VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?
McCLEARY: Last fall, a now-defunct performance space called The Void tried their hand at doing a monthly reading series. I went once and read some stuff, and then felt obliged to go again the next month because A) a bunch of my friends were reading and B) the Void was across the street from my house. The series had been kind of drunken and haphazard to begin with, but this particular night ended up being even weirder — the host/owner didn’t show up, there wasn’t a setlist, and every mixed drink that got ordered turned out to be ginger ale mixed with beer. Also, none of the performers wanted to be first to go up on stage and read. After an hour or so of this I started to get bored, and joked that I could just go up first and read from whatever I had with me — despite the fact that I wasn’t on the bill, and all I had to read was an 80’s comic book about post-apocalyptic surfing, a copy of Jarett Kobek’s If You Won’t Read, then Why Should I Write that I’d received as a comp and knew nothing about, and a crumbling, coverless paperback 1977 edition of Dune. Maybe it just the ginger-ale-beer, but after five minutes of discussion my joke was ruled a brilliant idea, and I found myself on stage. Ultimately I read from everything I had with me. I learned the dangers of reading Dune aloud, since half the words are unpronounceable neologisms. I also somehow also ended up MCing the reading for the next several hours. I recall at one point telling a long story about walking to Tijuana for beer — not my story, but a story I’d just been told five minutes before by a friend at the bar. After the show half the readers, half the audience and I went to the diner down the street for terrible midnight food. The next week the Void closed its doors forever and the owner moved to Texas. Our reading was their final show.
Keith McCleary is a writer and graphic designer from New York. He is the author and illustrator of two graphic novels, Killing Tree Quarterly and Top of the Heap, from Terminal Press. His prose and comics have appeared in Heavy Metal, Flash, Jupiter 88, and Weave, and his teleplay ‘The Gothickers,’ co-written with Sophia Starmack, was featured in the CCLaP 2012 audio series ‘Podcast Dreadful.’ He is currently working on an ongoing comic book series, Curves & Bullets, with Eisner-nominated artist Rodolfo Ledesma. Keith is an MFA candidate at UCSD, and received his BFA in Film & TV Production from NYU, where his thesis film ‘Australia’ won a Warner Bros Production Award in 2002.