The Poetry Project’s Executive Director Nicole Wallace met with former Program Coordinator and Newsletter editor Gillian McCain to talk about the origins of the Friday Late Night Series, which McCain established in 1991. The Friday Night Series will celebrate its 35th anniversary in fall 2026.

Gillian McCain: When Ed Friedman interviewed me for the job I told him about how much I loved the Project—what readings I'd been to, and what workshops I'd taken. And then I told him that one of the most special events I've ever been to was an afternoon group reading of Frank O'Hara's “Second Avenue" in front of the church—it was just so fantastic—you could hear the cars whizzing by. Then when we had our second interview, he said he'd been thinking about that, and would I want to curate an event series, things like that.

It was fucking dream come true, man! I mean, there was no budget, but if we needed to rent a projector or something, we’d find the money. People just got paid by what was made at the door. 50/50, I believe. So someone might walk out with $200 or $20, you know?

I just had all these ideas. It was so incredible, because the church has such a reputation. I mean, it's legendary. You'd be surprised by how many people have heard of it, right? And so I could just call up anyone. Crispin fucking Glover, will you come read here? I mean, I could just get anyone on the phone. It was insanity! It was so much fun.

Nicole Wallace: That's awesome. What year did you start going to The Poetry Project?

GM: I moved to New York in '87, so right away. I think in '87 I took a workshop with Jeff Wright. And then, in 1988, I went to Naropa and that's when I met all these people, you know? Then I did a John Yau workshop at the Church. So yeah, I had taken workshops. I didn't go to as many readings as I may have liked to, because I didn't have any friends in New York yet, and at that time to go to The Poetry Project, alone, when you're 21…you know, it's fine for a while, and then maybe during the break, you’re just like, I gotta get out of here, man. It was intimidating not knowing anyone. So I went to less readings than I wanted to. But, just seeing Victor Bockris with Gerard Malanga, and Richard Hell with Jim Carroll. Just incredible. That was all before I started working there.

NW: I can definitely relate to that feeling—being a young poet in the room who doesn't know anybody yet, and feeling intimidated. There are all of these poets that you've maybe heard of, or know of, in the room that are clearly in some kind of community with each other.

GM: Even when I was curating and I'd see someone in the audience, like, who's that? Because as time goes on, it really is a community, you know? I would make a point of going over and talking to the person, and then say “Hi” the next time they came around, and soon they were just one of the crowd, too.

NW: That's something I've noticed over the years. Having started as an intern and volunteer, every few years there's a new turnover of people that come to The Poetry Project. There's a sense of community that develops amongst them. They start volunteering at the reading series and then they end up starting their own reading series, or they start a magazine together. That's something that's continued to happen throughout time here, which I think is a part of the beautiful magic of The Poetry Project.

GM: Yeah, it is. I just had a funny remembrance. An agent I know said, "Oh, PJ says hi,” and I didn't recognize the name, and the agent said, "He said you were really supportive of his literary magazine when you worked at the Project.” He’s a huge literary agent now! And I remembered him, writing about him in my Dirt column. His magazine was great. But, yeah, you lose track of people.

NW: What year did you get hired? Was that also 1991?

GM: Yep.

NW: What was your title then?

GM: Program Coordinator.

NW: Program Coordinator. Okay. The titles have changed so much over the years now that I have a hard time remembering what they were when there were just three full-time staff. There was the Program Coordinator, and then there was...

GM: Program Assistant.

NW: Program Assistant. And then Director. So when you started it, the Friday Series used to be the Late Night Series, because it started at 10pm.

GM: I think it was 10:30pm. Yeah... that's crazy now! I would never go out that late.

NW: And it continued to be the Friday Late Night Series until, you know, maybe around the same time when we started paying Friday readers a set honorarium. I was always like, why does this start so late?! It would end at 12:30 or one in the morning sometimes.

GM: Oh, it was because of the theater upstairs. The show in the theater had to be done, or we would have heard them.

NW: Was that Richard Foreman's theater at the time?

