Awkward Press

Awkward’s very own Kyle Jarrow was featured yesterday in a big article in the LA Times! He has created a new musical called Whisper House with Duncan Sheik that will be opening in San Diego soon. Duncan Sheik is the composer of the gazillion-Tony-award winning musical Spring Awakening. Also, according to Wikipedia, he broke a Billboard record when his song “Barely Breathing” stayed in the top 100 for 55 weeks. That makes sense, because if you could program a music-creating machine to perfectly distill America’s tastes into a 3 minute pop song, it would sound exactly like “Barely Breathing.”

Anyway, good job Duncan Sheik, but this isn’t really about you. According to Kyle, this is what the play is about:

I first started writing this in the heat of the Iraq war — that fear is something that guides a lot of life, that there is all this stuff telling us to be afraid,” said Jarrow, whose playwriting credits include “A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant” and “Armless.” “How do you process fear and not let it control your life? That’s one of the biggest questions of modern living.”

That sounds awesome! I will go see that play. We should all go see that play. If you don’t live in Southern California, don’t worry, you’ll get your opportunity. Because it’s going to Broadway! Probably. We don’t know yet. But of course it will, because all signs point to it being the pinnacle of human theatrical achievement. Suck it, Aristophanes!

Congratulations, Kyle!

Mark Green is the best. There’s no question about it. He’s a political scenester in New York who is apparently running for public advocate. He just made this ad that proves you don’t need any money to do something awesome:

A few years ago, I went to some fund-raising event that Kyle was performing at. It was at the nonprofit where FOA (friend of Awkward) Desiree Burch worked, and after the performances, the woman who headed the charity up gave a short speech. Afterwards, Kyle and I were riding in the elevator with Mr. Green, who had come to see the event. First of all, he’s a short, short man. Second of all, we got to talking with him, and Kyle asked him if he enjoyed himself.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Especially the final speaker. What a doll.”

“Yeah, she wasn’t bad,” Kyle said.

“She’s my wife,” Mark Green admitted.

“Your wife is a foxy, foxy lady,” Kyle said.

To this day, I am unaware of whether Kyle had any idea who he was talking to, but it was a smooth move, nonetheless.

This is hard.

You might not know who I am. You may have come to this site because I found you on Twitter through other independent publishers that you have chosen to follow. (Yes, I’ve been doing that, and I’m not proud.) Or you may have known me for 25 years, as have most of the (two) people who seem to be posting comments.

My name is Jeffrey Dinsmore. I helped start a publishing company called Contemporary Press. You have probably never heard of that, either. Shortly after 9/11 (I think … I’m a little foggy on the details) my friend Jay came up with the idea of starting a modern pulp fiction publishing company. I jumped on board, as did five of our other friends. We threw a couple hundred bucks into a pot and started writing books. My stipulation before joining CP was that I be allowed to write a book called Johnny Astronaut. I didn’t know what Johnny Astronaut would be about, but I knew I had to write it. I wrote it under a pseudonym, which makes perfect sense if you read the book. The author becomes a character. It’s very meta. My own family didn’t get it and most of them never bought a copy. They knew I wrote it, but they didn’t want to read it unless my name was on it. That’s very meta, too. Today, Johnny Astronaut is out of print.

I wrote another book called I, An Actress: the Autobiography of Karen Jamey. I personally am more attached to this book than the other one, but a lot of people I know didn’t really care for it. There are 1,000 copies of I, An Actress available. You should buy all 1,000 and blow our distributor’s mind.

CP was fun. We went to publishing conferences. We were blurbed about in GQ. We got a kick-ass review in The Believer. We lost our shirts. We never had an office. We did all our business on Wednesday nights at a bar. We threw parties in New York featuring musical performances by soon-to-be semi-famous bands like We Are Scientists, Bishop Allen, and the Oxford Collapse. I put my heart and soul into CP, and it broke into a million pieces. Both my heart, and CP. We still owe our distributor money. We were really good at drinking, but we were not so good at business. We were also not so good at proofreading, as a visit to our now dark website will prove.

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