Palace Reading Series
The Palace Bar/ Greenpoint Palace
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Nov. 21, 2023; ongoing Tuesday nights
It’s the week of Thanksgiving and, by and large, the city is empty. The transplanted nature of NYC’s population is never more apparent than during the holiday season. But on this Thanksgiving week evening, the backroom of the Palace Bar in Greenpoint was filled seat-for-seat with reading attendees, and stool-for-stool along the bar with regulars.
“Yeah, we were nervous that no one’d come out tonight. Everyone’s out of town,” Marisa Cadena, one of the monthly event’s organizers and last night’s readers, said of the crowd. “So we booked only Greepoint locals for the show.” Needless to say, the neighborhood turned out!
That’s undoubtedly indicative of no small triumph on the part of the event’s organizers, Cadena and Rita Puskas, both of whom claim that the reading series they’re founding is built in the spirit of community and “giving voice to those who have thus far gone unheard.”
One was Janelle Greco, for whom host Puskas was near jumping from her skin while introducing. Puskas’ excitement was for good reason.
Janelle began her reading with a hard, pithy comment to set the stage: “These are pieces about my family. Since I have to deal with them this week, I figured you all should too.”
What followed were two pieces, one about her mother, one about her father, and both about her parents’ individual grating quirks. The complaint softens through the arc of Janelle’s writing. Her measured, hyper-specific delve into Long Island shoreline suburbia lulled the audience out of the jokes concerning Greco’s family and into warm mediations of our own, exemplified in the line: “The key to a 40-year marriage is to have one partner in the basement, playing craps by themselves …”
After the show, Cadena and I spoke about Janelle’s work during a quick rainy smoke. We concluded that it is the hyper-specific that renders the universal in the art. Janelle’s just showed us truth as true as truth can be — individual, discrete, and whole … just like our own.
The next two hosts read back to back. I asked them if this was something they usually do or if it’s only on account of the holiday and expectations of low turn-out. Their answer was heartening: every time. Cadena said, “This is also for us. Everyone’s working on their craft and sharing it and so are we. Plus, the consistency is nice from an audience stand-point. And, we’re putting our money where our mouth is, you know? A lot of writers get jittery and nervous before readings, and so do we. We’re all in the same boat, it’s only fair.”
Puskas said she was up all night editing her piece for the night’s reading, her first foray into fiction. I can only hope to see more of her fiction after hearing what she had for all of us at this performance. The piece was a harrowing novel excerpt about a teenage girl taken hostage. The prose was bodied, intense, hard, and real: “So far, I’ve chewed at the ropes around my wrists. I’ve tried to kick off the braids around my ankles and scrape at the restrains around my knees, but it’s not like in the movies …”
This commitment to a stellar performance by the hosts themselves is no small part of the reason to have faith in this series. With all the ovations toward community and building a bolster against the big five publishers, the most convincing thing here is not merely the constancy they display with their own craft, but what authors Cadena and Puskas have managed to dig up just by keeping an ear to the ground.
This is perhaps the real secret: being around. We are too often stowed away in the literary world, cloistered in our little libraries and routines. But, I met Cadena at a reading, and I’d bet that that’s the story for most of the writers featured thus far in the Palace’s own series. Cadena and Puskas do not pluck one from the crowd sheerly based on clout, but instead choose who they feature based on who they’ve witnessed. Boots on the ground yields better results than digging through subtweets.
Cadena read from her memoir, another example of the hyper-specific blooming into universality. Fairly large portions of text were in Spanish, or alternated rapidly between Spanish and English; the underpinning was her time as a server in a Mexican bar. There, she learned for the first time that the Spanish she’d grown up speaking and learning was not the Spanish typically spoken by native speakers. If the semantic operations of language can render slapstick, Cadena’s piece here is the closest I’ve seen to nailing it. Innocent words become vulgar, “to grab ahold” is colloquialized as “to fuck,” and highly local turns of phrase reveal the poetry stitched through a language the younger Cadena thought she knew.
The last two readers, Sean Welsh and Lexi Kent-Monning (whose new novel, The Burden of Joy, has been making some real waves on social media), were two exacting minimalists, though seemingly of different schools. Welsh’s prose was of the highly bodied, grime-soaked, physical realist variety, while Kent-Monningwas a surgeon of emotion, performing a sort of appendectomy of grief and rage, not unlike the tarot reader featured in her piece: “This is my mean tarot deck; but it’s the most honest.” Her novel details the decline of a relationship, tearing out the swollen, bilious pit at the center of human connection.
All in all, a great night, but what makes this reading special? Is it just the readers? Is it the magnanimity of the two hosts? The space? What?
One of the big troubles in the NYC performance scene has always been longevity. How long can we bank on this event being around before it folds, the hosts get busy, or the roster has been run through? Whether it’s specific events or venues themselves, everything always feels like it’s teetering on cancellation. But, here at the Palace, we have a unique situation. Puskas is one of the owners of the bar, and they just signed a 15-year lease. In her words, “This isn’t going anywhere. So long as I’m here, this reading series will be here. Why not?”
Thankfully, Cadena and Puskas aren’t getting tunnel vision about the whole thing. Next on the agenda for them is a podcast, further carving out a space for writers in the community to have their voices heard. From Cadena, a final word: “The big five publishers don’t need any help; we want to build a space for everyone else to be heard.”
