore reading in Evanston, Illinois I did a radio interview the next day in downtown Chicago, around 2 PM. From there, I was scheduled to give a reading at 8 o'clock that evening at an arts center in Rock Island, on the Illinois-Iowa border. But by the time I hit the road, just before 3, rush hour had already begun--seems that news reports of an impending snowstorm had started an early mad dash of commuters. So I inched along on the highway, counting the minutes, until, a bit desperate and hoping to finally get past the logjam, I started to drive on the shoulder of the road, to the angry honking of drivers in the other lanes.

Eventually, in the western suburbs of Chicago, the traffic began to thin, but by this time the snowstorm had hit, big chunks of flakes that kept coming. Within an hour I was virtually the only one on the highway, which had reduced itself, from the growing snow drifts, to a single lane, yet still I drove on. I'm a professional, damn it, the show must go on, etc, I told myself, and once or twice I parked at a rest stop to call the readings organizer (this was before the era of wide-spread use of cell phones) and tell him that I was on my way, I'd be there, though I might be running behind a little.

By the time I arrived in Rock Island, 40 minutes late to my own reading, the world seemed asleep under a white glaze, and when I trudged through the snow to the arts center the lights were out, and my patient hopeful audience had long gone.

But the best reading story I ever heard concerns a colleague of mine, Paul Friedman, now retired. When he won an Illinois Arts Council Grant for his work, part of the deal then, besides the grant money, was that he had to give a few readings of his work at various libraries across the state. At one library, clearly the advance preparation had been minimal. As Paul sat on the stage of the small auditorium while the head librarian introduced him, he looked out at the single face in the audience. The librarian's intro over, she left the stage--apparently busy, she wasn't going to stay for the reading. So, Paul stood at the podium and began to read from one of his stories to that one fellow. In the middle of his story, two police officers walked in, arrested his audience, and dragged the guy off. Apparently, the fellow was a shoplifter and had been hiding from the police during Paul's reading. And there stood Paul, still in mid-story, his audience taken away.


Philip Graham is the author of two story collections, The Art of the Knock and Interior Design, and the novel How to Read an Unwritten Language. He is also the co-author, with Alma Gottlieb, of Parallel Worlds, a memoir of Africa. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post Magazine, North American Review, Missouri Review and elsewhere. He is the recipient of an NEA fellowship, an NEH grant, and two Illinois Arts Council grants. He teaches at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and he is a co-founder and the current fiction editor of the literary/arts magazine Ninth Letter. His dispatches from Lisbon, which have appeared regularly on the McSweeney's website, will be published by the University of Chicago Press this fall, in an expanded edition titled The Moon, Come to Earth.