Editor’s Note:
As Kleft Jaw Corner takes shape inside Subjunctivo, I want to preserve writing that documents not only the publication itself, but the live literary culture around it. Gabriel Ricard’s essay captures Kleft Jaw in motion through memories of the Mercury Café in Denver and a shared Kleft Jaw–Drunk Monkeys reading at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California. What emerges here is not just a record of events, but a portrait of performance anxiety, artistic fellowship, and the strange electricity of literary community.

Whiskey and Cookies in the Lobby: Kleft Jaw at Beyond Baroque

By Gabriel Ricard

It’s a cliché, but I’ve always liked the notion that cowards die a thousand times before their deaths. I have always found it especially useful as a way of thinking about performance.

Theater, stand-up, or anything that involves facing a crowd pushes my social anxiety to its limit. At the same time, I believe in doing whatever I can to promote a project or an idea. If that means trying to hold the attention of a room full of people who are not entirely sure why they are listening to you, then so be it.

That tension is probably why I audition for plays, pretend I have any business doing open-mic stand-up, and agree to readings. So when Frankie Met invited me to join the Kleft Jaw staff, I assumed readings would become part of the work.

Why not? Anyone who knows publishing understands that for a dying industry, there are an awful lot of books around. Readings help sell them. They also require a certain willingness to stand in front of strangers and behave as though reading something personal into a microphone is the most natural thing in the world.

For some people, maybe it is. For others, the terror goes well beyond cliché.

I fall somewhere in the middle. Theater has always been easier for me than stand-up, and it may be best for everyone if I never attempt stand-up again. Radio is easier still. On Kleftikos Radio, I got to read poetry, play music, interview writers, and spend time with Frankie, Lindsey Thomas, Mik Everett, and Ryder Collins. It was a great gig, and far less stressful than theater, stand-up, pro wrestling, or anything else I have done in front of an audience that did not later end in rumors or regret.

By the time Frankie invited me to read with Kleft Jaw at Denver’s Mercury Café in May 2014, I had enough stage experience to make a fool of myself with some confidence. The timing worked out perfectly. I was already headed to Chicago from Virginia, so taking a train to Denver did not seem like much of a stretch. It gave me the chance to meet Frankie, Lindsey, KJ alumnus Dustin Holland, and the rest of the crew. It also gave me the chance to read at one of Denver’s most respected performance spaces. I was honored.

But I did not really prepare.

I knew what I wanted to read, and I practiced a couple of times. What I did not do was seriously work on the set itself. Considering how frightened I was of doing badly in that company, before that audience, my casual approach to rehearsal still surprises me.

I told myself I would be fine. I assumed enthusiasm and stage experience would carry me through. There are probably textbooks written about people with performance anxiety who still manage to convince themselves they do not need to practice.

In a burst of misplaced confidence, I convinced Frankie to let me open the show with stand-up. I neglected to mention that the last time I had done stand-up, it had gone so badly that a woman at the Brass Monkey in Baltimore told me, as I sat down at the bar, “Honey, you ain’t that funny at all.”

This is the part where you are supposed to act surprised that I crashed and burned.

Everyone was generous about it. I certainly could have been worse. Even so, sweating and stammering through five minutes of bad comedy, then sweating and stammering through a short story I had not planned to read, was not what I had in mind. I had been determined to read something affiliated with Kleft Jaw, and the poem I had originally chosen no longer fit that requirement.

Measured against the energy and originality of Frankie, Dustin, Lindsey, and everyone else who read, sang, or performed comedy that night, I felt mediocre at best.

Kleft Jaw celebrated in the streets of Denver afterward with vodka and whatever else seemed necessary, and I joined in. I was grateful for the chance to watch some of the most compelling writers and performers I knew do what they did best, but I was disappointed in myself. Frankie assured me there would be other readings. I assumed he was right, though sometime in the warm early hours of that May morning I also decided I would understand if no one invited me back.

Fortunately, I had not done enough damage to make that outcome inevitable. Later that year, there would be another chance: a reading at the legendary Beyond Baroque in Venice, California.

By then I was in Ashland, Oregon, with my girlfriend Cara, so Los Angeles was much easier to reach than Denver had been. Going to Venice also meant staying in L.A. with Matthew and Corissa Guerruckey of Drunk Monkeys. One of the best things about 2014 was getting to meet the people I worked with at both Kleft Jaw and Drunk Monkeys. The two publications shared certain sensibilities, but they were distinct literary worlds, and I was lucky enough to move between them.

