Hi. My name is Khalil and I will be blogging this week and throughout the fall about giving and organizing readings and, when I get tired of talking about this, movies I have seen around the time of my giving or organizing readings. As I am in the midst of downtime having finished all of the spring readings, I will do my best to help you catch up on what has happened so far.

Or something like that. Yesterday, for instance, I saw two movies when I should have been emailing people about reading in Austin and Houston in the fall–”In Bruges,” because I love Martin McDonagh and “Hancock,” because when I got to the movie theater, alone, as I tend to view many movies, I felt weird seeing “Wall-E”by myself with an audience of little kids.

It wasn’t always this way. In fact, it used to be way worse. At the very first reading in which I was involved, when I was a freshman in high school and when my English teacher decided it would do us good to participate in the open mic at the Barnes and Noble in the strip mall down the road, my mother actually had to bribe me with a CD to get me to go through with it. After that I avoided participating in readings for years. Then in college I discovered beer and that I didn’t mind speaking in front of other people so long as I was able to drink beforehand.

All of which leads me to this past April, when my first book came out and when I was invited along with Kaisa Ullsvick Miller, Carl Martin, and Aaron Kunin to read at the New School. Arriving late, I focused all my attention on Kaisa’s reading. Then I went up. Though I usually make a point of looking up here and there while reading, I was, that night, particularly flustered and so didn’t notice, until about halfway through reading a poem called “Canto de Ossanha”–a poem, I should note, that includes at the end, a line about fucking people up the ass–that my mother was in the audience. Because of our crazy schedules and because of the two years I spent broke and depressed in Austin, Texas and the lack of desire to travel this inspired, I hadn’t seen my mother for almost 3 years at this point. Realizing she’d surprised me by flying up, I somehow managed to continue reading the poem, line about sodomy and all. During the banter between that poem and the next, I voiced my surprise at her being in the audience as well as the fact that I probably wouldn’t have read the poem knowing she was there.

Then Aaron read and then Carl read, both as great as Kaisa. Then we all went out to dinner and I managed to steer the conversation away from the Bush administration and anyone pissing off my mother, the churchgoer and sort-of-conservative. At the time this all seemed like the perfect start to the tour that would continue the following week. It seemed that, knowing what I knew then about booze and about watching out for surprise audience members, nothing would go wrong. Then came Philadelphia.