The audience at a reading isn't the same one you imagine as you write. For me at least, they're all strangers, even if I know them well, probably because I can't guess at their motivations. Why have they come out? Whenever I read I'm in full retreat from reality and the people are like Pound's petals on a wet black bough. The dearest faces dissolve and I have no friends and no family and no loves. I think I must turn into a character when I take to the podium, dumber than I am, stuttering and baffled, delivering a rough draft of myself. It's like I go halfway back into the raw state of writing. When I'm actually at home working everything goes the other direction. I don't mean that a writer safe at the sanctuary of his desk pictures a particular audience, but when I write I know I'm in the room with something solid, a presence, and I just put my hand out, blindly feeling. Even the vaguest things seem real. The little resistances beneath my fingers become the face, and often when I work I tilt my head to hear, tilt it as if leaning in to catch a whisper.

When you read, you push breath, heave the words out; I'm always surprised I make a sound. But as an audience member, you draw in breath and hold it; the silence is like a clearing you've provided for the writer. Like most people, I bring a lot of goodwill to a reading, I'm flush with hope for the writers, and on this night, in the basement of Elliott Bay, we'd gathered together to celebrate The Clear Cut Future, a book published by Rich Jensen and Matthew Stadler. I liked the fact that all the readers were also part of the audience. It allayed some of my normal fear, the navigational problem of taking two known points--I write, I read--and moving toward the next intersection, that unknown vertex, the question: Who listens, who hears? Nine of us read snippets from the anthology so the evening wasn't weighing on the words of a single writer but had instead an apostolic feel. There were stories, essays, poems, all roughly confederated under the banner of regionalism. I recognized towns, weathers, hopes, illusions, colors, sentence rhythms. I would have known where I was with my eyes closed.

Writers kept popping out of chairs. Had everyone in the audience taken a turn at the microphone, it would have seemed okay. The absence of authority, to my surprise, was pleasant. A kind of anonymity spread out, including everyone. There were enough voices to go around. In this spirit I decided against reading my own work and instead read Richard Hugo's poem "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg." Everybody in the basement of Elliott Bay probably knows that poem by heart but I like reading it flat, as though I'm reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" instead. It's like doing a cover of an old song. I lay that banal weariness down on the Hugo poem, in my head, at least. I want each line to die and I try to avoid that lilting you hear so often with read poetry, where hope is lifted out of each phrase for no reason.

After the reading, the audience bought books, then moved down a long line of writers. I positioned myself shyly at the first table, where people wouldn't pool up and make small talk; I didn't want to lose the feeling of being there, in the audience. Mostly I feel like an outsider at my own readings, the only person who doesn't belong. Signing books is usually embarrassing but scribbling your name down in an anthology felt more like adding graffiti to a wall. Audience and writers were merged, I sensed connections, I felt friendships, loves, shared curiosities--a blurring that was extended to the party afterwards, at an apartment in the Triangle Building. I'd never been in this building and was stupidly surprised to find out that, inside, it was triangular too.

Charles D'Ambrosio's collection of essays is forthcoming from Clear Cut Press.