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.
I wasn’t sure about doing these monthly chapter readings. Some good friends and smart colleagues questioned the wisdom. Apparently publicly sharing your work so early in the process just isn’t done in the world of prose. But I am new to writing stuff to be read instead of heard, and, coming from the theatre as I do, the best idea I could come up with to keep a fire under my ass while simultaneously giving me the gut checks I need on how the work’s proceeding was to semi-publicly read it out loud. And so far so good.
Turns out, I need this process. I need the connection. And if this need is a holdover from my theatre days, when every script of mine went through an extended iterative process of private, then semi-private and then fully public readings, then so be it. I see no sense in doing something for over a quarter of century only to willfully abandon every trick I’ve learned.
For those of you who couldn’t make the first two readings, here’s what you missed:
Chapter One “The Gate”: I introduce the dominant setting of the book, the Starting Gate, which was the country town bar I basically grew up in, working as a stock boy there, along with my older brother, from the age 13 until 17.
Chapter Two “The Crease and The Hatter” :I remember the two next bars I worked at before I was old enough to legally drink, one just outside of Baltimore, the other on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Chapter 3, “The Perfect Experiment” is what I will be reading on April 14. It’s a bit of a departure from the trajectory so far of bars worked and drank in. In it, I give a brief history of my family and how we came to be, well, who we are: from my father, the first Paul Mullin, to the one we wound up with. I sometimes think of it as my Mulliniad in SparkNotes.
So come to the St. Andrews on Aurora if you can. It’s free! Have a drink (or a few) and maybe a nosh, too. The whole process is painless (relatively) and done in a half an hour. (How often can you say that about theatre?)
When: Monday, April 14 at 8pm
Where: The St. Andrews Bar and Grill, 7406 Aurora Ave N, Seattle, Washington
Who: Me and you and probably a few others you know
How: Quick and dirty.
Why: Why not?
Join the Face Book event: https://www.facebook.com/events/632079443530249/
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