Storytellers and poets owned the Doudna Lecture Hall stage Thursday as part of the “Lions In Winter” reading series.

Chicago-based writer Megan Stielstra, local winners of the James K. Johnson Creative Writing Award, and members of Eastern’s faculty presented their pieces to an audience of students and faculty in a night devoted to creative writing.

Stielstra, the literary director of the 2nd Story Performance Series, headlined the evening as the second guest speaker of the “Lions In Winter” reading series, which brings writers to Eastern to share their work.

Stielstra said she comes from a mixed background of traditional English training and a ground level view of what narrative is like in day-to-day life.

“During the day I would be reading these amazing stories by Chekhov and Dostoyevsky,” she said. “Then at night I’d be tending bar and hearing these crazy stories.”

The writer said the outcome for her was a strong emphasis on the importance of oral aspects of story telling.

That oral influence was on display in Stielstra’s story “The Flood”, a tale involving a woman’s troubled relationship with her son Niki’s father, where Stielstra’s character used oral communication to develop her character over long periods of time.

Stielstra read, “The snow stopped and started again and in-between Niki talked. His first words were ‘mom’. After that, in quick succession, were suture, swab, and capillary. I had started nursing school and was studying with Niki before bed.”

Stielstra also showed a skill for finding the humanity at the core of even the most politicized of subjects in a story she was commissioned to write during the 2008 presidential elections.

The story, “Now All There Is”, gave a face to the type of person who is confronted with the questions of pregnancy and abortion recalling on their past decisions and emotions.

“I’m 18, the world is at my feet, a red carpet spread out before me,” Stielstra read. “When I told my nice, Midwestern boyfriend I was late he said ‘What for?’ When I said late-late, he didn’t say anything.”

Stielstra took time after her stories for a question-and-answer session with the audience. Questions that focused around Stielstra’s history in a casual literary competition dubbed “The Literary Deathmatch”, caught the audience’s attention.

According to Stielstra, the “Deathmatch” involved a series of writers being paired up and presenting their works for seven minutes to an audience in a bracket tournament format, though the winner is not always decided based on literary merit.

“I was blindfolded, spun around, and given a knife,” Stielstra said. “Who ever got a knife closer to Spain on a map won the round.”

Stielstra added that the excitement and absurd nature of presenting works in a live format can be beneficial to writers.

“Sometimes competition is good,” Stielstra said. “It can make you go ‘Grrr, I will write the s**t out of this so I can beat somebody.'”

Ryan Shea, a junior English major, said he came out to see Stielstra after she had visited two of his classes earlier on Thursday.

“Her performance really packed a punch,” he said.

After Stielstra’s reading, the recipients of the James K. Johnson Award and Eastern faculty took the stage.

The four readers were initially scheduled to present their stories and poems over a week ago, but were forced to evacuate the Lecture Hall and reschedule when the building’s fire alarms were accidentally activated mid performance.

Among the readers were Eliot Thompson, a freshman economics major, Phillip Gallagher , a graduate student, Lania Knight, an assistant professor of English, and Mary Maddox, a journalism instructor.

Maddox, who read the prologue of her forthcoming novel “Dark Room”, said she came into the reading with a focused goal.

“I kept it short,” she said. “I wanted to read something that was self-contained.”

The students and faculty who presented their works on Thursday ultimately lived up to Stielstra’s advice to current and future writers.

“Writing isn’t just you sitting alone at a typewriter with a bottle of Wild Turkey,” Stielstra said. “You’ve got to get involved.”

The “Lions In Winter” readings series will conclude at 4 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 26 at the Doudna Lecture Hall.

Andrew Crivilare can be contacted at 581-2812 or at ajcrivilare@eiu.edu.