Mark Leiren-Young, Free Magic Secrets Revealed
I've been living in 1980s Vancouver lately, which I can highly recommend as a great place and time in/from which to avoid all the horrors (toxic drug supply, "AI" hype, enshittification, President Fuck a l'Orange, etc).
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| Photo by Tav Rayne, from bcbooklook.com (will delete if asked!) |
(Disclosure: I've known Mark for quite a few years now, since I taught his book The Killer Whale Who Changed the World to three sections of unsuspecting first-year composition students, since the Beer & Books club cheerfully read the same book, and since Mark had such a grand time with us at the Oak Bay Marina Restaurant [RIP] that he decided to join the club.)
Leiren-Young isn't the only person I know with his own Wikipedia page, but his is distinctly the longest. He's built a long career out of saying "YES! SURE!", and then excelling at whatever someone else needs while somehow remaining exactly himself. It's easy, startlingly easy in fact, to forget just how ridiculously accomplished he is in so many different areas: plays and screenplays, journalism, nonfiction, museum curation, teaching, T-shirt wearing, and more.
One example of that "more": the comic memoir, both the Leacock-winning Never Shoot a Stampede Queen and the under-rated, under-read Free Magic Secrets Revealed.
The short version of FMSR is that it's the story of how an intensely nerdish 17-year-old Mark somehow found himself, with a few other teenagers, more or less obliviously creating and producing a play in Vancouver in 1980. It features literally ALL the hijinks you could imagine, along with many, many more you couldn't imagine. Among other things, this wasn't a predictably earnest coming-of-age melodrama, or a teen comedy/romance, no, no no no, but something that 100% earned its title of The Initiation: A Black Metal Fantasy. It was, against all odds, a full-on fantasy built from the shards and echoes of Conan the Barbarian, Heavy Metal comics, classic science fiction, and Doug Henning's magic show.
Somehow it's all simultaneously gentler, more dangerous, funnier, and more pointed than you might expect, though it's also an awful lot less risqué than Nick Marino's East Side Story 1980s Vancouver. There are girls to be lusted after, many of them already with boyfriends, because of course; magic tricks to be conceived and revealed; real-life villains to be countered and overcome (mostly); and above all, utterly knuckle-headed teenagery that rings absolutely true.
"Our first scene was modelled after Star Wars, of course" (p92): none of the people/characters seem to understand that they're living a real life with real risks, which is exactly as it should be for 1980s teenagers. They dive into their lives and this project with utter abandon, constantly shocked by the consequences only to dive into the next thing. It reads convincingly like a novel, even though the word "memoir" is right there on the cover, and even though the lengthy acknowledgements section attaches real names to many of the book's characters. (I love nonfiction, and I read a lot of it; I'm just saying that this isn't a book of context, but a book with a narrow story, narrowly pursued, hence more like yer typical novel.)
From where I sit, mind, I'm not sure that Mark lives his life all that differently now from when he was 18. He's still juggling multiple impossible projects, still accomplishing feats of wizardry with neither time nor adequate resources, still too busy to sleep or even to sit calmly. Still, you don't have to know him for this to be a terrific read (even though I'm very pleased that I've somehow fallen into an awfully wide circle of friends!), and I'd love to see what he could do with some actual resources.
Free Magic Secrets Revealed will hit an awful lot of Gen X readers right where they used to live, period, and it'd be a good fit for theatre kids from every generation and every age. Seriously, just buy the book already.
If you want to know more, though, here are a few links:
- here's an interview about the book, and
- here's an excerpt in the Tyee.
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