Dennis Paddie
Dennis graduated from Hope High School, Hope, Arkansas in 1959, only a couple of years ahead of Bill Clinton.
He got his B.A. in History in 1964 from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
Then moved to Austin in 1965 to pursue Graduate studies in Art History at the University of Texas. During that time he organized and catalogued the International Law Library, Townes Hall Law Library, UT, Austin.
Dennis identified during that time as a Political activist, journeyman poet, writer and environmentalist.
In 1975, he wrote his first play, Diocletian and Sebastian for the Shakespeare Festival, New York. In 1977-'78, he took Diocletian and Sebastian to San Francisco where it was produced by the Top Floor Gallery, 330 Grove Street, San Francisco.
1979-'80, he was a member of the original work group, Open Movement Participation, at the famed P.S. 122, NYC.
His second play, The Quail in the Pines, was produced at the Paramount Theater, Austin, 1983.
His third play, Last Night at Mary's, was produced at Capitol City Playhouse, Austin in the mid-80s. His fourth, The Interview, was subsequently produced at CCP and Chicago House.
Dennis participated in the original work groups for the formation of the Austin Arts Council.
He's written a series of plays in The Absent Rose Quartet, an examination of modern spirituality: Reveille, Lapis Lazuli, Remember Us, Broken Animals.
His first published book of poems was Morning Sounds in the Warehouse, funded by the City of Austin and the State of Texas.
He has several works in progress, including the novels Dark Ground, Ask the Fire, and A Handful of Ashes: three scenarios for screenplays.
He has published articles in White Crane Journal, and in W. H. Auden: a Legacy, David Izzo, editor.
Two of Dennis's plays are included in the Austin Chronicle's "Select Bibliography of Texas Plays."
He currently works as occasional archivist and executive assistant to the Director of Blue Star Center for Contemporary Art in San Antonio.
Dennis Paddie is also an accomplished painter and graphic artist. His "day job" to find his artistic endeavors has generally been in the restaurant business. He's been a maitre d' and restaurant designer over the years in fine restaurants in Austin and San Antonio.
Dennis Paddie is best known in Austin as a sort of "spiritual hippie extraordinaire," and vagabond bon vivant.
You can contact Dennis through his friend Toby Johnson (whose website this page is posted on).
Dennis wrote a beautiful tribute to fellow Texas playwright Sterling Houston who died November 8, 2006. This article appeared in The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide.
Dennis's novel Ask the Fire was released by Lethe Press July 2010.
Ask the Fire blends the high tech culture of modern espionage and the highly politicized social culture of Washington, D.C., the capital of the world, with the secret of the Knights Templar, courtly love and Freemasonry in the architecture of the D.C. streets. Add a dash of 60s hippiedom, and plenty of urban gay and post-gay culture, and readers will discover a new trans-mythological, but deeply spiritual, vision of the meaning of human life in the charged world of the 21st century.
“I had a friend who was a spy.” So begins a story of terrorism and espionage, featuring a brilliant, almost enlightened, but emotionally jaded and politically cynical secret agent, a gay Mati Hari who’d seduced secrets out of Arab rulers and now struggles to prevent the start of the Terrorist Wars. It’s a story with a vast sweep that places spying—and spiritual vision— within the larger history of heresy and homosexuality in Western culture from the Crusades to contemporary Islamic fundamentalists.
Recommended for libraries by Amer Lib Assoc GLBT Round Table reviewer Paul Hubbard in nice review.
Watch Dennis on YouTube reading from Ask the Fire
See more about this book -- with links to order
Reveille: A Play in Three Acts was published by Peregrine Ventures Press, December 2024.
REVEILLE
A Play in Three Acts
Dennis Paddie
Peregrine Ventures Press, Austin TX
December 21, 2024
ISBN: 9798345417911
150 pages, Paperback $9.99
Order Reveille from amazon.com
In 1951, Cora Nelson and her grandson, Nathan Pardue are cleaning graves at Macedonia Cemetery, at Sardis, Arkansas, below Hope, above Patmos. Cora tells Nathan the story of the time in 1925 when Felson Hamiter, her beloved scamp of a brother, returned to Arkansas, with his beautiful and faithful wife, from Washington, D.C., where he was an Honor Guard at The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, only to die.
Gassed in the Battle of Belleau Wood, Felson’s lungs are failing him. At the same time, Gemma Reese, the Hamiter stepmother, a woman of strong will and unconventional, even perverse and cruel character, dies of tetanus. The story comes to life as memory throughout the day and into the sunset with Nathan and Cora and at the end with Uncle Alec Aubrey at Macedonia Cemetery.
Dennis Paddie, a graduate in history from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, has lived in Austin TX since 1965. He has been active in early gay politics and in early environmentalism. His poetry has been published by the Texas Circuit and his plays produced at the Paramount Theater, Capitol City Playhouse and Chicago House. Two of his dramas are listed in the Austin Chronicle’s Select Bibliography of Texas Plays of the last seventy years. Dennis Paddie’s writing has appeared in the White Crane Journal and the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. Dennis Paddie is one of the people who created the “weird” in “Keep Austin Weird.”
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