The Wonderful Night

City College tonight at 7 PM, just before Denise's tribute.

The reading:

--David Groff from Good Deeds
--DyAnne DiSalvo from Red Whiskey Blues
--Bill Lutz from Peshtigo
--Ron Block from "Bad for Boys"
--J.T. Barbarese from "An Honest Orgy"
--Victoria Redel from "A Woman of Heart and Mind"
--Mark Doty from Trespasses
--Paul Lisicky from Trespasses

The tribute couldn't have been sweeter, more memorable. There we were, eight readers, reading ten minutes a piece, from a range of 25 years of Denise's work. And there was her family sitting in the back. There were old students, and old friends, some from as far away as Northampton, Syracuse, and Glens Falls. And thirty people filled the room, taken in by the power of those narrators, alternately cranky and wistful and bewildered and joyful. (I mean we always knew she was wonderful, but that wonderful? Well, the night knew.)

My introduction to Trespasses:

It’s impossible for me to contain the breadth of a 26-year-long friendship in sentence or two, but here’s an image: it’s 1986, and I’m lying on the floor of my father’s den, listening to the tenth draft of the tenth chapter of Red Whiskey Blues. I’m nervous because I don’t yet have the vocabulary to tell Denise how much I love it, how much I think this version was better than the last. She’s nervous because she thinks I’m not as knocked out as she wants me to be; she wants me to gasp. In a little while, I’ll read something of mine. And in this way we’ll spend years and years on the phone. We’ll teach each other attention. We’ll lead each other deeper into the scary, beautiful forest we call literature.

And from a Facebook post by the lovely Susan Stinson, who came to the reading all the way from Northampton:

Last night, I went to a memorial reading of work by the fiction writer, Denise Gess. I didn't know Denise, and was moved to hear such range, so much wit, intensity, and narrative power, and to feel with characters so much in relationship with others, with so much at stake in that.

Thanks once again to Brandon Judell and City College for helping to make the night happen.

Update: A photo of Denise I'd never seen before, courtesy of DyAnne DiSalvo...