By Gardiner Brown
The Whip In was already very crowded when I walked in to see Owen Egerton (who currently has an ongoing Kickstarter with his wife, Jodi, that you should 100% go check out right now!) and Manuel Gonzales host last week’s One Page Salon. The One Page Salon is a monthly event wherein local authors are invited to come and read a single page from their current WIP (Work In Progress). After some patience and searching, I was able to grab a table right up by the stage, so I ordered myself some dal sliders and a seltzer and settled in to watch the show.
Not long after, Owen Egerton leapt onto the stage in his jeans and brown suede jacket, welcoming all of us and making sure we knew that tonight’s One Page Salon was very special, because he had a guest star co-host, Manuel Gonzales, whose book of short stories, The Miniature Wife, just came out this past February. The readers that night were all from Emanuel’s nine-month-long writer’s workshop which had just wrapped up.
Owen took the opportunity to announce that this night’s edition of the Salon was the first to be recorded and made into a podcast and that the One Page Salon would be starting a monthly book swap, so folks can bring along books they’ve finished and see if anyone would like them. Finally, they will also be starting a Whip In One Page Salon bookshelf containing the finished works of folks who have read at the Salon, and, with his own stylistic flair, Owen placed Gonzales’ The Miniature Wife upon the shelf as the inaugural selection.
To kick off the readings, Owen read from his own article, which appeared in The Huffington Post, offering up 30 tips for writers. There was an audible shift in his demeanor as Owen made the transition from affable, spitfire MC to projected and passionate writer reading his own work.
Some advice from his list:
- Don’t think. Scribble. Scribble. Scribble. Type so hard you bruise the screen.
- Now think.
- Celebrate arrogance. You’re calling yourself a writer, for God’s sake. Embrace it.
- Laugh out loud at your own written words. Even in public… Especially in public.
You can read the entirety of Owen’s advice here.
After warming up the space, Manuel came up on stage and began calling his students up to read from their work. There were nine readers from his workshop: Josh Gill, Karen Valby, Chris O’Connor, Nicole Beckley, Lisa Michelle Jackson, Jack Kaulfus, Ingrid Norton, Emily Smith, Shelby Wardlaw, and Kareem Badr. Among them, there were crossfitters, programmers, suit-wearers, folks headed to Harvard Divinity, and improvisers. Their selections included some remarkable moments or ideas: falling in love with love, movie clubs, the realization that you are sleeping with a sleazy sexist, the benefits of good leather shoes for future cult leaders, and the idiosyncrasies of Southern women.
Though at first the event felt pressed for time, we soon learned that the band who was supposed to follow the Salon was not going to make it, which gave the rest of the evening a calmer pace. The co-hosts were able to continue their jabbing banter with one another, and Manuel gave his workshop students a chance to talk about themselves a bit on stage. Overall, the event was ridiculously fun, and I definitely plan on going to next month’s Salon to hear other fantastic readers!
As I mentioned above, Owen and Jodi Egerton also have a kickstarter going for their new book, This Word Now, a collection of exercises for writers and essays on writing! There’s less than a month left on their Kickstarter, so you should go donate now! 