Just Wrought

Twelve Days of A CHRISTMAS CAROL

In twelve days, I will go to a theater to watch a play for the first time in eight years.

In twelve days, I will go to Northgate Station with my two teenage sons, my wife, and her mother. We will climb aboard the Link light rail and ride to downtown Seattle to see A Contemporary Theatre’s perennial holiday cash-cow stage adaptation of Charles Dicken’s classic novella, A Christmas Carol. If this were three years ago, and you knew anything about my history with the theatre as an artform, this news would be, at least to some degree, surprising, maybe even shocking. This is because eight years ago I made a big public stink about retiring from the artform for good.

So why am I going back now? Well, I have a hodgepodge of reasons, all sort of related, but they also stand on their own. So I thought I’d present them over the next twelve days, like a half advent calendar, leading up to the day we Mullins go to the show.

 

Dec. 1 / Reason 1  -  A Christmas Carol: The Book

I have always loved A Christmas Carol, going back to my first exposure to it, a radio play version put on by the various deejays, announcers, and on-air reporters  at WBAL in Baltimore, which was the city’s flagship adult contemporary radio station in the 70s. There’s nothing really like it one the air anymore, certainly not in Seattle. WBAL played a wide spectrum of pop music from the 40s forward to contemporary, but the station also ran news, sports, and hour-long interview programs featuring local figures: politicians, sure, but also local sports and entertainment luminaries. It played in the background at my house from the time my parents got up and had their first cup of coffee until they went to bed after their last cup of coffee. (I still don't understand how Mom and Dad could drink black coffee just before sleeping.)

I first read A Christmas Carol when I was maybe 12. It was a hard slog for me then, but I got through it, and enjoyed it, and it spooked me in all the right places. The novella is an astoundingly concise clockwork of a plot, moving the reader along relentlessly to its formalized conclusion. The language is rich: simultaneously lugubrious and cocksure.

Old Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

Was there ever an opening argument of a case stated more plainly than that? But Dickens then goes on to expand and expound, like Bach working up a fugal theme:

Old Marley was dead as a door nail.

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the country’s done for. You will, therefore, permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Gah! I loved it as a kid, even barely understanding it as I did. And even back then I recognized how deeply and overtly political the story was.

Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?

Can’t we just round up these people living in tents and RVs and put them somewhere we don’t have to look at them every day?

I don't think it's some warm and fuzzy "Spirt of Christmas" that keeps us coming back to this book. I think it's the author's very sharp and very necessary spirit of radical progressive humanism.

Dickens thought we could do better.

And we still need to.

Day 4 / Reason 4 for Going back to the Theatre: The Darkness

When I was a kid and saw various versions of A Christmas Carol on the TV featuring scenes of old-timey Christmastime London (51.51° N), like the street outside Scrooge and Marley’s or Bob Cratchit at his standing desk, I remember marveling at how dark it was even in the afternoon. (And I knew it was afternoon because Scrooge kept saying, “Good afternoon!”)  I grew up in Maryland (39.29° N), and it certainly gets cold there in the wintertime (and godawful miserably humid hot in the summer), but it wasn’t until I lived through a winter in the Pacific Northwest (47.61° N) that I understood fully about this kind of darkness.  Come December, the edges of the night here squeeze in on both sides and gloom takes over. (As I write this at 8:15 AM it is dark and raining, and it will rain on through the dark day without cease. There will not come an hour I won’t need to turn a light on to read.) Here’s how I describe it in my novel Seattle Trust:

Seattle slowly circles December’s drain. Days will now march past like lumbering ghosts, as the border between day and night softens like bruising fruit into a barely varying sameness. Gray in/gray out.

I count on the Christmas season to boost me through until the Solstice, when the days start getting longer again. Usually, by the middle to end of January, I start feeling the light gently seeping back.  But until then, the “artificial light” of art in all its forms: Christmas trees, and music, and plays, has to do the heavy lifting of my soul.

So yeah, one reason (reason number four, to be exact) that I’m going back to the theatre, is because…

 “I need a little Christmas. Right this very minute.”

Day 2 / Reason 2 for Going Back to the Theatre: My Sister

Against all better judgement I have begun a 12-part blog series enumerating my reasons for going back to the theatre, specifically to see ACT’s production of A Christmas Carol on December 12. This is day two of my virtual half-advent calendar.