GM: Yep. There was also dance in the Sanctuary, which was very loud. I think 10pm just didn't quite cut it as far as the other things shutting down, so it was 10:30pm.

NW: I miss the days when we would have—I think it was Incubator Arts when I started and, then of course, Danspace—the converging Friday night programming that would happen. You'd get to see a lot of people you knew going to different programs at the church.

GM: I so wish I went to more Danspace, more Ontological [Hysteric Theater], but I was there five days a week, two nights, and sometimes on the weekend. I just didn't want to live there. It's kind of disappointing that I missed that stuff, especially the theater, you know?

Jim, my husband, still brings up the fact that I didn't go to his Monday night reading. He accepted the reading because he was hoping I'd go!

NW: Was it while you were working at the Project?

GM: Yeah.

Anyway, I wrote down some of the highlights. Okay, let's see. There was Larry Clark, the photographer and filmmaker. I didn't know him as a filmmaker yet. I was just a fan of his photography. I couldn't believe he said yes. So we set up a big screen to show his photos as a backdrop to his talking about them. Then people started coming in, and they were all really young, like teenagers, kids in their early 20s. The Parish Hall was totally packed. Some kids were carrying skateboards. These were all the kids that were in the movie, Kids! He just made that film, but it wasn't out yet. That was really an event. It could never be replicated. The perfect place in time.

One night, it was the folk singer Cindy Lee Berryhill and the rock writer Paul Williams, who had founded Crawdaddy magazine. It was a really big snow storm, and there were like, I'm serious, I think four people there. One was Lenny Kaye and the other was Lenny Kaye's daughter, who couldn’t have been more than ten. They were sitting in the front row, and the whole place was empty.

Then I had D. A. Pennebaker, who did my favorite documentary of all time, Don’t Look Back, about Bob Dylan. He followed Dylan around with a camera during his 1965 tour of England. I think that was the first event of the season, and also it was pouring rain—the place should have been packed, right? But there were probably 20 people there. It was kind of good because it was so intimate, it became a discussion between him and the audience. Pennebaker just stood up and said, "Hey, what do you want to know?" So people just threw out questions, and it was a fantastic event. If you want to read the transcript you can find it on pleasekillme.com.

I asked Edward Gorey if he'd do an event. I talked to Edward Gorey on the phone. That was pretty cool. He said no.

I also organized a group reading of poems by Mayakovsky. At the end of the event, everyone was milling around drinking, when this handsome, charismatic, tall Russian lady walked in and announced, "I am Mayakovsky's daughter." And so we kind of soused it out. I think it really was! [laughing]

When Ric Ocasek was reading on a Monday night, I was sitting with Jordan Davis, and Jordan just goes, "turn around very slowly." Which I did, and there was Neil Young sitting right behind us. Ric and Neil had the same manager. Yeah, Neil Young was at the fucking Poetry Project.

NW: Did you slowly turn back around?

GM: Yeah. And to Jordan, I was whispered, "Oh...my...god."

I would do some academic things. Paul Schmidt did a talk on [Velimir] Khlebnikov. John Yau on Warhol.

One of the first readings I booked was a group of young Black poets from Boston called Dark Room Collective. And now Kevin Young, who was part of that group, is the poetry editor at the New Yorker. A lot of those people went on to be highly respected poets.

I also commissioned artists to make t-shirts. The only person I can remember is George Schneeman, because I won it. But there must have been about seven or eight different t-shirts, and Mary Fortune was modeling them. There weren't very many people there. Probably fifteen. So we were doing the auction, and David Greenberg just busted in and he said, "I need to read a poem!" And then he read it and said, "Kurt Cobain is dead." That was the first we heard that Kurt Cobain died. We're like, what? He goes, "Yes." I think he was crying.

On another night, I think we were doing an event of Mitch Corber films, and I had stopped at Veniero's and gotten lobster claws for the interns. We're standing around eating them, and Mitch comes over and goes because he needed something, and said seriously, "Can we not talk about lobster claws?!" To this day, Jo Ann Wasserman and I sometimes just go, "Can you please not talk about lobster claws?!"

