No matter how many write-ins you sit with, how many languorous coffee shop hours you spend pecking away with other writers, the real core action of writing happens in the space defined by you and your thoughts, with nothing and no one in between. To do it at all well, writing is lonely, heart-scraping work.
For a reader, the experience is the same. It’s meant to be intimate. In spite of all technological advances, reading still happens between you and a book, with no one else mediating the experience. Team reading is not a thing. There are book clubs, yes, and Goodreads and book-blogging, etc. If you’re lucky, you may live in a town with great bookstores, with readings, even a book festival.
Reading and writing are solitary endeavors. And yet. Under the surface, creating and receiving art are two halves of something larger—a single, connected arc. However far away in space and time and circumstance the author might be from the reader, something is jumping the gap. It’s spooky action at a distance.
It all began as a lark. Driving through upstate New York I saw buildings, actual buildings, created for the purpose of ‘fellowship’ for groups of people. Kiwanis. Rotarians. Grange Hall. Conservation Club. Moose Lodge.
And I wondered, where is the place for ‘us’—for the writers and readers of speculative fiction. (You know, the weird stuff.) And for the people with one foot on either shore. There should be a place for us, even if it’s ephemeral, impermanent.
I tried to draw a straight line between what I wanted most of all and what I could get away with. I had started writing and learned it was lonely—except for those moments where you could talk to other writers, or to readers who were really hyped on a specific author or book. And especially those rare, unearthly, adrenaline-shot moments when you get to read your own stuff out loud in front of other people and see their reactions. Those were the moments I wanted … all of them, for myself and everyone else.
So I decided to create a reading series. Get some authors, get some listeners, put them in a room together. How hard could it be?
I found some friends to help out. We called it Charm City Spec, and it happens in Baltimore. The ‘spec’ means speculative fiction.
Charm City Spec is into its sixth year now. What I’ve arrived at, over the course of those years, is this: authors really thirst for that one moment when you introduce them to an attentive crowd, and you tell the room who that author is, what they’ve done. You list their successes in a respectful voice. You hold up their book. You step back and give them the microphone.
Then you listen to them read.
I fully believe authors’ lives can change in those moments. There’s nothing else like reading your work aloud to an attentive room. There’s a raw energy, a tension born of uncertainty. Anything can happen in those moments.
And because it’s speculative, or weird, it really could be anything.
Readers and listeners, carried right up to the edge. It’s why we call these ‘events.’ They are events.
Charm City Spec’s simple format of writers + readers + readings works, and we’ve improved it over time. There are some added bits now: a signing, a group Q&A, snacks. But the real, churning engine of it is that ineffable connection: somebody reading, everybody listening.
There’s something unspoken but understood, a kind of bargain entered. The writer and audience become some larger thing. I refuse to give it a name, to set any boundary around it.
The miracle, the real miracle, happens again and again—people show up for this. To be together, to warm themselves around the fire of it. To be charmed, perhaps. And it makes my night to see people come out whom I didn’t expect to see there, people maybe I expected never to be there.
Community happens at these events.
The authors and their fans, but not just the authors and the fans—also the authors’ families who come out, the friends from work, the college kids from local writing programs, the booksellers, the people who sell the coffee and pastries, the occasional editor or agent. People off the street, curious to find out what's going on. People who’ve never attended a reading before but leave knowing they’ve found something strange and alive.
It’s fair to call it alchemy. Nobody understands the forces involved, but the soul knows that if certain things and people are brought together, in a reverent, ritualistic manner, something can happen. Something unpredictable. Unexplainable. Uncanny and weird.
It doesn’t happen anywhere else. Oh, I know there are similar events, in Seattle, New York, Portland, Philly, elsewhere. What I mean is, it doesn’t happen over Zoom, or BookTok, or some ‘live’ YouTube channel. It sure doesn’t happen on an Amazon search page. Something new comes into being here. You can feel it.
For those moments when the event is happening, there are no guardrails. No rules, no limits. That’s one essential ingredient. There’s nobody standing over us—we can read anything we want, say anything we want. I’m mindful of how rare this is, and grateful for this freedom, and for all the people it draws.
Another essential ingredient is inclusiveness, of making everyone welcome, of making a safe space for the voices that aren’t getting heard elsewhere. I’m proud of that.
How some readers light that stage on fire! I’m so thrilled and grateful for every instant when a reader catches us all completely by surprise. When something an author says reaches through the weave of plot and character and grabs the listeners, speaks to them directly.
And, every now and then, but more often than you’d expect, someone steps up on our little make-believe stage and reads or says something so unforeseen, so left-field, so kill-the-chickens-at-ten-yards strange that we all know our evening is made. I’m grateful to them too.
People reveal themselves when you invite them to read out loud in front of strangers. They really do. It happens again and again. They tell their stories when they read their stories.
I’ve been taken aback, how some authors really distinguish themselves. Their professionalism, their generosity, their candor, their large spirits. I would never have met them all, without this. I’m so grateful to every person involved, for taking a chance with us. I want to honor those spirits. Community might seem hard to come by, but it is so worth it!
Sometimes I have this dream that I’m building an ark, piece by piece. To save everyone who can get aboard. Save them all from who or what, I don’t know. It makes me think of how I will really never know what the extent of Charm City Spec is, never see it from the eyes of all the audience members: what happened, who they met, who they saw again, what they heard that they liked.
But I want to turn this dream around, and say to you, reader: get on the ark. Or build your own ark. It’s your turn now. Go connect in weird, special, mysterious ways.
The whole vast sphere of speculative activity—writing, editing, publishing, reviewing, making movies, computer games, con-running, cosplay, LARPing, Lovecraftian crochet circles, whatever it is—if you think any of these might be your special jam, the very finest thing you can do is reach out, find other people who feel likewise, and get busy!
When you do these things, know that it’s life-giving and anomalous. It’s so much easier these days to stay home, to stay isolated, to watch manufactured ‘content’ and accept it blindly, to scroll through social media. People are starving themselves of real community. So do it.
Don’t accept anybody’s evaluation that what you’re doing is pointless or weird. Go with your weird. Bet your life on weird. Weird is where things happen. Weird is where you meet new people, new ideas. Weird drives understanding. The speculative arts are mind-expanding at a time when the broader culture is trudging backward in the opposite direction. Has anyone ever fallen in love at a Charm City Spec? I hope so. I truly can’t say. That’d be nice. But I can tell you this: people have fallen in love with authors. People have fallen in love with books. People have fallen in love with the community they found there.
