 to In The Studio. I'm your host today, Matt Blake, and joining me is one of the co-directors of Stories on Stage Davis, Naomi Williams. Welcome to the show, Naomi. Thank you so much, Matt. It's really a pleasure to be here. It's great to have you here. Thanks. So tell us about Stories on Stage Davis. So Stories on Stage Davis is a literary series based right here in Davis. And what we do is pair short stories or short selections of fiction with professional actors from the area who read the pieces allowed to a live audience at a local art gallery. Oh, excellent. What a great idea. Indeed, thank you. And how often does it happen? How often do you have these shows? It happens once a month from September through June. We kind of run on the academic calendar, so we take July and August off. But every second Saturday from September through June at 7 p.m., we're at the Pence Gallery in downtown Davis, putting on a show. Wonderful. That's really wonderful. And so how do you go about acquiring the talent for these shows? Thank you for asking about that because that's the most interesting part of it for me. So what we try to do generally is, and we do deviate from this pattern sometimes, but generally we try to showcase two authors. And one of them will be a more established author, broadly defined. So that would be somebody who probably has at least one book out from a relatively established press. Sometimes it's somebody like Karen Joy Fowler, whom we featured last month, who is a very famous author with many books. And then the other person will be a somewhat less established author. And that also is very widely defined. It could be what we call an emerging writer, which could be someone who's never published a story before or a book. It could be someone who maybe has some stories out in literary journals, but doesn't have their own book out yet. It could even mean somebody who has maybe just one book out from an extremely small press or maybe one book out that they self-published it, something like that. So part of what we're trying to do is maybe bring some audience members in with the more established author who they might recognize and then introduce an audience to a less established writer whom they might not know yet, and so it kind of helps both writers. Oh, excellent. And is that the same for the actors as well that are acting out these pieces? The actors are mostly people who do professional work in the Sacramento and Davis area. We get a lot of actors from Davis Shakespeare Ensemble. We have a casting director. His name is Tim Gaffney. He's very active with DSC with Davis Shakespeare Ensemble, knows a lot of actors in the area. So whenever we make the selections for the stories, and I can tell you a little bit more about how that happens, but once we've decided what the stories are, I send them to the casting director. And I usually try to do that six weeks to two months out. And then he goes through his list of people that he knows, people who've expressed interest in reading for us and tries to pair the story with the perfect actor and he's really good. That's great to hear. And so is it like an audition process almost? Is it something like that? It can be. We do, through our website, we solicit audition tapes, I guess. So people can contact us and say, hey, I'm an actor, here's my resume. And then they can either come in and maybe read for Tim or sometimes they submit a clip that shows them reading something or acting. A lot of it, though, is people that Tim or those of us who are part of the board of the series have seen on stage in the area and then will pass their names on to Tim and say, hey, can we try to get this person? They're really good. I just recently saw a stage play in Sacramento. That was astonishingly good. And I wrote all their names down to pass on. They were really good and they were actors we haven't had before. So it's kind of a collaborative effort in that way. Yeah, that's great. And so you were about to say something else. Yeah, so the way the stories come to us is every spring, this has been the case for, I guess, now going into the second year. So the series just started its fifth season. So we've had four complete seasons behind us. And my co-director, Elise Nguyen, who's at a writing residency right now, otherwise she'd be in the studio with me, she and I took over last summer, summer of 2016. So we did one complete season together as co-directors. We just started our second. And what we've done is in the spring, so the spring before a season starts, we try to get the whole lineup, at least of those established writers, locked in before the summer. And then we've got the whole summer to kind of plan our publicity and a special season opening event. And so we've been gathering names all year long of people we'd be really interested in featuring. And Elise and I are both working writers as are several other people on our board. So we read a lot, we go to readings, we read the New York Times Book Review, we go to book festivals, and we're always kind of looking for people we haven't featured before. And mostly, most of the writers are from Northern California. So we've had people from as far away as the foothills or like Nevada City, all the way out to the Bay Area and then point south. And we've had some LA actors, writers also come up and present their work on our show. And then if the person has a short story collection, often we're just looking at the short stories for something that's of an ideal length, which is generally like 3,000 to 4,000 words, is sort of the ideal length. And that feels like it's going to work for a live audience because not every piece of fiction is that conducive to reading aloud. There's some things that are so writerly or something they really live on the page and they need to be read. And then there are other pieces that make for great read aloud stories. So we're really looking for that. And we think a lot about how would this work with an audience, would this keep people's attention for 20 to 30 minutes, et cetera. And then with the less established writers, we actually have an open submission process where it's on our website and we just say, hey, do you have something between 3,000 and 5,000 words? 