From the Greenpoint Palace Bar in Brooklyn, new York, writers and bartenders Rita and Marissa have intimate conversations with an eclectic mix of people from all walks of life about their passions, paranoia and perspectives. Featured guests could be artists or authors, exterminators or private investigators, or the person sitting next to you at the bar. This is People at the Core.
Speaker 2:
Okay, go, okay. So, rita, we've got Dolan here to read a little excerpt with us. Yay, yay. Dolan Morgan is a writer and illustrator living in Greenpoint, brooklyn, and is the author of two story collections, including that's when the Knives Come Down. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bomb Magazine, the Believer, the Lifted Brow, the Rumpus, electric Literature's Recommended Reading, selected Shorts, npr and elsewhere. Please welcome Dolan, who's going to be reading a little excerpt from a piece that he will introduce and tell us what it's about.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, this is something that I read at the Palace Reading Series. Oh, I thought it was appropriate and it's called 1-800.
Speaker 2:
Oh, I love this one, I know, I remember. Sorry, really, spoiler alert.
Speaker 3:
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Speaker 3:
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Speaker 2:
I love it. Yeah, you just your, your. Your writing is so humorous and I love how dark becomes so light that you're you. You forget you're sad laughing. Yeah, exactly, I don't know how else to to say that. So what's next in the writing situation? Are you working on long format, or I mean, what I've experienced from you is more shorter pieces like that and these really punchy pieces save for the butterfly thing that you wrote. It was really beautiful.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I would say. At a lot of readings I tend to read things that sort of fit in the chunk of time you're afforded at a reading.
Speaker 3:
But most of my work is actually significantly longer than that, not like novel length, but short stories that are four, five, six thousand words and they just don't fit in a reading. Every now and then I'll read an excerpt that I think is compelling enough to share at a reading, but generally I try to read something that will fit in that space, and so a lot of pieces I write are actually structured to be like. I have this piece about puppets.
Speaker 3:
It's five little chunks that I could read any one of them at any time, but they also work together to make a cohesive thing. So that's like a format that I do just sort of by necessity.
Speaker 4:
I do the same thing too. Like, if you look at my book, it's I'm just cutting out paragraphs and pieces just to make it work, because I feel like the reading and the writing are two totally different things, kind of. Or that's how I view them. Anyways, it was performance, so it's an interpretation of my piece, not necessarily the piece A hundred percent.
Speaker 2:
I've been reading my book is composed of vignettes, and some are longer, but they're not cohesive necessarily, or don't make sense as a standalone. So I take pieces, and it's a lot of work, and I make them so then it's less than a lot of work and I make them so, then it's, you know, less than a 10 minute read and all of that. But I guess my question for you is, when you're writing something new, what comes first? Is it what you're reading at a reading is an amalgamation of something, or do you sit down to write thinking about hey, I've got to do this piece under X amount of words, or to be performed in X amount of time?
Speaker 3:
Oh yeah, I have like two modes. I would say One of them is. I'm writing this. Who knows if I'll ever be able to find a way to make a chunk of it work, and it's just a story that I need to tell for whatever reason.
Speaker 3:
And its format dictates itself. And then other ones that often are a little bit more, I don't know, um, not frivolous, but they're more whimsical. It's sillier, dark too, but um, where, um, where I'm comfortable having it written in like little vignettes that are interlaced, um, and those I deliberately I'm like, yeah, this will be something that I can bring to a reading. Yeah, so, I'm always trying to do like I don't know. One of those for every three more traditional structure stories that I write yeah, got it.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I mean, you're such a prolific performer that I was curious. Is the process whether the performance followed the writing or the writing followed the performance?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I mean, in a way they intermingle, because I read my work out loud as I write it.
Speaker 4:
I do too, to make sure it sounds right and reads right. Yeah, I do this. I just was working on a piece the other night it's like five in the morning and same thing just reading every line, and it really helped. The reading series really helped me with that. To realize how important it is to read everything out loud.
Speaker 3:
Yeah.
Speaker 4:
You can really find those lines that are not working. Yeah, exactly, and the style of reading too. I don't know if you do that ever, but I've kind of changed my you know pronunciations, or you know how I dictate it too, and that helps I mean, it's really helped my writing a lot yeah which is, you know, crazy yeah, I.
Speaker 2:
I guess I've always, yeah, been a mental writer.
Speaker 3:
First it's my own voice narrating it, and then somehow it finds its way to actually the page, but I've always been my own audiobook.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, totally Nobody else is going to do that. But yeah, just having seen you and heard you, uh, I appreciate uh the effort that goes into the performance. Um, one is an organizer and two is an audience, uh participant. Uh, yeah, love, love your stuff and I'd be interested in, so happy to have reading bigger, longer, more you know, less jazzy, I guess, ruminating pieces is there.
Speaker 4:
Well, I guess we can't really do a times. I was going to say any pieces coming or any reading series coming up, but they probably won't miss it by the time they'll probably miss it by the time this comes out exactly if you have anything next summer stuff, yeah, there's something coming out in May, but I think we're probably past May right now we're almost to May, but we'll be yeah, alright, I'm peacing out bye.
