This year Northwestern hosted another Deep Song Reading Series. This event features different writers and authors and engages the community with their work.
“The Deep Song Reading Series is a chance to invite professional authors — both local and occasionally from a further field — to come read on campus and try to get them to engage with the community,” English professor Dr. Sam Martin said. “They get a chance to read their work where sometimes the audience has never heard of them before.”
As a part of this year’s Deep Song Reading Series, Kate Brauning of Sioux Center came to share her work. Brauning was previously a high school English teacher before becoming associate editor at Entangled Publishing. She also does freelance editing and runs a group industry blog called Pub Hub.
Brauning read a section of her book, How We Fall, and answered questions about the selected text.
She also signed copies of her book and had books at the event to purchase.
Brauning’s book is a young adult novel. This was the first time NW had a young adult novelist on campus.
“Young adult novels started to gain a lot of steam when Harry Potter novels came out,” Martin said.
Recently, many people besides young adults have begun reading young adult genre novels. They are becoming very popular, and many people enjoy them.
While Brauning was on campus, she also worked with students in classes.
Allison Mulder is a writing and rhetoric major and has worked with Brauning before.
“We’ve mutually followed each other for about a year and had conversations over Twitter before,” Mulder said. “She’s just really encouraging to young writers. She’s really enthusiastic about getting new and varied voices in literature. It was just really good to talk to her being an aspiring writer myself.”
In addition, Brauning gave advice for aspiring writers.
“Think of writing and the publishing journey as training and pursing any other career,” Brauning said. “You study, you learn from experts, you network, you study more, you try your hand at it, find the space you fit, take constructive feedback and work, work, work.”
Brauning also suggests reading books frequently.
“Read the kind of books you want to write and read constantly,” Brauning said. “A novel or two per week. When you react to something in the story, stop and look at how the author made you react and why you reacted that way. It’s a great way to learn.”
The event took place on Thursday in the Te Paske Gallery. How We Fall is also available to students in the library.
Professor Martin will read from a selection of his own works during the next session of the Deep Song Reading Series on Thursday, April 9, at 7 p.m. in the Te Paske Gallery.