Tonight is the last of a three-night performance of Epiphanies: performances of flash fiction. My flash fiction.

After the opening night performance, standing with my husband and friends at our favorite watering hole, the elation making me incoherent, I must have said “Wow,” at least 50 times. My face hurt from smiling.

Let me describe this experience. Several weeks ago, I met my friend, Craig Gingrich-Philbrook, Professor of Communication Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, to hand over a thumb drive with most of my published flash fiction—nearly a hundred stories, a jumble of word documents.

Craig presented these stories to a selected group of performance students—both undergraduate and graduate—and faculty. They chose stories to stage at SIU’s Marion Kleinau Theatre, a small stage best suited for intimate audiences and minimalist or experimental productions.

I arrived at the theater with my husband, singer-songwriter Tim Crosby, early. I was nervous, excited. Surrounded by a large group of friends, we sat second row center facing a black-floored, black-walled-and-curtained stage upon which rested a single prop—a simple chair/stair of black-painted wood.  

A graduate student introduced the night, and delivered the first performance. I was transfixed for that and the next 12 performance, 13 total.

Most were solos. One had two performers. The final performance included the whole cast of eight. By performance I mean a memorized reading that is also an acted interpretation of the story, making use of the stage but with only the prop of the chair/stair and another just like it.

They chose snarky stories and sad stories, stories that are darkly funny or tragicomic or wearily bitter. They infused each story with a multiplicity of emotion. One story was performed three times, which is an amazing way to understand the subtle differences in interpretation.

Around me, I heard my friends and audience reacting to my words and to their dramatic presentation. I felt seen. I felt my stories hitting home, doing what I wanted them to do, expressing what I wanted to say.

And, I heard my words in a whole new context, delivered sometimes the way I’d heard them in my head when I wrote them, and sometimes with a different shade of emotion that gave the story new meaning to me, its writer.

After the performance, talking with the cast, one of the words I heard most often from them was “fun.” They had fun with my stories! Can there be a better compliment than that?

My friends told me they had fun, too. And that they laughed, teared up, and were blown away by the performance.

I’m at a loss how to describe fully how this feels. I’m honored, obviously. It’s such a gift to have someone I respect as much as Craig ask to use my work in this way, to have a group of performance art professionals and students inhabit the stories, and to have my friends and members of the community come to experience it.

I have tried to come up with a philosophical statement about why I write. I struggle to explain it. Mostly, it’s something I have to do. I’m unhappy when not writing regularly, restless and snappy and bored. When I’m writing, even when it’s not going well, I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to do. Supposed to do why? I don’t know.

Early in my life I realized the emotional reaction I had to a story meant I shared something with the writer, something deep, personal and spiritual in a way—something that cut across time and geography. It’s one of the best feelings I know to read a story and to feel kinship with the creator, no matter what era in history or part of the world that person or people lived. I’ve wanted to be part of that timeless conversation since childhood, and as a writer, hope to do that.

This performance affirmed for me that I am doing it. That my words contributed to someone else’s artistic expression, and that the words separately and as part of the performance, touched people.

Thank you, Craig, and Shelby Swafford, Alicia Utecht, T Brown, Christine Ivey, Elise Wheaton, Sky Bartnick, Paula Horton, Mario Sanders, Juno Blue, and technical crew. You’ve given me a gift I will carry in my heart and soul forever.