VERY late Jennifer Brice

So, I was so kindly reminded by my peers about blogging on a writer's series reader, and I totally neglected to write about Jennifer Brice after I saw her in..October! Time flies. So, thinking back to then, I loved Jennifer's reading, and I had the opportunity to meet her in my Advanced Creative Non-Fiction course that morning, where we learned a lot of interesting things about the process of writing and generating a story. At her reading, I was very relaxed by her conversational tone and mellow, comedic voice. She read from her newest novel, "Unlearning To Fly", which is a collection of shorter pieces about flying and learning how to fly, along with other stories. Her writing is so dead on: I loved her descriptions of juggling things with her girls, and the demands that children can have and how utterly exhausting and irritating those moments can actually be. I was laughing out loud listening, and when I read some of her pieces before meeting her.
Jennifer has a sort of soft spot to me, because she was my brother's professor at Colgate, where she is currently a creative writing professor. We had a good little chat about my brother, and she let me into his life a bit more, which was pretty interesting. Something that she mentioned in her Q&A at the end of her reading, was that writing teaches people something new about you, in a traditional or non-traditional sense. She used the example of my brother, who wrote an essay about how he loves going to the dentist, because it is so relaxing, which is something that I never knew about him. But that was her point, writing is a chance for you to talk about these little (or big) things that people do not know about you, and this is the opportunity to express these things: you can write about the dramatic or the mundane: whatever you want, as long as you make it captivating, interesting and a story. There has to be something to what you are writing, otherwise nobody will care.

I really enjoy going to the writers series readings, and I think that they are always enjoyable and interesting, with a good takeaway. And, listening to someone read is always relaxing to me, so it's a nice way to segue into the evening!