The Mysterious Somethings
The Big Idea
At some point during the mid-pandemic isolation I had the opportunity (as many people did) to spend a bit of time in what you might call “a gently cleansing paroxysm of dread and anxiety.” I had bundles of thoughts about the state of everything, the conditions in which we try to advance our art and craft, in a landscape of media consolidation and strangling algorithms and generative AI… how the hell do we compete, as artists? What can we do that machines can’t emulate, that algorithms can’t strangle? What can remain so special it can never be taken from us?
Live performance, that’s where I kept circling back to. Live human performance. The way the lights go down, the way the audience quiets, the chance for a mistake or an improvisation at any moment of a show… that delicious and ephemeral tension that we can only make in certain spaces at certain times. Not all of us have it in them– many writers of absolutely exquisite prose cannot and should not step out into the light of public scrutiny. But I have been reading to audiences for years, honing my bag of tricks. My shamelessness gland is quite healthy. I began to toy with the notion of some sort of recurring live performance as more than an idle pandemic anxiety flop. For a couple years, that’s all it was. A notion.
Crucially, I eventually realized that I was approaching this thing from the wrong angle, a defeatist angle. It’s hard to be bold when you’re in a defensive crouch. The question shouldn’t be “what can we do because it’s a value-add on top of our writing,” but “what can we do for its own sake, because it might be fun, because it might be invigorating, because it might be fucking awesome?”
In 2024, I said to myself, “This is it. This is the year I’m gonna do it.” Well, 2024 had other plans. In 2025, I said to myself, “This is it. This is the year I’m gonna do it–” and then I started renting theater spaces.
The Tower of the Wizard
I call this project THE MYSTERIOUS SOMETHINGS because while it is intended to be built around a core of performance reading (audiences in the 19th century sold out auditoriums year after year to see Charles Dickens perform his own prose– I can’t promise to be as slam-bang great as he apparently was, but hey, I’m pretty okay at this), each new thing I present will also have components added, which may be stolen from the worlds of theater, performance art, illusionism, mentalism, or all of the above, in order to create unique and special experiences.
The only thing that will be true of all the Mysterious Somethings is that they will all be pure live performance. Ephemeral. Recordings will not be allowed. These things will not be archived, they won’t be on YouTube, they will be strictly the business of the people who are there, in the dark, on the night of. Furthermore, every single performance of a Mysterious Something will have some mechanism, some element, that will be completely unique to it and will not be seen or heard by audiences at other shows. Nor will a cycle of any given Mysterious Something ever be repeated.
The first Mysterious Something is called The Tower of the Wizard. It’s a specially re-worked version of my novelette “The Fall and Rise of the House of the Wizard Malkuril,” published in the anthology The Book of Magic. In this tale of a distant, distant age near the end of the universe, an age of fused science and sorcery, you’ll meet the fearsomely powerful wizard Malkuril, the menace of a thousand worlds, and the enchanted fortress he built for a home and filled with thousands of magical creatures. You’ll also find out what happened on the very worst day of Malkuril’s life, and in the hundreds of years that followed. It’s an epic story of magic, ambition, time, and tea… and I’ll be reading and performing it for you in the dark, in a way no other audience will ever see.
The Tower of the Wizard is intended to have five or possibly six performances. Two have already taken place. More information will be posted here when venues are arranged!
• Burlington, MA –- July 17, 2025
• Seattle, WA –- August 17, 2025
• Brooklyn, NY –- TBA
• West/Central MA — TBA
• Portland, ME –- TBA
• Minneapolis, MN — TBA