A week ago I launched the campaign to crowd-fund the publishing of my book, The Starting Gate. Now, because of my astounding friends and fans, the project is 63% funded.
If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll consider contributing. Any amount is welcome. Just $10 gets you the book in electronic form, readable on a Kindle. For five dollars more you can have the audio book. And you can have a copy of the limited edition, hard-bound, first run copy of The Starting Gate for a contribution of $25, which coincidentally happens to be the amount it will sell for when it hits the stores.
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’sWalden and John Gardner’sGrendel 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.
The city is white. The strand is white. The sky is blue paler than the ocean is blue.
The sail that just broke the horizon is white. It’s white, right? Tell me it’s white.
The king will tell you The same damned thing: You are the king. We are… everything.
The sail is black. It’s always been black, going all the way back. It’s black
*
“Evil” is a shorthand: a convenient knot on a string Every day we dress the children in white cotton for the king.
We say, “children”, but we mean something else, surge of protein: most will survive. When was the last sail you’ve seen that wasn’t white?
It’s white, right?
The sail is white. The sail is white. And life is woven light. Monsters are movies. Life is mood.
Face down on the sand is a what not a who.
And whos that are whats are food.
*
Your heart is a labyrinth where the minotaur lives. The bull-king's heart is weak and wormy, compromised by compromise. But this is only what must be because this is what you want. You're free.
*
You cannot be forgiven. I cannot be absolved. Ours hearts are ash, lungs saltwater, and stomachs stuffed with children seethed in belief.
Our labyrinth is formed in curves not angles. That singing is sirens, not angels. All the forever we’ve lost is now.
This week I started my new job working for the City of Seattle, Department of Transportation (aka SDOT). This coming Sunday evening, I’ll be reading a story I wrote called “Exit Interview” about getting laid off from my old job. At the time I conceived it, the plot was mere imagination, but I knew the ax would eventually fall. Additionally, the story morphs into being about the end of my life, and then, more eventually still, about the end of the world. And again, I used my imagination but I have a pretty good general idea of how these things will go.
So why am I reading this story on Sunday evening (with the help of the truly excellent Brandon Simmons)? And why, in support of Bernie Sanders campaign to become the next president of the United States of America?
So many think he doesn’t have a chance. Others think he’s inured to the injustice of American racism, puffed up on a cloud of clueless White progressivism.
What do you think?
Do you think he has a chance to become our next president?
Here’s my suggestion: use your imagination; because like me— like all of us— you have a pretty good idea of what will happen otherwise.
You gamble wrong, hoping I’m like the others. I ain’t.
I’m the one who’ll kill you, make you better, or abandon you; but never hope you’ll care. I’m the one who’ll make you bigger than both of us, lift you thriving above surviving. I’m the friend circling your heart’s winter with fire.
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 don't even have a dog in the fight that Brendan Kiley's pulled me into here, but I think I might have to rent one. Me on Face Book yesterday
* * *
Before I retired from theatre nearly two years ago I liked to write essays about the art form’s problems (“On Institutional Arrogance”), and what made it great, (“How Can I Talk About the Borrowers?”), but I never did manage to write all the essays I wanted to. By the end, I had a whole file full of titles I would never flesh out. I even wrote an essay about that (“Surplus Titles”). One of my favorite leftovers was “Better Dead”, under which I intended to provide an explanation to the uninitiated that despite the image they might hold in their minds of playwrights being central to the making of theatre in modern America, the fact is, our absence is the usual and preferred state of engagement, and if we can manage to be dead, preferably for a long enough time that our work is in the public domain, then we are even more popular among our non-playwriting theatre colleagues.
In what I can only describe as an attempt to kick my own butt with a leap of faith, I started publically reading chapters from The Starting Gate at The St. Andrews Bar and Grill in Green Lake long before I had finished the book. Now it’s a year later, a strong first draft is finished, and there are only two chapters left to present. Will you consider joining me as I read “The Ending Gate”, the twelfth chapter? This chapter tells the story of what happened to me and my brother when our home away from home burned out of existence, and threw us forward, for better or worse, into the rest of our lives.
Here’s a little taste:
Back in 1985, neither my brother nor I had any strong theories on how the fire happened, but one fact quickly dawned on both of us, and I have to assume nearly everyone in town. The Starting Gate stood there, condemned and vacant, but also packed with thousands of dollars’ worth of liquor, some, if not most, of it salvageable. This fact must have dawned on John too, because within days of the fire, photocopies of this posting went up all around the property:
ANYONE FOUND HERE AT NIGHT WILL BE FOUND HERE IN THE MORNING.
Here are the details:
When: Monday, February 9, 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.
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