I have never really fully explained why I left the theatre back in 2013. My reasons were personal, even if my retirement was painfully public. Maybe I’ll get to sharing those reasons someday, but before I can do that, I should state for the record who is to blame for me becoming involved in the art form in the first place. That would by my sister, Margaret, or “Maggie” as those of us closest to her know her these days.

Maggie first fully electrified my theatrical imagination playing Puck in her junior high school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was maybe six or seven, but I followed the Elizabethan text better than one might expect. Still, a lot of the language lofted over my head. Except when Maggie spoke, transformed as she was into a mischievous hobgoblin, seemingly in charge of all of the chaos reigning on the stage.

Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand,
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover's fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!

I already had it mostly memorized, because I had listened to her memorizing it in her room over the weeks before.

The following year, when my sister played Gollum in the school’s production of The Hobbit, the gas really hit the spark plug.

“Bless us and splesh us my precious. Gol-LUM!”

She would practice her lines over and over in her room with the door shut, but she was loud enough for me to hear everything in the room Eddie and I shared next door.

“What’s it got in its pockets, my precious? Gol-LUM!”

These eponymous punctuations "Gol-LUM!" burst forth from her as seemingly uncontrollable, autonomic eructations welling up from the pit of her gut. Or rather, Gollum’s gut, for she had, indeed, become the twisted little monster.

“We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious. They stole it from us. Sneaky little hobbitses. Wicked, tricksy, false!"

Looking back now, she was so unlike other girls her age, in the mid-70s: so obsessed with hair and fashion and looks. Oh, Maggie cared about those things too, obsessed about them at times, but she threw them all aside when she came to inhabit Gollum. Once him, she didn’t care one bit about looking feminine, even though the director had squeezed her blossoming body into a green and brown painted body suit. She gave herself over completely to the character. It was really, for me, the first time I had ever witnessed such a transformation.

Now you may say, wait a minute. She was doing theatre, pretending. This wasn’t real. But when your oldest sister by six years is becoming an avariciously murderous monster in the room next door to yours, it’s real all right.

Keep in mind this is decades before the magic of Peter Jackson’s digital capture of Andy Cirkus’ pliable, gamut-running, psychologically insightful portrayal in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. It was even prior to the animated version of The Hobbit released in 1977. As far as I know my sister had never seen a performance of Gollum, and I’m not even sure she read the book. My sister had nothing from which to construct her portrayal but the text of the stage adaption and her own imagination. In other words, she did the quintessential actor’s job, and took fresh text (fresh to her anyways) and molded from it a character whom she then inhabited. Her portrayal of Gollum encapsulated everything about the theatrical process that would get and keep me stoked  for the next three decades. As an artist, my sister set me on fire. With Puck and Gollum she showed me how weirdness and audacity could be leveraged into a gift you could offer other people in performance.

The key to my origin story as a theatre artist—which I never put together consciously throughout all those decades of doing it, and only just fully realized writing this—is that I started acting, and then went on to playwriting, because of my sister Maggie. She touched the match to my fuse as an artist, and I’ve been burning ever since.

Every one of my siblings has some experience with the theatre, but I was the only one who went professional. I got my Actors' Equity card at the age of 19 playing Young Scrooge at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC. I never used my union card again.

My Christmas present from Maggie that year was a beautiful, hardbound illustrated copy of A Christmas Carol. Here’s how she inscribed it.

1/11/88

Dear Paul,

I saw this book a week or so after we saw your show & I had to get it for you. I know that the show caused some inner turbulence for you but it is a timeless story that touches everyone’s heart. Your show was an excellent adaptation of the story. After buying this book I started thinking about what it is that makes this story so special. What did I come up with? We can identify with Scrooge’s past, present and future “personas”, and we can relate to the loss of Christmas spirit that seems to occur as we get older. We become so caught up in the ways of the world, that we lose touch with the ways of the soul. I’d like to believe that in this story Dickens isn’t merely encouraging the celebration of Christmas, he’s demanding that we celebrate life. The ghosts are merely showing us how we have allowed the control of our lives to be taken out of our hands. To you, dear brother, I wis a full, rewarding, happy, sad, thoughtful, action-packed, glorious and challenging life. I hope that you will enjoy this book & celebrate Christmas every day of your life.

Lots of Love,

MCM [Margaret Cecilia Mullin]

 

There’s so much I could tell you about everything my sister has taught me over the years, but if I had to boil it all down to highlights it would be these:

• Life is long, but ultimately short.
• Be weird when you want.
• Be loud in your love.
• Celebrate light in the darkness.

My First-Ever Debut Novel is Available Now!

 

After five years, it's finally here!

