Just Wrought

Recovering playwright, once won a STRANGER Genius Award for theater. Now writing a bloated novel about… G-d help me! Theatre.

  • 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

    Posted at 11:16 AM in Books, The Starting Gate, Writing | Comments (0)

    Tags: audio book, independent publishing, Kindle, memoir, Nook, Paul Mullin, Richard Rhodes, Robert Schenkkan, self-publishing, The Starting Gate, Tom Nissley

  • On Collaborating with Luck

    On Collaborating with Luck

    I wrote this note in my journal a day or two prior to the world premiere of one of my plays:

    12/7/–
    I believe [actor] will rise to something with this show. I have to believe that and I do. When we give up totally on luck, when we try to drive it meanly into the narrowest of margins of pure reason, that’s when it really lashes out nasty. This is a project that ran on luck: good fortune and good will—from the get go. I can believe it’s going to abandon us now. It’s practically a collaborator.

    Let me stipulate to an important point from the outset. Of course luck —strictly speaking— doesn’t exist. But that fact doesn’t exclude the notion from having a profound effect on the preponderance of people who believe in it. For that matter, the list of things that do not—strictly speaking—exist, but that still affect believers—and often non-believers, too—via the membrane of consciousness, is long and evocative:

    • Faith
    • Fate
    • Hope
    • Love
    • Justice
    • Free will
    • Evil
    • Life after death
    • Etc.

    Arguments for the non-existence of all of these have been convincingly and consistently posited. Even consciousness itself has been advocated for inclusion in this group of “things-we-ardently-believe-in-but-should-understand-do-not-actually-exist”. See the works of Daniel Dennett and Suzanne Blackmore for relatively compelling arguments in this vein.

    So why should grown rational human beings even indulge in considerations of luck at all? Well, I would contend that perhaps it pays to pay attention to luck in the same ways it pays to give notions such as “free will” and “consciousness” the benefit of the doubt. Belief in luck might be a bit like being able to see the grid of a chess board: ultimately unnecessary, but plainly helpful in playing the game.

    ASPECTS OF LUCK

    Here are some things most of believe about luck:

    • Luck follows luck. Or, restated: luck, good and bad, comes in runs.
    • Luck runs out.
    • Luck favors the prepared.
    • Good karma brings good luck. (In the West we tend to egregiously conflate the notions of “luck” and “karma”. In places where karma is contemplated as an article of faith, the concepts are quite separate.)
    • Even losers get lucky sometimes.

    Regardless of whether we believe in luck, all of these propositions require us to notice it. It’s this noticing that gives luck its power.

    MY LUCKY WEEK

    I have a lucky week and it’s coming up. In my early teens I started noticing  that good things happened for me on March 10th, which is also my half-birthday. Coincidence? I think not. Luck scorns coincidence. Later, in my 20’s, I began noticing that fortune tended to concentrate its beam on me throughout the entire week, from March 10th through March 17th.  Notice that? My lucky week has eight days. Why? Well, duh! ‘Cuz it’s LUCKY!

    I have landed several jobs in my lucky week. I have opened several plays that turned out to be important and favorable for my career in the theatre. My wife was born on March 16, the second to last day of my Lucky Week. Indeed, she has started to piggy back on the Lucky Week’s power, having had some very fortunate things happen for her within its span.

    Some superstitious sorts might argue that talking about my Lucky Week is about the least lucky thing I could do, tantamount to abrogating all of its effects. I call horseshit on this. The very essence of the thesis I am tendering is that luck only matters, only exists, only has power, if we notice and celebrate it. In other words, the God of Luck to whom I pay reverence craves having reverence paid. The more I talk about my Lucky Week the more powerful it becomes, especially in this, the 49th year of my life. (I won’t digress to explain the particular puissance of seven’s square.)

    LUCK CONNECTS US TO THE INEFFABLE

    We are a pattern-seeking species, a tendency which has served us well over the deca-millennia. Even when the patterns we saw weren’t, strictly speaking, real—dippers in the sky, the comings and goings of Persephone, regular chariot races of  sun and the moon– recognizing them still helped us survive and thrive.

    When we see luck running through the events of our lives, we palpate a substance that we have helped generate through our own hard work and tenacity. Luck connects us to the ineffable, to the patterns of life we can’t quite otherwise understand. Courting luck creates a working relationship with the otherwise overwhelming randomness of existence. By contemplating it we coax and kneed meaning out of meaninglessness. Sometimes it’s enough to realize just how lucky we are in any given moment, like striking a match and tossing it into a pitch dark well: perhaps a pointless gesture in the grander scheme of things, but our lives are short, and the grander scheme of things is often—no, almost always—beyond our ken. Luck is a map of the unknown and unknowable forces that buffet our lives. Of course it doesn’t exist. All models are wrong, but some models are useful.

