I did the Sanctum thing last night.

The actual site is lovely. Temple Church looks great, and the performance space that Theaster Gates has built is really nice. It is also not nearly as cold as I had feared. The staff there were all really helpful. And there was an audience.

Well, there was when I started anyway. Probably the best thing that can be said about my experience there is that it could have been worse. No one booed, no one threw anything, and I didn’t get hauled off stage by the management. However, about half the audience walked out during my performance, often not waiting breaks between items, and one person started talking loudly to his companion while I was reading.

Part of that is understandable in that I’m not that great a writer. I know many people who are far better at short fiction and poetry than I am. Part of it in undoubtedly because I had been scheduled to perform late at night on my way back from Cambridge. I was very tired when I got there, and had little time to rehearse. I have definitely done better performances.

On the other hand, I think this was probably the best I could have expected from the evening. The lack of a published schedule meant that I didn’t know most of the audience and they had no idea what to expect from me. They almost certainly were not expecting a trans woman reading science fiction and activist poetry. That isn’t an easy sell. One of the stories I read had gone down a storm in Cambridge the day before, but fell flat at Sanctum. The poem I did for 50 Voices went down really well there but was much less well received last night. Audiences differ, and given the sort of thing I write I’m never going to be particularly popular with an audience made of of random people who would attend a high profile art event.

It is what it is, as they say. More generally, Sanctum seems to be going very well. I very much hope to get to see some of it myself at some point. And I’ll have one of the performers on the radio with me on Wednesday.