DISPATCH: Franklin Park Reading Series, Brooklyn

Franklin Park vs The Knicks

The Franklin Park Reading Series is such a singular staple in Brooklyn’s literary community that one may forget that Franklin Park is an extrinsic bar. The May 12 nonfiction event featured Brian Gresko, Diane Mehta, Jamie Hood, Kari Ferrell, Erika J. Simpson and Colette Shade, but also the Knicks versus the Celtics on the muted screen above the bar and on the patio. Some of the playoff crowd’s cheers were oddly well-synced with the reader’s pause-for-applause lines, while other outbursts stirred a collective discomfort, darting stares, and tight smiles to mark this as a more contemplative territory. The space’s plural identity - and the fight for supremacy within this duality - was mirrored in each author’s piece.

Opening the evening was Brian Gresko, reading from You Must Go On: 30 Inspirations on Writing and Creativity. In an excerpt titled “What Does it Mean to be a Writer?” Gresko explains that his students feel the need to quantify the title, as it can otherwise seem elusive, even fanciful. While each writer has their own criteria of when they’ve earned the label, it cannot - or should not - be measured in bylines or recognition. Gresko read that “art is a form of play and fun and self-discovery” that is often birthed from uncertainty. While doubt and uncertainty are a taint many of us would like to avoid, the internal or communal negotiation it inspires is the making of art itself. Artistry is not a product, he argues, but a state of being.

Next was Diane Mehta, who led with a poem titled “Back Bend.” As the poet in residence at the New Chamber Ballet, she contemplated the power of the dancers she observes, the knowledge that lives in their muscles, the emotional reward of controlled risk. Mehta ended with a piece from her essay collection, Happier Far, in which she mitigates pain and aging with swimming. She reads of swimming as an act of heroism and devotion while keeping her steady poet's cadence, reminding me that every word and space between are to be experienced. In the essay, Mehta gains satisfaction through steadfastness, through effort, which is all that is required of any of us. She left us with life advice, wrapped in a nod to Brooklyn and how to meet its allure: “...all you have to do is show up and remember that no one is better equipped to experience life than you.”

Jamie Hood closed the first half of the night, reading from her memoir Trauma Plot. In the excerpt, she talks to her therapist about what it means to be the right kind of sexual assault victim. The perfect victim, an impossible measure, would never have engaged in frivolous sex, is certainly not trans or an escort, all of which Hood is “guilty” of. No conclusion, no puffed up identity to give herself instead, just a lamentation on the piles of shit left for victims of assault to sift through. To lighten the mood, she leaves us with love poems in progress. She is a woman dripping love for her long-distance boyfriend, who conceded that the sea may be wetter, but she’s “tighter, baby.” We’d hope so.

After intermission, (during which I won a copy of Gresko’s book, my third Franklin Park raffle win, thank you very much) Kari Ferrell read from her memoir, You'll Never Believe Me: A Life of Lies, Second Tries, and Things I Should Only Tell My Therapist. Of internet “hipster grifter” fame - scamming friends and strangers and writing about it - Ferrell read an anecdote about her time in prison. While my personal nightmare, Ferrell describes an oft summer camp vibe among the inmates, and a forced but appreciated hiatus from the endless choices and responsibilities of adulthood on the outside. Ferrell gets the opportunity to sharpen her scamming skills when an incarcerated couple barters for her help in guarding their privacy: “I fell to the floor and started to convulse… I shook my legs in what I hoped was a convincing display of epilepsy.” No word yet on her recidivism.

The penultimate reader is Erika J. Simpson, author of This is Your Mother: A Memoir. She starts by asking the crowd to cheer for their mothers, then asks them to cheer if their mother is, like hers, dead. A few mottled, tentative cheers later, she begins reading about finding her identity as a middle schooler, which aligned with her mother’s cancer diagnosis. She tries on different hats, from actress/Oprah wannabe to one-third of a rap group, who recorded a song titled “Eat Me Out.” Simpson’s charismatic delivery has us cheering and gasping, as though she carried the Knicks to game five. If you somehow had no interest in Simpson’s writing, you’d still be prompted to buy her book after such a performance.

Ending the night was Colette Shade, reading from her debut, Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was). The year 2000 was a new frontier, a present that caught up with what felt like the future: metallic Urban Decay cosmetics, alien motifs galore, and a brave new economy. Her uncle, an MDMA-loving hippy turned capitalist, became her Rich Uncle thanks to the sale of his start up and gifted her one hundred thousand dollars to attend college. Their new status was a zero-sum game to the existing residents of her uncle’s adopted city. Shade quoted Bill Clinton‘s remedy: ”We all must build up our human capital and compete”. Shade’s reading paired with the final quarter of the Knicks game, and she mentioned twice that she “can’t compete” with it, though she certainly tried. Twenty-five minutes into her ten-minute reading slot, after she reads that she and her brother graduated college debt-free “by the skin of [her] teeth,” she began to mirror Clinton’s obliviousness. The comparison was solidified once the bar cut the mic but Shade continued reading, indignantly. Frank Ocean begins playing softly on the sound system, and she finally ends the reading.

The Knicks won, 121 to 113.