How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
"That's where writing starts — with a deep rumbling in the stomach," LSP professor Robin Goldfin said at the beginning of the Faculty/Student Reading held last night at the Telephone Bar and Grill in the East Village.
The reading was held in a small back room with glasses of candles on a series of wooden tables. Three faculty members — Jane Rosenberg LaForge, Elayne Tobin and Chris Packard — and some students from their classes read pieces of fiction, nonfiction and poetry to a crowd of about 40 people.
Some faculty members read excerpts from recent books that were published, with subjects ranging from anecdotes about singing songs with fascist-like 3-year-olds to somber stories dealing with suicide.
When Goldfin taught for a semester at NYU's La Pietra campus in Florence in 2003, he came up with the idea for the readings. When he returned, Stephen Curry (the former dean of the General Studies Program) asked Goldfin to start a similar series here in New York. Goldfin began holding faculty/student readings in 2004. He asked four faculty members and one of each of their students to read works they had written.
"I wanted to give our faculty, who are dedicated teachers, a chance to show what they do when they are not teaching — to show what kinds of writers we are," Goldfin said. "We've got some courageous writers among the students — not to mention songwriters and musicians, and the reading series always turns up some wonderful surprises."
He later changed the format to have two or three faculty members read and then an open mic night for students.
The event ended with one student reading a Shel Silverstein poem. Goldfin said this is an example of things to come, hoping to have readers next semester present others' work as well as their own.
