“Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids” is an open-mic night like nothing I’ve ever attended.
Somewhere between a reading and a comedy show, it’s a night when everyone—from grandparents to university students—can take the stage to share how they put pen to paper as a kid.
When Grownups came to Ottawa on Feb. 1, 21 readers got up and shared their childhood writing in front of a packed house at the Bytown Tavern. I was lucky enough to be one of them.
I’ve been a fan of the show for a while—ever since it visited Newfoundland last summer and I basically busted a gut laughing at the stuff volunteer readers dusted off to read.
I also followed Grownups when it partnered with CBC Radio last summer to broadcast a 10-part series of open-mics hosted in cities across the country.
So when the show rolled into Ottawa, I signed up to share some of my own material.
My repertoire: a short story I wrote when I was six called “The Great Adventure of the Ranger of the Mountain” and an instructional manual for igloo building I wrote for a third grade English class. Both were short, sweet, and outright cringe-worthy. I fit right in.
One reader read from her “Book of Shadows,” which she wrote in high school when she thought she might be a Wiccan. Another woman read “Dark Angel Eternal,” a poem she wrote when she was 15 and in the middle of her “gothy stage.”
Other readings were downright cute. But my favourites—an innocent 12-year-old cursing her brother with wet dreams in her journal and a poem called “Sex and the Baked Potato”—were downright outrageous.
Still, and here’s the great part, every reading was relatable in some way or another. For every diary entry, short story—or letter to Lucien Bouchard, for that matter—the audience kept pace with the person on stage, laughing with them as they relived their kid memory.
“The person onstage is them, but it’s also a little bit of you,” said Dan Misener, who started hosting Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids after his wife discovered a box of old diaries in 2007.
“Even though everybody has their own story and everybody had their own experience, so much of growing up is universal,” he said.
Still, I was nervous. I was last to read, a bit of a daunting task after a night of hard-to-beat poems about peeing, diary entries about gingers, and lyrics to 80s instrumentals.
In the end, I was fine. The crowd was with me the whole way. I had been them and they had been me, after all.
“Part of what I tell people if they’re feeling a little bit nervous is you do not need to win anybody over,” Misener said. “Everyone is already on your side and they’re rooting for you.”
