If you wish to exorcise some demons from your young imagination, or celebrate your adolescent inventiveness, you’ll soon have such an opportunity to do so at The Banff Centre.
CBC Radio producer Dan Misener is bringing his open-mic brainchild Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids (GRTTWAK) to The Club, Theatre Complex on March 2, and there are a couple of spots open for those brave enough to share some diary entries, book reports or questionable poetry from their teenage wasteland.
“We’ve been doing these shows since 2007 and basically what happened is in Christmas of 2006 my wife and I were visiting her parents; we were down in their basement and we came across a bunch of old boxes and in it was her diary from when she was an early teenager. We basically started reading it out loud to each other,” Misener said on the event’s inception.
“Parts of it were really kind of funny, and parts of it were awkward, parts were embarrassing and parts were bitter-sweet – she’s talking about her relationships with her family and it struck us that lots of people probably have the same kind of thing with diaries or creative writing assignments, stuff they have themselves or have been held onto by parents.”
The couple thought it would be fun to get together in a more social way and share this kind of material with others. They booked a night at a bar in Toronto and invited some people to come out.
“Low and behold, people have lots of this stuff, so we’ve been doing shows ever since,” Misener said.
Due to his day job as a radio producer, Misener has an impulse to tape record everything, and from very early on he’s been taping these shows.
“Last summer we put together a series of 10 episodes for CBC Radio that aired nationally and we travelled across the country and put on 10 live shows and taped them and put some of the fun stuff on the radio. We’re continuing to do that,” Misener said.
“We don’t try and pretend that the podcast is the same as coming to the show because the live show is 90 minutes to two hours and we usually have 15 to 20 people in the course of an evening get up and read, so it’s a lot of really rapid fire stuff and the podcast is supposed to be just a taste of that.”
He views GRTTWAK as a fun side project for him to pursue.
“There’s a degree to which all of the stuff people bring to our shows is universal in some way. Who hasn’t had a teacher who they loved or hated, or who hasn’t fallen in love with somebody and had them not love them back? said Misener.
“So there’s these universal things and at the same time you really do get a sense of place from these types of writing.”
He grew up just outside of Halifax, Nova Scotia and says he is just as guilty as any other Canadian youth for having spilled questionable ink in his youth.
“I had a different life growing up than someone on the Sunshine Coast in B.C. or growing up in rural Saskatchewan, so what I love to see is that we are kind of all the same. But we do have regional flavour across the country,” Misener said.
Ideally in the course of a show, Misener says they like to have 15 to 20 readers, so there are a couple more spots for those brave enough to step up to the mic. All he asks is for people to sign up in advance through the GRTTWAK website at: www.grownupsreadthingstheywroteaskids.com.
“It seems like a scary thing to get up on stage and read something that’s maybe a little embarrassing or you’re not super proud of who you used to be, but the thing about these shows is there is no warmer audience anywhere for anyone who is the slightest bit hesitant to read or to get up,” Misener said.
“The entire audience is already on your side, there’s nobody to win over, everyone is rooting for you – the supportive nature in the room makes those fears go away.”
