I spent much of the day of the Brooklyn Reading Works reading worrying that too many people would show up at Fou Le Chakra and there would be nowhere for them to sit in that tiny cafe.

Well, too many people did come and it wasn’t really that big a
problem. I’d say most everybody was able to sit except for, maybe, ten
people. They stood in the shop part of Fou Le Chakra, but I think
they could hear and that was the main thing.

Susan Karwoska was first up and I introduced her remembering how,
before we met, I knew her as the statuesque blond who pushed a stroller
down Seventh Avenue making motherhood look so easy. Who, I wondered, is
this beautiful woman with the three beautiful children who has such an
air of capable calm?

For a year, we shared a writing space on Sixth Avenue. That space
became our sanctuary, a place for writing and thinking in between the
whirl and swirl of jobs and family life.

I was very pleased when Susan agreed to read an excerpt from her
unpublished novel, THE RIVER FROM NOTHING at BRW. She read beautifully and the
audience was rapt, moved as they were by the vividness of her
characters, her luminous language, the inner life she was able to evoke. Her
teenage character seemed to be going through one of those times in life
when something serious and life changing is happening. But it was as if
she was out of her body watching it all from a heart wrenching
distance.

Marian Fontana read two excerpts from her upcoming book: THE WIDOW’S
WALK (Simon and Schuster). In one, she described the October day in a
Food Court when her son asked if his firefighter dad, who’d been
missing since 9/11, was dead. "He’s dead," she said aware that the
woman at the next table was listening. Marian thought to herself:
"She’s probably thinking: What kind of mother tells her son that his
father is dead in a food court in Nyack, New York?"

The crowd was moved to tears by Marian’s tales of those first sad
and surreal months after Dave Fontana’s death. They were impressed, too, with
her powerfully detailed writing style and the way she seemed to offer
dark comic relief at just the right moments.

Thursday was the last BRW at Fou Le Chakra. The June 23rd reading with Sophia Romero, Carlton Schade and Lauren Yaffe will be at the Old Stone House in JJ Byrne Park on Fifth Avenue between 3rd and 4th Streets. 8 p.m.