It’s probably no surprise to hear that as an essay editor, I love attending live readings. Hearing an author read their words aloud in the way they sounded in their heads when they wrote them; watching them slow down when the sentence calls for it; getting to slow down with them and just be in the moment with their piece… When we made the decision to try a live reading of a recent Personals piece we published from Kristi D. Osorio, I was elated. We’re guessing you might be, too. So, come join us on Substack Live tonight, Wednesday, November 11, at 7 p.m. ET to hear Kristi — right smack dab in the middle of her book tour — read her beautiful and poignant essay, “I Had to Buy Back My Own Trauma” out loud in her own voice. And stay for a brief Q&A with Kristi afterward — I’ll ask her some questions about the piece and her memoir, and you can too!
And…if you haven’t read Kristi’s piece yet, or you’d like to reread it before tonight’s event, you can do so here and below.
Memoir
I started keeping a list of things the newspapers got wrong. In one article, they spelled my name Christy instead of Kristi. In another, they referred to me as a 16-year-old even though I was only 15. In yet another, they said that the murder had happened in Mom’s room, not my grandma Betty’s. What they got right were my pajamas, the Hello Kitty ones I’d worn to bed that night, before I knew what a scream really sounded like. Woman stabs mother while two kids sleep down the hall, is what they reduced it to. After it happened, I never wanted to look at the articles. I knew they existed because after I stopped going to school, a friend told me some asshole from my art class had taped Mom’s mug shot up on my locker.