My first ever novel, Seattle Trust.

Join the crowdfunding campaign to support its publishing and marketing!

Check out this crowdfunding kick off video:

 

Click here to reserve your personally signed advance copy now!

THE STARTING GATE for Father's Day

The idea came from my good friend and former theatre collaborator, John Langs, when I handed him his copy of the limited first edition hardcover version of The Starting Gate and he grinned and said, “Oh, man. I gotta get a copy of this for my dad!”

Lightbulb!

Of course this is a good book for Father’s Day. Not only is there a chapter (or two) that zeroes in on my relationship with my own step-father, but also the entire book is dedicated to my boyos, Declan and Keelan. In other words, this book was written as a father, in an attempt to capture moments in my life that my own sons might not otherwise be able to conceive of: simple things, like telephones being attached to walls, and having to go out and look for a job by walking up and down the boulevard and sticking your head in ever business you passed.

Here are a couple of the things I am doing to promote The Starting Gate as the perfect Father’s Day gift (though a good bottle of bourbon never hurt either):

• Bought a week’s sponsorship of The Seattle Review of Books. (This excellent new site founded by Martin McClellan and Paul Constant provides substantial, thoughtful reviews of books of all kinds, as well as blogging about the literary scene here in Seattle and beyond. It is a growing force for good in Seattle’s literary scene and wider world of arts.
  
• Slashed the cost of the Kindle version in half. It’s now $4.49 (that’ s 82% off the hardcover version!) Available here. 
  
• Released the paperback version. It’s available here: https://www.createspace.com/6282351
• Will give away free Audible downloads of the audio book to the first 10 people who message me. (So message me! Auctioning the limited first edition hardcover version of the book over at eBay. It’s currently bidding at $12, which is over 40% off the $25 cover price.

If you can think of another way I can make the book easier to get in time for Father’s day, please let me know!

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Moving THE STARTING GATE

Since the start of my Indie Go Go campaign to fund the publication of my book The Starting Gate, that site was the best, and really only, way to order the limited first edition hardcover version. As of midnight, that’s going away. So you have half a day left to go here to get it while the getting’s good. After that, the hardcover edition will be available for list price at Amazon here: http://amzn.com/0997074701

But Amazon is boring, and arguably somewhat evil. They certainly take the lion’s share of the sale price for themselves, so I am adding a fun way to get The Starting Gate for a deep discount, over at Ebay. Every week, starting now, I will be offering the book for auction starting at 40% off. At the end of the week one book will go to the highest bidder (or, you can always just pull the trigger at the list price of $24.95). Just go here:
http://ebay.to/1Ww08VT

Alternative versions, electronic and audiobook are available as always…

Electronic:

You can purchase the Kindle version by clicking here.

You can purchase the Nook or iPad version by clicking here.

Audio Book:

The audiobook version of The Starting Gate, narrated by yours truly, is available across a variety of different platforms, including Audible , Amazon, iTunes, Audiobooks.com, Hoopla, The Audiobook Store, Downpour, Overdrive, Barnes & Noble, Nook, and Playster.
 

 

How to get to THE STARTING GATE

 

If there’s one thing this retired playwright has learned about the independent publishing business, it’s that delays that would be impossible— unthinkable in the theatre—are par for the course. And so delivery of the hardcover version of my book, The Starting Gate, so beautifully designed by K. Brian Neel has been pushed back yet again, and may not happen until the very end of February, if then.

So here’s how you can, if you so choose, get to The Starting Gate NOW!

 

Electronic Versions:

You can purchase the Kindle version by clicking here.

You can purchase the Nook or iPad version by clicking here.

 

Audio Book:

The audiobook version of The Starting Gate, narrated by yours truly, is available across a variety of different platforms, including Audible , Amazon, iTunes, Audiobooks.com, Hoopla, The Audiobook Store, Downpour, Overdrive, Barnes & Noble, Nook, and Playster.

That said, if you are interested in listening to the book, but are new to audio books on-line, just message me and I'll offer some "off-line solutions."

 

Printed Versions:

Despite delays, the limited first edition hardcover is coming! I’ll be passing them out to people who have pre-ordered them at the IndieGoGo site at my book release party on March 14, at The St. Andrews Bar and Grill, starting at 7 pm. For more information on the party, go here.

The paperback version of the book will be available in the Summer of 2016.

