Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame by Robin Robertson

Some part of me realizes that at this point I should cough or clear my throat to let them know that I’m here, but the presenter is still shouting:
    ‘I’m sick of you booking these bloody nobodies. When are you going to get me some proper guests?’
    The headphones are so tight I feel as though I’m undergoing a cranial lobotomy. I gaze blankly at the razor blade as the presenter harangues the producer for his bad choice in guests, demanding to know what my books are called, what they’re about and what on earth I’m going to want to say.
    ‘And where is she, anyway?’ he snaps.
    ‘She’s in the other studio,’ the producer says.
    There is another pause while the jazz record spirals on, the pianist still tinkling away politely. We listen to each other breathing. The producer, poor man, clears his throat. ‘Are you there, Maggie?’
    ‘Yes,’ I say.
    ‘Can you hear us?’ he asks weakly.
    ‘Uh-huh.’
    The record ends. The presenter fills his lungs. ‘And now I have a special treat for you all. Here in the studio to talk about her new book is authoress Mary Farrell.’

‘To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.’ Walt Whitman
Paul Muldoon
    Worst of all, surely, was the occasion on which I set out by train from New York City to read at a university one or two states up the track. The university should remain nameless, though if I were to mention its name you’d probably never have heard of it. It was not a university of the first water, one might say. I alighted at the station, expecting to be met, though, since the arrangements had been made a good month earlier, I began to doubt my memory of them. I waited long enough for a little dusting of snow, then took a cab to the campus. Nondescript is too colourful a word. I was carrying a letter from my host which gave his office building and number. I found my way to his door. No response. At least not from him. There was, rather, the scraping of a chair from the next office. Its inhabitant appeared. Professor So-and-so? There was a glance over the shoulder, a shaking of the head. Professor So-and-so had been on a three-week-long bender. Dreadful. In a moment of lucidity, however, Professor So-and-so had been in touch with the departmental secretary and had let her know that an announcement of my reading should be made. This had happened as recently as yesterday. There hadn’t, alas, been much time to run up a flyer. He rustled a khaki invitation which had already been all but obscured by an ‘Anxious? Depressed? Suicidal?’ poster.
    Not to worry. Rough with the smooth. Hang loose. Stiff upper lip. The neighbour had to rush, alas, but he pointed me in the direction of the room in which the reading was meant to take place and informed me of the location of the hotel into which I’d been booked for the night. Needless to say, no arrangements had been made for my fee. Such considerations are not uppermost in the mind of someone committed to a three-week-long bender. The cheque would be in the mail. No need to worry about the hotel. That would be billed directly to the department. I agreed with the neighbour that it would probably have been better if someone had been available to give an introduction but, under the circumstances, I also had to agree with him that no introduction is better than one hastily cobbled together. I thanked him for his trouble and assured him I was perfectly happy to take things from there. I treated myself to a pizza in the student cafeteria and made my way to the room for a quarter to seven. The reading was due to start at seven and I was gratified to discover that there was already a core of five or six audience members. There to get a good seat, one would have thought, though they were all somehow huddled at the back. The core audience turned out to be the entire audience. Okay. Still better, I always think, than that time in the Moy when Jimmy Simmons and I read to his wife, my father, and my sister. At about five