On Friday night I attended the MFA’s “Graduation”. This consisted of the students who were graduating the program reading a piece of their writing. Some chose to read poetry, others chose to read a piece of fiction that they had wrote, but one thing is for sure, each of them were very original. The biggest thing that I got out of the readings (I do not usually attend readings, so this may be common knowledge to others) was how incredibly influential a readers voice is on the piece of work they are delivering.

The reading started off with a male student reading something that he said he “just prepared a couple hours earlier”. As he gave a brief introduction about himself, he spoke in a soft voice, almost as if he was shy. Then, he flipped a switch and began reading in a voice that was the polar opposite of the one he was using before. To be honest, I do not even know what he was reading or what it was about, but I can say that I was intrigued simply because of the voice he was using. After he was done reading, he went back into the previous version of himself.

One of the next girls read some of her poetry. She was very soft spoken throughout her reading, and it added a comforting feel to her reading. She did a great job delivering her poetry, with her tone adding the grace that poetry deserves.

Finally, one of the last girls that I heard read delivered a piece of fiction about a girl moving to South Bend. The reader was clearly not the shy one of the group, and her reading was very effective as she varied her tone and pitch in perfect harmony with the material she was reading.

In conclusion, the material is not what was surprising to me. To be honest, most of the time I could not understand what was being read due to the poor acoustic characteristics of the room. However, the delivery of each piece of writing varied from person to person, and it was the degree with which they varied that shocked me. Each writer was very original in the delivery and truly showed examples of various “voices” of various authors, even if in a very literal sense.