Launching The Strange Recital

Seven months ago I embarked on a creative venture that is unusual for me because it’s a collaboration -- a thing for which I’d come to believe I have no talent. Fortunately, my collaborator and I seem to think alike in a few ways that are important for this particular project, so now the landing gear is up and we’re off the ground, gaining altitude slowly but steadily.

It may actually have started over a year ago, with one of those dog-walking meetups. My wife met a fellow pooch owner on Woodstock’s Comeau trail, a guy who wanted to find local writers-for-hire to create an episodic genre fiction podcast, a commercial venture. She referred him to me, I gathered a few likely folks, we had meetings, then the whole thing took a left turn and disappeared. But meanwhile, I mentioned it to my new acquaintance, local author-musician-audio engineer Tom Newton, during our very first get-together over coffee at Bread Alone. It was a connection born on Facebook; I had read and reviewed Tom’s surreal e-novella (Warfilm, Bloomsbury Publishing) before I ever met him in person.

So would Tom later have suggested collaborating on a podcast anyway, or not? No way to know. But suggest it he did, and when I said yes let’s do it, he came up with several stories, the title, the audio tag, the music, the graphics, and the website itself (which is why I think of him as the Mad Renaissance Genius of Byrdcliffe). I contributed a subtitle: "a podcast about fiction that questions the nature of reality."

Since then we’ve each reached out to our pools of writer friends and now have a pipeline of stories in various stages of production, lined up to be released twice a month into the indefinite future. I’ve learned the ins and outs of podcast distribution, a whole new way of getting good writing and ideas out into the world, a great addition to the book production skills I’ve gained over the years as a small indie publisher.

Explore our website here: The Strange Recital -- and join our email list. Or listen at one of our various other venues:  iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, Google Play Music, Facebook.  It's all free.

Always a highlight of my week, Tom and I get together in The Palace of Materialized Dreams (his studio) as often as we can, usually with a writer/reader friend. We do a little recording and editing, and then he performs more audio magic into the wee hours. We're hard at work subtly undermining conventional ideas of reality... and having fun while we do it.

In dark times, is it enough to simply pursue what you enjoy? Maybe it is, but I like to think there's a little more to what we're doing than a pleasurable literary pastime. I agree with James Baldwin:

“You write in order to change the world…. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.”

Our eighth episode (just out this week) is this story written and read by me:

The December Ninth Study

"Amid fits of laughter and clouds of pot smoke, Dave and I would debate: Do thoughts have density? What is the weight of sadness, the volume of anger?..."

Is this story a glimpse of a vast synchronistic web of invisible interconnections, or is it mostly a convoluted but loving tribute to John Lennon? You decide.

And listen to the author interview (of a sort) that follows. A smile is good.

All you need is....