“The One I Could Believe in:” Jacob McArthur Mooney on the Pivot Reading Series
Jacob welcomes you to Pivot Readings.Pivot Readings, founded in 2008, is one of the most respected reading series on the literary scene today. Pivot host Jacob McArthur Mooney and I sat outside Le Gourmond Café, where Mooney filled me in on Pivot’s well-established brand and rich history. “I take stewardship of the series very seriously. It’s not my series; I didn’t start it. It’s a bigger brand than it being about me.” Mooney started hosting in September 2012 and is reaching his first year anniversary as the series’ host.“I was asked to take over maybe five years ago for what was then called the I.V. Lounge Series. It used to be across from the AGO. I.V. Lounge had closed for renovations for a year, and they shut it down and didn’t want to pick it up a year later. That coincided with Alex Boyd, who was running the I.V. Lounge, having a baby. I wasn’t really able to do it myself because there were some other commitments that I had, and it ended up being taken up by Carey Toane, and later on Elisabeth de Mariaffi and Sachiko Murakami did it for a bit. Angela Hibbs did it after Carey and kept it going. Elisabeth recently moved to Newfoundland to be with her love. Two years was the time people would do it for before switching out, so when Sachi had her two years in, she asked me to take over.”Since hosting is passed from one host to another, the aesthetic tastes of one host in particular rarely shapes programming. As an attendee of literary readings, Mooney says that he has different listening tastes than reading tastes. “I like a lot more variety, and I like particularly sonically adventurous work when it’s read out loud. More so than when I’m reading it. I feel like my taste doesn’t get too much into it. The series has a history of being open to all comers.”
While Pivot does occasionally have unsolicited email submissions curated by the current host, the series tends to book a lot of writers with recent releases. “The city has a lot of really great publicists who stay on that stuff like Kitty [Lewis], Hazel [Millar], and Evan [Munday], and that quality relationship has continued this year. We have a lot of BookThug, Coach House, Brick Books, some of the best small presses in the city.” The relationships between Pivot and various small presses in Ontario have contributed to their great reputation for featuring quality work at almost every show.
“Pivot has kind of a brand attached that—it tends to be a good karma night. I’ve inherited that, so it’s been a matter of hanging on to that, and not ruining it. I think that we have really interesting juxtapositions of styles and personalities and there’s no tension there.” While Mooney admits to being disappointed as a member of the audience at many other readings, he thinks that Pivot has always been able to maintain a certain level of excellence. “Pivot was always the one, before I was hosting it, that I could believe in. This city is incredibly full. You can do something every day for free, or for the cost of pass-the-hat. So the fact that you’re offering something out there isn’t good enough. It has to be tailored to an audience that’s going to appreciate it and has to be accountable to that audience.”To Mooney, series tend to fail when they try to do too much at once rather than recognizing that there is a very specific audience that frequents literary readings. “Any attempt to make it cool failed out of the gate. Any attempt to--based on how we define the term inclusive--make it inclusive failed out of the gate. It doesn’t have to be democratic in that way. I think what makes a really exciting reading series is a crowd-defined communal expression of our group’s eccentricities, which are hearing poetry, hearing fiction, and listening in that sort of crowded room. Anything that defies the purity of that sets you up to spread yourself too thin.” As an example of a successful hybrid show, Mooney mentioned Free Speech, which used to run in Parkdale. For a show like this to be successful—with comedy, music, and literary readings all featured on one bill—the show needed to be tightly curated by experts in each field, and according to Mooney, “that was something they really nailed.”For the young writer starting to read their work, Mooney suggests, “Read short, and read slowly. A twenty-minute set should be really fifteen minutes. You should intro and banter and segue in between if you’re good at it, and you think you have a natural predilection for it, and avoid it if you don’t think you do. You should be aware of your other readers and what they’ve read. If you’re the third reader in a trio and the others have been really light and funny, consider going more serious or going the opposite. If you know that someone has a whole book about going fishing for bass and you have a poem about fishing, maybe drop it in there. The selflessness of that [approach] goes a long way and is part of what makes memorable evenings.”One of the areas that Mooney thinks Pivot could improve is outreach. While “Pivot operates as the club house of the community of Toronto literary types to reconvene,” he would like to see some of the even younger up-and-coming writers start to drop by Pivot. “It’s about maintaining that clubhouse and having more and more regulars, and what I love is people who come to Pivot because they know they’ll find something they like there rather than coming for a particular author.”Pivot resumes on September 18th at The Press Club with Stan Dragland, Jon Paul Fiorentino, Sara Peters, and Robin Richardson.