 

About THE STARTING GATE:

The Starting Gate is a smooth cocktail consisting of thirteen interconnected chapters, tracking my life from my first job as a stock boy at a Maryland country bar (called the Starting Gate) where my boss once shot a man dead for trying to rob the local drug store, to my days as the only white kid on an all-black labor crew at the National Archives. You'll learn what it's like to spend days cleaning the high-rise glass windows of Manhattan and the rules you need to know to enjoy a cocktail with the greatest living bartender, Murray Stenson.

 

What some Amazing Authors are Saying about The Starting Gate:

"Do you want to know how to behave in a bar? Do you want to know how to live? Maybe they're not so different. Paul Mullin finds a real honor and wisdom in the messy practice of a life, and he makes me wish I too had learned how to work as a kid at a little country tavern in Maryland called the Starting Gate—even on Taco Night. How am I suddenly nostalgic for a life that wasn't even my own?"
– Tom Nissley, Jeopardy Champion and author of A Reader’s Book of Days

“Paul Mullin enters sacred territory in American Letters, the Temple of the Tavern wherein both grace and alcohol are dispensed. Like its successful predecessors, FALLING THROUGH THE EARTH, THE LIARS CLUB, and THE TENDER BAR. Mullin’s entertaining memoir is an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, to explain the mystery of the now with a Drunkard’s Walk through his past of hard manual labor, art, and Zen Buddhism. It’s funny and moving, and Mullin’s chapter on how to properly appreciate a bar should be required reading for all those coming of age.”
– Robert Schenkkan, Tony Award-winning author of All the Way

"Playwright Paul Mullin deploys his gift for vivid storytelling in this lively memoir of work, play and apprentice barkeeping."
– Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb

 

 

 

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My Friend for a Year: A Reader’s Book of Days

 

 

 

I have been reading the same book for nearly a year. I sit and read one page, every day, and in so doing, it has become a true friend to me. I’m actually a little concerned about how much I will miss this book when my year with it is up.

This book—my friend— was given to me by another friend, the poet Kevin Craft, who presented it to me at the 2014 Annual Mullin White Trash Christmas Party. I cracked open the tome the very next day, December 14, and quickly learned that Shirley Jackson, author of The Haunting of Hill House, was born on that day in 1914. I also learned that  in 1999 Charles M. Schulz retired from penning his classic cartoon strip Peanuts. He would be dead by the following February.

A Readers’ Book of Days by Tom Nissley is an addicting almanac of literature, charmingly illustrated by Joanna Neborsky. It engagingly details not only what happened to authors on particular days, but also, and perhaps more importantly, what happened to their characters. We all know that Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March, and most of us know (or should) that Leopold Bloom began his vast single-day adventures on June 16, but how many of us know that the wedding that kicks off The Godfather occurred on the last Sunday in August 1945?

Nearly a month into my ritual of reading a single page every morning with my coffee I learned that in 1873, Herman Melville’s brother-in-law lobbied the Secretary of the Treasury to see if anything could be done to make the author’s job as a customs inspector easier. This was twenty years after “Bartleby the Scribner” was published, and twenty-two since Moby Dick first surfaced. In July I learned that on the 16th of Germinal in Year II the poet Fabre d’Églantine was executed in the revolution for which he helped invent an entirely new calendar. He handed out his poems on his way to the guillotine. 

Stories like these especially spoke to me, freshly laid off from my day job of seven years and recently retired from theatre to begin writing in new forms. 2015 loomed ahead of me with an intimidating unknowable newness. Still, if Melville could defy obscurity two decades after Moby Dick, and if d'Eglantine could still earnestly offer his poems even as he tumbriled towards death; then who was I not to soldier on in my privileged circumstances. And so, in addition to introducing me to all kinds of cool books, from Cloud Atlas to the The Time Traveler’s Wife, with his own singular book Tom Nissley helped remind me that success and failure as an artist are just painted-on illusions. All you can really hang your hat on is the work, and the earnest offering of its product.

Books are like people: it’s easy to love the general idea of them, but in reality there are just too damned many to know or care about. There are books with which you had wild youthful affairs. (Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and John Gardner’s Grendel leap to mind for me.) Ones that you treasure fond memories of, but understand you’re unlikely to revisit in middle age (Joseph Campbell’s The Hero of a Thousand Faces), and then there are the books you live with, day upon day, in something not unlike happy matrimony (Coleman Barks’ versions of Rumi for me as well as The Ancestor’s Tale, by the brilliant, but lately somewhat loathsome Twitterer, Richard Dawkins; and Jorges Luis Borges’s hat trick: The Fictions, The Non-Fictions, and The Selected Poems.)

