DISPATCH: The Franklin Park Reading Series

I was late to Franklin Park. I’m not sure why. The kids were with their dad, and I didn’t change out of my work clothes when I stopped home in Queens to pick up my car. There was no traffic and parking was a breeze. I made myself late. I made myself late like I make myself late to dinner parties, flights, anything I put a deposit on. There’s something about pomp and circumstance I need to extinguish. If I had a therapist, I imagine they’d call this self-sabotage.

The thing was, the July installment of the Franklin Park Reading Series was a very special event. Celebrities! Acclaimed author Scott McClanahan, actual rockstar Geoff Rickly, plus literary stars Michael Seidlinger, Kathy Joyce, David Simmons and Hallie Elizabeth Newton. That meant the place would be uber crowded, but thankfully the lineup drew my literary network who filled in the blanks with voice recordings, photos and a saved seat.

First up was Michael Seidlinger, a Franklin Park alum, reading from his new book, Brokeula. It concerns a vampire whose life is longer than his money. He is fitful and anxious in his Rolls Royce of a coffin prompting him to consider “would be suicide” (don’t worry, he’s done this before). His extended lifetime did nothing to teach him about investment bubbles or the traps of consumerism. He bought the expensive rug because it matches the desk, and it can’t be any old desk. All to “look the part.” I hear this hoping that he finds his Tyler Durden counterpart to free him or at least slap some sense into him.

Next was Kathy Joyce, a “interesting woman from New York” according to her bio. She read a story surrounding a narrator, her boyfriend, a shit ton of drugs and a bit of public sex. The style was as direct as her bio: “We go into the bathroom…and start popping pills because we are pill poppers and we like to get high on pills.”

By now I have arrived. Instead of walking through the crowd, I stopped in the red-lit hallway with the pinball machines, a photographer and a spillover of guests.

I leaned on the wall, totally casual, not posing in the photographer’s view as we listened to Joyce describe sex on a Starbucks table in the gingerly voice of a young woman in love:

As the crowd gave Joyce her flowers, I found my friend and my seat in time for David Simmons to read from his short story collection, Fetty on the Switches. His voice was as loud and confident as his style, and he had us in a chokehold from his pleasantries onward. The story starts with kids in a Baltimore classroom dissecting crabs “because the admin smoked the frog money” and ends with an act I wouldn’t dare spoil for you. I will say that the realism manages to stay intact in the fantastical scene, anchored by the way police treat a distressed child. I’m pretty sure his race wasn’t mentioned but the cops were really mean to this character named “Marquise.” Do with that what you will.

After intermission, Hallie Elizabeth Newton read from her novel, Agnes Lives!, about a woman who is trying to find someone to kill her. In the scene she sets her sights on her boss who she pedestalizes as a “decorated and powerful Buddha” who “loves good wine”. As it turns out this woman of refinement is not into stabbing her employees, even when given the greenlight.

Next was Geoff Rickly. Before he treated us with a work in progress, he spoke of Scott McClanahan’s comparison to Faulkner and triggered an audible gasp in the crowd. He argued that McClanahan is “weirder and better than Faulkner.”

Rickly’s story was inspired by a real tragedy and was incredibly sensory. I was in the cold in Central Park, it was my dog who unearthed a dead aquatic animal, I felt the barrel of a shotgun:

I closed my eyes for a better listen and when I opened them, I was briefly disoriented and reminded that I was in a room full of people.

The closer of course was Scott McClanahan, reading from his new novel, Fights! He began with something I’ve never experienced before at a reading, or maybe at all. There have been Franklin Park readers who brought props or swag, presented visual art and have sung as part of their readings, so when McClanahan started speaking quickly and rhythmically, I at first assumed it was a song inflected with his West Virginia accent. Turns out, another attendee told me confidently, that it was more like an incantation. I slowed it down for you here:

In the excerpt the narrator goes on an unhinged boat ride with Giancarlo and Juliet (yes I know, but this is labeled fiction). Gian possesses a carelessness that is not without charm, though riddled with his interests surrounding death like smoking cigarettes and Charles Manson. Though not intentional he almost kills himself, his friends and neighboring boaters:

The excerpt ends with a beautiful reflection on his loved ones and the terrain of West Virginia; that Giancarlo and Juliet were his mountains and that he’d “have to live a ten thousand years to understand their beauty.”

If it was in fact an incantation at the start of the read, it either worked or he never needed it.