Name: Hilary

Reading: Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein

Why did you want to read this? I had a few different ideas but Tender Buttons won out for being the most fun to read aloud. I have a few deadlines at the moment and it was therapeutic to spend thirty minutes thinking of nothing but the shapes and sounds of the words, focusing on not tripping up because nothing unfurls in an expected way. The lines have their rhythm though, and I find a strange or altered sense of emotionality in them which cannot be tied to meaning, like in dreams—which was fun to think about in the reading. 

How did you record yourself? In my studio surrounded by oil heaters in April, a little awkwardly so as not to block the microphone with the book. There was some background noise of the trams, traffic and voices on the street below, and some knocking about in the rooms next door, but not loud enough to be picked up by my laptop mic (I hope).