NW: No claw talk!

GM: [laughing] Then I organized a nice tribute to Cookie Mueller. Her son Max was there and he got all the money, which was nice to be able to give that to him.

I had a reading with Eileen Myles and Jim Carroll. So sometimes I'd just have two people. The biggest event, I think, and it was my first year, was the tribute to Lester Bangs. So it was all these famous rock writers, and it was in the main Sanctuary, and it was filled up.

Then I had these scene nights like, “The Record That Changed My Life,” and I'd ask 10 people. Or, you know, poems on artists. Or, people on films, or people reading their diaries—that was Mike DeCapite and Linda Yablonsky and Maggie Estep. And then some music, but it would always just be acoustic. Oh no, I wish I had my flyers with me. But that's a pretty good sampling isn't it?

NW: Yeah! I want to go back into the archive and listen to all of those readings now. There's around 400 readings that have been uploaded by the Library of Congress.

I was actually just looking through the audio and video manifest from the Library of Congress the other day, and I think I saw that Lester Bangs reading. I was actually looking back, because I know that we have VHS tapes in the archive from when Eileen [Myles] was the Director, and I was trying to locate some of those.

GM: That just made me remember that I hosted a book party for Victor Bockris's book on Keith Richards. I remembered because I just saw him last week. And I walked in the kitchen to get something and there was Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg sitting on the floor going through a box of books that was for the church's rummage sale. The church lady got all mad at me on Monday. "You left the thing a mess!" And I knew she wouldn't know who Marianne Faithfull was. I mean, I shouldn't have left a mess, but I just forgot about it, or whatever. The church lady said to me one day, "Oh, I didn't know you had a last name. I thought you were just Gillian, like Cher." [laughing]

NW: Was she a church administrator, or … ?

GM: Oh, no, no, just one of the church ladies. I always found everyone who worked at the church office very nice. Like the sexton, Jimmy Fragosa.

NW: I was thinking about—and now it’s become clear through your examples—how the Friday series has always been an interdisciplinary series.

GM: Occasionally I'd have fiction writers—once in a while, not very often. I had non-fiction writers too. I did a night of women rock writers, stuff like that.

NW: “The Record That Changed My Life” reading—that sounded really fun.

GM: It was really fun. Also, Ed [Friedman] let both Wanda [Phipps] and I each do a zine. So that was the theme of one of my zines—the pieces people had written.

NW: Was it published by The Poetry Project?

GM: Yeah. Milk. Ed gave us a budget.

NW: That sounds so familiar… maybe I've seen it at the Project.

GM: Yeah, I did like four issues. Mine was Milk and Wanda’s was Xyloid. I had so much fun working there. Ed just let me do anything. I had free reign. So, four nights a month for eight months, so 32 events a year. With no email—organizing with no email.

NW: Did you write to people too, or was it mostly phone calls?

GM: I wrote to people. Usually I wrote first and then there'd be some phone contact. Ever since I worked at the Project, I just abhor the phone. And I used to be a real phone person! But it's literally from working there because, you know, it's a high stress job. And you're busy working and then you pick up the phone, “What time is the reading?” Then the phone rings again, “I'm doing a dissertation on John Ashbery…and I thought you could help me…”

NW: I want to know about your flyers. Did you make them all yourself?

GM: [Nods] I remember saying to Ed, “I’ll have to buy some Letraset.” And he looked at me and said, “Why wouldn’t you do them on the computer?” It had never occurred to me. They were so fun to make. It was so old school. Sparrow would come in and use the mimeo machine holding his baby. He was the only one who used it. But I just wanted to keep that spirit from the ‘70s alive—and it pretty much all was. I’d literally walk around the neighborhood and put them on bulletin boards. It was just such a different time.

Gillian would like to acknowledge and extend her thanks to Douglas Rothschild, Jo Ann Wasserman, and David Vogen who were all early stalwarts of the Friday Late Night Series.