With Dream Baby Press, Matt Starr has brought the fun back to the literary scene, creating nights where everyone is welcome to stand up on his stage, and no one wants to miss out on.

London distances are not for the weak. I wouldn’t blame you if the (at least) forty minutes on two different forms of TfL transport were enough to make you question your evening plans. But what made this particular Tuesday afternoon worth the pilgrimage to north-west London was a reading hosted by Dream Baby Press, the poetry blog/writing club/grassroots publisher/entertainment company founded by New Jersey–born, New York–based Matt Starr, who brought one of his cult literary gatherings to the city for the first time.

This is not a literature event in the way you might imagine. It is closer to an all-American showbusiness spectacle than a traditional reading, inspired somewhere between WWE and vaudeville. Since 2022, it has taken place every other month across New York City in Burger Kings, Penn Station’s Sbarro pizzeria, gay clubs, gyms, pools and other accessible but unlikely venues, rather than the highbrow spaces where these kinds of artsy events usually take place.

Born out of Starr’s passion for poetry and his desire to create something more fun and punk, it operates with a simple mission: “make reading and writing fun, accessible and exciting.” One of their reading series christened The Perverted Book Club, inspired by the spirit of John Waters, is themed around pleasure – or rather, one’s interpretation of the term. “The readings are often about desire and shame. And when you say those things out loud, and you say them in a room full of 300 people, they become way less shameful, they become funny.”

He recalls early Dream Baby events in New York, one in a gay porn shop where “men were cruising in the basement” and people fainted mid-reading, as proof of the same principle: anything can happen. The effect has been a growing pull, drawing in a mix of cultural figures, from model Kaia Gerber and Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell to Girls actor Jemima Kirke, who has since become a regular attendee.

The first London edition, staged inside a family-run boxing gym in Kilburn with decades of sweat in the walls, proved an immediate sell-out. The evening began with an Elvis Presley impersonator in a white pleather outfit, shiny cross across his chest and hair almost perfectly combed, fully committed to his performance of Presley’s bestsellers. Within minutes, the 300 guests gathered around the boxing ring were dancing and singing along. The format that followed is simple: a list of interesting personalities, curated by Starr himself, get five minutes each to read whatever they like.

First up was Mickey Down, co-creator of HBO’s Industry, who read a very graphic Harry Potter fanfiction piece written from Hermione’s perspective. Influencer and writer Camille Charrière shared relatable stories from her forthcoming memoir Ashamed, while editor and socialite Tish Weinstock read Cookie Mueller’s Ask Dr. Mueller advice columns from the 1980s, before singer Kate Nash read a piece written by the anonymous writer Slutty Chef about a guy she fell in love with, who would send nudes to other girls.

In between bursts of laughter, it felt like everyone in the room was in on the same joke – a way of engaging with poetry or literature that was funny, generous and unlike anything else in the city. This is a place you’d recommend to anyone looking to get inspired, make new friends, or maybe even find a lover.

Writer and screenwriter, Bertie Brandes, who wrote the screenplay for Charli XCX’s A24 mockumentary The Moment with Aidan Zamiri and is also the creator of indie cult zine Mushpit, took the ring to read an essay from her soon-to-be-published book that touched on overpriced designer perfumes that smell like insulin, shopping at Brandy Melville and other absurdities of the 2020s.

Over a phone debrief the morning after Brandes told me, “Everyone was cool and everyone was hot, but it was also very open, and not cliquey, which is so rare in London, it’s all quite pretentious here at the moment.” She insisted: “The whole thing is like a performance in such a fun way. I felt less scrutinised than I would if it was in a quiet room. [Matt] brought an energy that I think London really needs. I feel really grateful to him for having done something like this, because it allows other people to do it as well.”

It is not random, or even ironic, that Starr’s events take place in venues like fast food chains or community gyms. Over breakfast the next morning, he lights up as he tells me about Muf, the son of the boxing ring’s owner, and Deveen and Myra, the Burger King managers he befriended during his New York events, who, he says, “has been such a light in my life.” Starr is genuinely interested in the people who inhabit these spaces, people who would never normally find themselves at a literary reading, let alone feel welcome at one: “when I can merge two communities, to me, that is magic; plus, you can’t be an asshole in fluorescent lighting.”

With a background in conceptual art, that thinking stems from his own experience of feeling unwelcome in traditional literary spaces. “I tried to get into the New York literary scene, but people would say, ‘Your stuff is funny, who are you? Where did you come from?’ They weren’t going to let me just jump on a mic,” he says. “So I started my own reading series. My inspiration has always been the ethos of punk and early French New Wave, you can break the rules, create the rules, and just do what you think is fun.” At Dream Baby Press, everyone is welcome.

In 2024, Starr released Mouthful, a twisted, honest and incredibly funny collection of poems written by himself and self-published through Dream Baby. Dream Baby is naturally on Substack too, where you might find city guides with the best kissing spots (check out Candace Bushnell’s guide to kissing in NYC), love letters from painter Georgia O’Keeffe or interviews with Leonard Cohen’s perfumer. One of its signature formats online, lists of 10 things Starr’s favourite artists love and hate, has been widely reshared online, with contributions from Olivia Rodrigo, Lena Dunham, Alexa Chung and many others.

Dream Baby Press also hosts a monthly writing club, where Matt insists his goal is to meet and write with people of all ages, something he is particularly passionate about when it comes to older participants, “Friends who are serious journalists who write at The Times, we have librarians, 70-year-olds, all types of people. And people come and so everybody writes, and anyone could read. After five minutes, I get up on the microphone and ask, ‘who wants to read?’ And it’s slow at first, but then by the end everybody’s reading.”

Poetry, he says plainly, changed his life, and he has now created spaces where it might change other people’s too. And standing in a boxing ring across the pond, watching a room full of strangers dance to an Elvis impersonator before bursting out laughing while reading about shame, sex, desire and heartbreak to one another, it’s hard not to feel like he might be succeeding. It was, unquestionably, worth the journey.

Photography – Miyuki Wang
Words – Moira González