This Friday at 7 p.m Tom Nissley will be celebrating the paperback editon of A Reader’s Book of Days at the warm and welcoming shops he owns, Phinney Books. (In the interest of full disclosure, I must inform you now that I have since I introduced myself to Tom as a fan. And I like to think that we have begun a tentative but promising new friendship. Indeed, I asked him to write a blurb for the back of my soon to be published book, The Starting Gate, and he surprised me when he told me it would be his first time.)

As artists, as humans, we cannot know the true measure of our gifts; that’s for others to understand. Kevin Craft couldn’t know what the book he was bringing to my raunchy Christmas party would mean to me over the following year, and Tom Nissley couldn’t know one of the people he would reach so profoundly was the guy who wrote the deeply weird play about angels and sub-atomic particles he saw at a black box in Belltown in 1992. We offer what we offer and we hope for the best. Through Kevin and Tom this best of books changed my last year for the better. And now in turn I’m offering you this piece of advice: go if you can on Friday to Phinney Books and purchase yourself a copy of A Reader’s Book of Days.

 

Who:     Tom Nissley

What:     A Reader’s Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year

When:     Friday, November 6, at 7 p.m.

Where:     Phinney Books, 7405 Greenwood Ave N, Seattle, WA 98103

Why:    Because you’ll be achieving several great things in one small, fun, and easy package: buying a great book directly from the author, and in doing so supporting local literature and local booksellers, and finally you’ll be celebrating authors throughout the ages that worked hard so you’d have something interesting with which to pass the years of days.

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I got a compliment from a friend the other day that made me feel very proud in a modest sort of way.  He said, “Well, Paul, you do tend to finish things.” We were talking about a novel I have recently started. I have no idea if I will finish it. But with my friend’s kind approbations added to the analysis, I like my odds.

 

“I was the One at Home”: Chapter 10 of THE STARTING GATE at St. Andrews

 

I finished a solid first draft of The Starting Gate about a month ago. Then I spent another two weeks putting a polish on it, rewrote the ending on some excellent advice from a good friend, and sent it under his cover to a literary agent in New York. The reply was surprisingly prompt, but, not surprisingly, discouraging. Apparently the book’s “candor and soul, art and wit” are “admirable”, but alas, the work is too “quiet and thoughtful… insufficiently sensational” to attract a publisher. If I were famous enough, maybe; but since I am not, no dice.

Since I honestly don’t know what to do next, I am going to do what I’ve already promised myself to do: read the next chapter, as scheduled, at The St. Andrew’s Bar And Grill next Monday night. So would you please consider joining me as I read “I was the One at Home”, the tenth chapter of my book The Starting Gate? It’s about the night in the house on Sweet Air Road when it was just me, my step-dad, and his massive left hemisphere stroke.

Here’s a quickie excerpt:

.... He reaches out his hand, grasping for things on the table that aren’t there. “Do you want me to get you something write with?” I ask. He nods vigorously. I get him a ballpoint and a small pad with some advertisement on the banner. He begins scrawling, but it looks funny. I turn the pad around to read it.

“Call your mother.”

“Dad, mom’s in Towson.” Towson is 10 miles away. “I should call 911. Let me call 911.”

He shakes his head more furiously than before. He taps fiercely on that pad with his fat forefinger. (The same meaty hand that slaps our faces, heavy and fast.) So I call my mom at the real estate office, where she’s manning the phones in the hopes of picking up a loose lead. Mom needs loose leads. She’s not exactly a born sales woman. But there’s another reason she volunteers to work essentially unpaid for three or four hours nearly every evening. It gets her out of the house at the time when my Dad’s most likely to be drunk.

Mom answers the phone at the real estate office. I tell her the situation and ask her to let me call 911. “I’m pretty sure he’s having a stroke, Mom.”

“Oh Paul, how can you know that?”

“He’s not talking, Mom.”

“Well let me talk to him.”

“Mom, I can’t let you talk to him. HE CAN’T TALK.”

And here are the details:

When: Monday, December 1, at 8pm

Where: The St. Andrews Bar, 7406 Aurora Ave. North, Seattle, WA 98103

Who: Me, and you, and probably a few others you know

How: Quick and dirty, the readings rarely last longer than 25 minutes.

Why: Why not?

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On Monday, April 14 at 8pm, at The St. Andrews Bar and Grill, I will do again what I have done twice before: read a chapter from my book in progress, The Starting Gate, to a small group of close friends, so I can hear it out loud and also gather their reactions.