My cell phone died last week, I told them. Derek and Emily looked up from their own phones. That got their attention.
“Oh my god,” Emily said. “Where’s your new one?”
It was waiting at the store. I just hadn’t gotten around to dragging myself in and buying it yet. I hate buying things. Another in a long list of personal issues.
My two MFA pals had plenty of time to consider my problem. They have a ten-week hiatus from classes, their Summer Break. They don’t need a break. But their instructors do, evidently. Teaching three classes a week at ninety minutes each is exhausting. Evidently.
Derek and Emily returned to their phones, but kept speaking. Both are capable of holding entire conversations while scrolling. This is called multitasking. “You probably,” Derek tells me. “Needed an upgrade anyway.”
This was likely. But the old one was doing just fine. And I didn’t need a phone to entertain myself. I carried a book instead. I told them as much, patting the cover and feeling a bit superior.
“I have a book, too,” Derek said, holding up his phone.
“I have fifty,” Emily chimed in, not to be outdone. No one outdoes Emily. Not without a fight.
This surprised me. “You read books on your phone?’
All the time, they said. It’s just like a tablet reader, only smaller. Derek punched his phone, then held it sideways.
“See? You scroll and read. Just like a regular book.”
Well, no. You don’t scroll through a book, you page. But I was surprised how easy it was to read. The book he showed me was Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. Emily held up her own screen. Her book was Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding.
These are MFA students, after all.
Right away I saw a problem. Derek’s phone, with Vonnegut’s short sentences and lightning paragraphs, made for easy reading. Emily’s not so much. Henry Fielding writes in long, discursive paragraphs, big blocks of prose that get lost on a little screen. At least for me.
Clearly, I thought, today’s writers need to take notice. If we’re going to be read, we better study how we are read on smart phones.
I was also impressed. Maybe all these people with their noses buried in screens wasn’t so bad. Emily and Derek returned to theirs, absorbed in whatever they were reading. I looked over. Derek reviewed soccer results. Emily was on Instagram.
Well, we’re all a work in progress.
Richard Donnelly lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Classic flyover land. Which makes us feel just a little… superior. He publishes a weekly column of essays on the writing life at richarddonnelly.substack.com