
Josiah Laubenstein, Marketing Director
scftheatre@gmail.com
Mark Peacock and LaMoine MacLaughlin, two nationally known and respected writers, will have a reading at St. Croix Festival Theatre on January 20th at 7:30PM. Tickets are $10 and all proceeds go to support the theatre.
Peacock, a fiction writer, and MacLaughlin, a poet, met a dozen years ago at a MacLaughlin’s church. Peacock says, “They had asked me to read the 2nd chapter of Luke at their church, so I did and then it's kind of grown from there.”
Peacock came to fiction late in life. He was first a freelance columnist: “I knew I'd get paid for an article and the market for fiction was very thin, I mean, for fiction maybe 6 months later you'd get a check or a rejection notice. We had to eat so I couldn't do it then. Only after I retired I thought I had some time.”
He’s used that time well. A chaplain at Good Samaritan, Peacock says he would always see people reading on their phones or tablets on their break. “I wanted to write something you could read in that amount of time, and then get back to work, having finished the story.” Break Time Stories were born. He has four collections available on Amazon Kindle and the first three have been compiled into a paperback, The First Gathering of the Break Time Stories.
Peacock gets inspiration from many places, but the latest came from close to home. “The genesis is stories I used to tell my kids. A lot of them they’re kind of mangled fairy tales, tales that kind of get stood on their head, for example Jack and the Bean Sprouts or The Little Red Hoodie. But in writing them down they give me a chance to deal with some ethical issues, like is suicide heroic or is it a waste, and what do you really do with poverty? Big questions, but told plainly.”
The event is a donation to the Festival Theatre. Peacock wanted to support the theatre, but didn’t know how. “I haven't got any money but I want to support Festival, always have. The idea for this originally came when I was reading at the Saint Croix Falls Library and I thought here's something I can do.”
For those interested in the attending the reading in and supporting Festival Theatre, tickets are $10 and can be purchased at FestivalTheatre.org, by emailing festivaltheatreboxoffice@gmail.com or by calling the box office at 715-483-3387.
Photo Caption: Peacock and MacLaughlin