“Taylor Swift” clones come to Naptown Story Hour
May Naptown Story Hour performance at Golden Hour Bookstore. Photo courtesy of Naptown Story Hour
“Taylor Swift” clones come to Naptown Story Hour
Hugh Behm-Steinberg didn’t write his flash fiction piece “Taylor Swift”—about commodified Taylor Swift clones—because he’s a Swiftie, but he liked the way her name rolls off the tongue.
“Taylor Swift just really rolls… in a very poetic, beautiful way, in a way that, say, Miley Cyrus does not,” Behm-Steinberg said. “You could say Taylor Swift over and over and over again, and it sounds just as good.”
Behm-Steinberg lives in Barcelona, Spain with his wife Mary. Prior to that, he was a professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, California where he taught creative writing for the past 25 years. Since writing the story he’s become a Taylor Swift fan, although he doesn’t really think of himself as a Swiftie.
“Solve for X” by Hugh Behm-Steinberg
“I started getting into her music,” he said. “I mean, I love 1989. That's my favorite record of hers.”
You can hear “Taylor Swift” being performed during the Naptown Story Hour at Golden Hour Books in Indianapolis on July 17 at 7:30pm. It will be performed by theatre actor Morgan Morton. The performance is free, a “non-stodgy” atmosphere is promised, and snacks will be served.
On page, Behm-Steinberg’s story had everything Naptown Story Hour co-creator Casey Patrick believes makes for a good Naptown performance.
“We want it to feel energetic,” she said.
“Talyor Swift” doesn’t lack for energy. It dives headlong into human relationships complicated by the sexual and emotional benefits that the fictional Taylor Swift clones offer their purchasers.
The story won the Barthelme Prize, awarded by Gulf Coast Magazine, in 2015. Then it went viral on the internet.
“Electric Literature picked it up and put it on a listicle,” Behm-Steinberg said. And that listicle went viral. “And then a second listicle came out.”
from left: author Hugh Behm-Steinberg in Barcelona, Spain; performers Morgan Morton, Emily Ristine, and Allen Sledge Performer photos courtesy of Naptown Story Hour
That listicle promoted his story as a model of the flash fiction genre, in the same company as writers like Jamaica Kincaid and Ernest Hemingway.
“The next thing I know, people are teaching it in college classes,” Behm-Steinberg said. It has also been performed onstage, including in a high school class in India. “It was like the high school Glee version of my story,” he continued.
If past is any indicator for future performance, there should be a standing room only crowd on July 17 for Naptown Story Hour. The series kicked off in February, and there have been three story hours so far. The format, as the name suggests, includes short stories, three of them, read by three different actors, in the space of an hour. Also performing separate stories on July 17 will be performer Allen Sledge and theatre director Emily Ristine.
Casey Patrick got the idea for starting Naptown Story Hour after the 2024 presidential election.
“I was feeling weathered down,” she said. “And I watched an interview with [MSNBC’s] Rachel Maddow, and she was talking about the kind of ways that we can respond to the state of affairs in our country. One of the things she said that resonated with me was building community, looking for creative places to build community. I was inspired by that, for sure. “And then I'm a big fan of a podcast called selected shorts.”
She is also part of a workshop where she works on her own writing led by author and Butler University creative writing professor Dan Barden.
“I went into a workshop one day, and I said, ‘I have this little idea about doing this little thing where we have actors come and they read stories and we do it and whatever. And as soon as I said it, Dan looks at me, and I could see it in his eyes. He goes, let's do it. So we reached out to Sarah Summers, who is the owner of Golden Hour Books, and asked her if we could stage it there. And then we reached out to some actor friends, and friends of friends, to see if they would want to do it.”
Behm-Steinberg will be curious to know how it all works out. “It's really cool,” he says about the prospect of other people performing his work. “You get insights into other people's perspectives on your stuff. The most important thing is you just sort of be hands off, and you let them figure it out.”
Taylor Swift, Hugh Behm-Steinberg
Taylor Swift photo attribution: iHeartRadioCA, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, Hugh Steinberg Photos courtesy of Hugh Behm-Steinberg
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