    LUCK LIKES TO BE FED

    The professional golfer, Gary Player, widely recognized as one of the sport’s all-time greats, says “The harder I practice, the luckier I get.” And I say, with the approach of my Lucky Week in my Lucky Year, “From your mouth, Gary, to God’s non-existent ear.” After twenty-five years of working almost exclusively in the theatre, I have been working hard for several years now on a slate of new things: memoir, fiction, writing these essays and poetry. This March I could use a well-earned lucky break.

    PS I’m thinking this might be the first in a series of essays titled “In Praise of Unreal Things”. 

    Posted at 11:16 AM in Books, The Starting Gate, Writing | Comments (0)

    Tags: audio book, independent publishing, Kindle, memoir, Nook, Paul Mullin, Richard Rhodes, Robert Schenkkan, self-publishing, The Starting Gate, Tom Nissley

  • The Starting Gate – Making it Happen!

    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.

    Check it out!

    Posted at 11:16 AM in Books, The Starting Gate, Writing | Comments (0)

    Tags: audio book, independent publishing, Kindle, memoir, Nook, Paul Mullin, Richard Rhodes, Robert Schenkkan, self-publishing, The Starting Gate, Tom Nissley

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

    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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    Tags: audio book, independent publishing, Kindle, memoir, Nook, Paul Mullin, Richard Rhodes, Robert Schenkkan, self-publishing, The Starting Gate, Tom Nissley

  • Food for the Minotaur


    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.

    Posted at 11:16 AM in Books, The Starting Gate, Writing | Comments (0)

    Tags: audio book, independent publishing, Kindle, memoir, Nook, Paul Mullin, Richard Rhodes, Robert Schenkkan, self-publishing, The Starting Gate, Tom Nissley

  • Exit/Entrance/Exit/Entrance… Imagination

    Exit/Entrance/Exit/Entrance… Imagination

    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.

    (more…)

    Posted at 11:16 AM in Books, The Starting Gate, Writing | Comments (0)

    Tags: audio book, independent publishing, Kindle, memoir, Nook, Paul Mullin, Richard Rhodes, Robert Schenkkan, self-publishing, The Starting Gate, Tom Nissley

  • Promise


    When you look me in the eye,
    (promise me you’ll lie)
    and figure out who I really am
    (promise me you’ll promise me)

    When you finally decide—
    (you’ll lie) 
    —to kiss me 
    (promise me)

    When you total up the stars 
    (promise me you’ll lie) 
    as I fall asleep beside you 
    (lie to the sky)

    When you work up the nerve 
    (to lie) 
    to leave me 
    (promise me won’t)

    When you finally say good-bye 
    (lie)

    Wherever I go without you 
    (promise me there you’ll lie) 
    whenever within you I come 
    (lie lie lie)

    This wickedness through which we wend 
    (this promise) 
    is simply who we are 
    (I promise)

    don’t bother to deny 
    (you’ll lie)

    (Just promise me) 
    you might as well 
    always do the impossible 
    (promise me you will)

    Posted at 11:16 AM in Books, The Starting Gate, Writing | Comments (0)

    Tags: audio book, independent publishing, Kindle, memoir, Nook, Paul Mullin, Richard Rhodes, Robert Schenkkan, self-publishing, The Starting Gate, Tom Nissley

  • That Friend


    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.

    Posted at 11:16 AM in Books, The Starting Gate, Writing | Comments (0)

    Tags: audio book, independent publishing, Kindle, memoir, Nook, Paul Mullin, Richard Rhodes, Robert Schenkkan, self-publishing, The Starting Gate, Tom Nissley

  • Official Finisher! “Gateless” – Chapter 13 of THE STARTING GATE at St. Andrews

    Official Finisher! “Gateless” – Chapter 13 of THE STARTING GATE at St. Andrews

    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.

    (more…)

    Posted at 11:16 AM in Books, The Starting Gate, Writing | Comments (0)

    Tags: audio book, independent publishing, Kindle, memoir, Nook, Paul Mullin, Richard Rhodes, Robert Schenkkan, self-publishing, The Starting Gate, Tom Nissley

  • Better Dead, But Rich’ll Do

    Better Dead, But Rich’ll Do

    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.

    (more…)

    Posted at 11:16 AM in Books, The Starting Gate, Writing | Comments (0)

    Tags: audio book, independent publishing, Kindle, memoir, Nook, Paul Mullin, Richard Rhodes, Robert Schenkkan, self-publishing, The Starting Gate, Tom Nissley

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