5,000 is the outer limit in those stories. We often have to cut back a little bit. Send us your work. So we have a reading committee who goes through all those submissions that come into us cold. It's a pretty competitive process. I'd say we only accept 10% of what comes in that way. And we often work with the writers to, sometimes a piece is almost there or it's maybe 500 words too long. So especially if it's an emerging writer, then I'm kind of the designated editor for the series and I'll often work very closely with the writer to kind of get it tightened up for our series and just so that it reads better. And yeah, and then we're very careful when we put the whole season together to really try to balance it and we're very committed to diversity. Diversity defined in several different ways. So we want to have a mix of male writers and female writers. We want to have a mix of writers of various ethnicities, even nationalities. And we also want to have different kinds of fiction. We rarely present work that's not fiction. Maybe once every other year we'll have a nonfiction night. We have one coming up in this season actually. It's the second time we're doing it. And we have once featured a poet, but generally it's fiction, but that's fiction with a sort of big umbrella fiction. So we've featured mystery writers like John LaSquah who is a Davis based writer of bestselling thrillers. We've featured science fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson came to our show this past spring. We've featured historical fiction, literary fiction, stuff that's more experimental, the whole gamut. Things that have been kind of bestsellers and also things that maybe are a little bit more obscure and maybe known only to other writers. And we've just tried to mix it all up so that there's a mix of what's considered more mainstream fiction or commercial fiction and more of the literary, maybe more challenging stuff and everything in between. Okay. So you do the established authors earlier in the year before the season starts. Is it, and then once you have secured those and got them on the schedule and had them agree, is it then that you go to the more emerging artists and find what would work well on that night? Basically that's how it works. I mean a lot of it is like if a story comes to us and we don't know who this writer is but we really wanna feature them, we'll say, hey, we really want to feature your work next year. And they'll say, wow, I'm only available in October. So then we'll just slot them in. And occasionally we'll have a month where we've got two established people who either kind of work together well as a pair, maybe are known to each other and would rather do the event together than alone. We're doing that in June, this coming June. The authors, Lynn Freed and Molly Giles who have been with us before, they appeared in our first season. They're good friends. Lynn was a professor for a long time at UC Davis in the creative writing program. Molly is a long time friend of hers, they both live in Northern California and we really had fun when they came together and they also introduced each other which was different because they knew each other and each other's work so well. So we wanted to have them again and they both have new books out. That's another thing we look for. Who has a new book out? Who needs to get their book out there? Avid Reader comes to our events and they sell books, the books that have been featured. So it's also a way to help the writers sell new copies of their books and help a local independent bookseller. And we pay the authors and the actors for their appearance. We're really committed to paying artists for their work. We were chatting about this a little bit before the show but artists are really, really accustomed to just showing up and presenting their labor for free. And a lot of us are willing to do this. I published a book two years ago and then spent a considerable part of my own money going around the country reading out loud from the book and hoping people would buy it and you're willing to do that. But it's really nice if someone says, hey, here's a little honorarium to come to our show or come to our event. So we're really committed to doing that. And the actors also. That's really wonderful. And I think for anyone who hasn't seen fiction read aloud, I have to imagine a nice introduction to that experience is with the actors presenting that material. It's true. And not every writer, maybe not most writers are very good at reading their own work out loud. I mean, we're used to sitting at home with our laptops. And some people do like to read aloud. They like going to these events and reading their own work. But often a professional actor is just going to do a better job. The best people we've had will come and the dialogue in particular really comes to life in the hands of a professional actor because they'll do the voices and they'll differentiate between the different characters. And even though it's not exactly theatrical because they're standing behind a podium with a mic, they can't wander around the space, right? But still they bring something to it. I mean, writers tend to just kind of open the book and say, okay, I'm reading from chapter one. And then they just kind of read, right? But actors will often not be as dependent on the page and they've maybe even memorized parts of it. So the reading just really comes to life in a different way. And people who won't go to book readings will come to our event. And that makes good sense to me. It's really valuing the unique talents and creativity of the type of artist that you're talking about, whether it be the author or the actor. That's right. What a great way to do it. Thank you. And so tell people how they can get to a performance. So we're at the Pence Gallery. Doors open at seven o'clock every second Saturday of the month from September through June. We're on kind of a donation basis. So if people are willing to donate a little bit when they come through the door, that money goes to paying our actors, our authors, rent for the Pence Gallery, which is a great nonprofit art gallery in our downtown. And then they just sit back and relax. We have lots of wonderful treats. My co-director, Elise Nguyen, in addition to being a fabulous co-director, a wonderful writer in her own right, is also an incredibly good baker. And her home baked goodies are available at every event. I honestly think some people come for her cookies, not for the literature. So anyway, that's pretty special. It's a wonderful event. There's always some kind of a surprise. Often the authors are astonished by what the actors have been able to do with a story that they thought they knew inside and out. And I've had this experience too. I've been on that side of being the author who listened to her own story being read. It's great, cause it's an interpretation, right? And it's not necessarily your own interpretation becomes this other creation. So yeah, it's really cool. Excellent. Well, Naomi Williams, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Matt. Stories on Stage Davis. You have a website. We do. Stories on StageDavis.com. Com. Yep. Excellent. So you can learn more there. Thank you so much for joining us in the studio. And I look forward to the next event. Thank you. Appreciate it. Excellent. Thank you. Thanks.