The Beyond Baroque event reflected that overlap. It was not solely a Kleft Jaw reading, but a shared Kleft Jaw–Drunk Monkeys event, with readers from both presses. S.A. Griffin, Dustin Holland, Lindsey Thomas, and Frankie Met were part of the lineup, and Matthew, Corissa, Cara, and several others were there as well.

Beyond Baroque itself is an unassuming place: medium-sized, with a performance space, a bookstore, and an upstairs section. It has existed for decades and has served as an important gathering place for poets and other off-the-path thinkers. You can feel that history standing in the enclosed outdoor area behind the building or climbing the stairs to the bathroom.

I understood some of that history, but others on the bill felt it more deeply than I did. Frankie in particular seemed moved by the fact of standing on ground that clearly meant something to him.

And he was brilliant.

Lindsey was, too. She wrote Blind Date at the Glass Eye Disco, which remains one of my favorite books in the Kleft Jaw catalog. She is one of the most interesting minds in our orbit, deeply ambitious about what Kleft Jaw could become, and one of the best readers I have ever seen. At both Mercury Café and Beyond Baroque, she began with the slightest tremor of nervousness, just enough to hear her voice settling into itself before she burned the room down with humor, strangeness, and an eye for the bizarre details hidden beneath ordinary life. She is funny, and she is one of the reasons I loved working with Kleft Jaw.

But everyone was memorable. S.A. Griffin reads quietly, trusting the words to do the work, and they do. Dustin Holland brings performance to the page without overwhelming it, and his writing often lands somewhere between the surreal and the hilarious.

And then there is Frankie. If I could borrow anyone’s confidence and energy, I would gladly borrow his. His work is strong enough to speak for itself, but hearing him perform it is a reminder of why people still come to readings like this in the first place. It is also why people crowded into the Beyond Baroque bookstore afterward to buy books and talk literature.

I felt small in those conversations, the way I often do around people who seem more knowledgeable and accomplished than I am. But it was thrilling company all the same, and the kind of company from which you can learn.

And I was learning.

Mercury Café had taught me that stage experience was not enough. Reading poetry or fiction to an enthusiastic room is not the same thing as doing a play or performing stand-up, no matter how badly I wanted to believe otherwise. So this time I listened to people who knew more than I did, and I practiced. Cara impressed upon me the importance of actually knowing my material, and even the order in which I wanted to read it. I practiced the set over and over during the ten-hour drive to Los Angeles.

It made a difference. I gave a much better reading at Beyond Baroque than I had at Mercury Café, and by the end of the night everyone seemed to know it.

Afterward, we stood around outside Beyond Baroque feeling pretty good. There was beer, whiskey, cookies, and other snacks in the lobby. Loose plans were thrown together for the evening, but I had somewhere else to be. Frankie felt good about the show, and I agreed. We could not have asked for a better way to end 2014.

As 2015 began to establish a proper breathing pattern, we were already looking ahead to Milwaukee in April. Frankie and Lindsey would be there. Ryder Collins, who wrote my favorite poetry collection from KJ Press, would be there too. I would be there as well.

By then, I was hooked.

The previous year had made the case clearly enough. Beyond Baroque showed me that I could do this, provided I was willing to put in the work and endure a few thousand small deaths first. I was in the best company possible to learn how.

If I can manage ten or twenty thousand more between now and whenever I finally go out, I will be grateful.

Gabriel Ricard writes, edits, and occasionally acts. His work has appeared in Cultured Vultures, Drunk Monkeys, and Kleft Jaw, and he is the author of Bondage Night, Clouds of Hungry Dogs, and Benny the Haunted Toymaker Grows Up.

Related Writers and Works

• Dustin Holland — co-founder of Kleft Jaw with Frankie Metro and Lindsey Thomas; author of Duck Walking Is the Only Way Out of Armageddon; illustrator of a new edition of The Gods of Pegana

• Frankie Metro — The Professional Donor

• Mik Everett — Memoirs of a Homeless Bookstore Owner

• Ryder Collins — I Am Hopscotch Without Hop

• S.A. Griffin — co-editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry

• Lindsey Thomas — Blind Date at the Glass Eye Disco