Owen Egerton, Austin's Man of Letters, Leaves the Community He Loves

Owen Egerton at the final One Page Salon before he moved to Boston (photo by John Anderson)

Under the glowing sign of Radio Coffee & Beer, a line snaked around the crowded patio. Every person clutched a piece of paper, a card, a phone with some text on the screen, each waiting patiently to deliver a single sentence from a book or story. Each waiting to say, in their own way, thank you and farewell to Owen Egerton.

This was the final One Page Salon of the Egerton era. As founder and emcee, he had created the event a decade ago as a space for authors to read a single page of a work in progress in front of a warm and welcoming crowd. That crowd will have a space from now on, an absence created as Egerton leaves a city whose cultural life he has helped define for two decades.

And not just through his support for the written world. There are thousands of Austinites who know him more as a comedian, as physically fearless as he is word-witty. The previous Saturday, he bid farewell to Master Pancake, the film-spoofing troupe that secured his reputation as one of Austin's most fearless jesters. But this was a different crowd: Still there for Egerton's sense of humor, but in its gentlest, kindest form. This was where they could see Egerton the author, the writer of works like the acid comedy Everyone Says That at the End of the World, evangelical satire The Book of Harold: The Illegitimate Son of God, and the more metaphysical Hollow.

It was one of the last stops on Egerton's big goodbye tour before he and his family leave Austin and move to Boston. "Goodbye to places, goodbye to favorite coffee shops, favorite quiet spots, favorite secret spots," he told me. Under the watchful eye of his loyal but heat-drowsy dogs, we sat in his living room as he began packing up. "But also goodbye to a lot with people. Just talking with someone being the counter at BookPeople. Or at Half Price the other day, and they're like, 'I saw what's up, and I'm sorry.' Someone at ThunderCloud was like, 'Thank you for what you've done and for being in Austin.'"

It's not like Egerton hasn't moved before. His earliest memory, he recalls as he clears a space on a table crowded with books and papers, is of a red toy airplane, a gift his parents gave to him as a distraction when they moved here from the United Kingdom (like so many Austin cultural institutions, Egerton is an immigrant). "I was mad because my elder brother Gareth had been allowed to camp in the backyard of our house in the UK, and I wasn't allowed to."

What made it even more infuriating was that his little sister, who was only a babe in arms at the time, even she got to go out. Ah, the pains of being a middle kid. Still, that explains a lot.

"Oh yeah," he laughs. "Very much a middle kid. Still am."

Middle kid, attention seeker, and a defining part of Austin's writing, comedy, and film scenes since he moved here in 1991. Now he's packing up the South Austin house that he and wife Jodi have called home since 2005, when she was pregnant with their first child, the house that everyone told them would be too small for two kids. "Well, we proved them wrong," Egerton deadpans. "We're short people and we don't take up as much room as the average person."

Sure, Egerton briefly decamped to Los Angeles to work on film scripts in 2010, but that was always a temporary deal. No one really saw him leaving. Definitely not I. I even made a joke out of it once. Longer ago than any of us would like to recall, Egerton and I were part of a roast of Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League. As is part of the format, I had to deliver a one-liner at Egerton, and commented that he was the most successful creative in Austin – meaning that he wasn't successful enough to leave Austin. Egerton, bless his receptive heart, literally fell out of his chair.

But now he's really exiting: Or rather, it's exeunt for the whole Egerton family, and the reason is not that Owen is suddenly successful enough to escape the velvet rut. It's in the sound coming from one of the bedrooms, the giggling of teenagers. Egerton may be a celebrity, but he's a parent first. "When we started realizing how dangerous Texas was for families with trans kids, we knew we had to get out of here. ... It's becoming a place where ideas are banned and history is censored, rights are oppressed, and identities are illegal."

That's why he finally started seriously looking around for a new job, and that's what's sent him to Boston, to Emerson College, where this fall he returns to academia as a tenure-track assistant professor of screenwriting. "I didn't consider myself qualified," he said. "'Do I even own a tweed?' Turns out I do."

In some ways, he admits, it's hard to feel sad for him. The new position draws equally on his talents as a writer and a filmmaker, and on his instincts to nurture fragile talents. And then there's the location. He admitted the family already loved the area, but their new home is walking distance from Walden Pond. Yes, that Walden Pond. Talk about writing legacy.

And those Emerson students could have a worse teacher, and not because of Egerton's generous encouragement and seemingly limitless energy. He's been in the screenwriting trenches and experienced every kind of indignity and paycheck: from selling the rights to his own books, like his 2000 debut, Marshall Hollenzer Is Driving, and full scripts like 2008's Bobbie Sue only to see them go unproduced, to working uncredited on other projects. That's why he took his cinematic destiny into his own hands when he wrote and directed his debut feature, 2015's Follow, which parlayed into his 2018 horror-comedy, Blood Fest, and his surprise 2019 Netflix hit, Mercy Black. Plus he squeezed the script for supernatural thriller The Axe Murders of Villisca in the middle of that.

His multitude of gigs in Austin has given him the liberty to make movies on his own timeline, and losing that freedom was his biggest concern when he interviewed at Emerson. "In my first interview with them, my one question was, 'Will I still be able to write and direct films?' And before I got to that, their last question was, 'Would you still be willing to write and perform and direct films? Because that's what we want our professors doing.' I was like, 'Woo-hoo!'"

He enters the classroom at a pivotal moment, as screenwriters face a genuine existential threat from AI-generated scripts. That AI can and will produce mediocre scripts is inevitable ("That genie's out of the bottle"), so Egerton described his advice to young writers as being how visual artists responded to cameras being able to duplicate reality: "Go deeper and weirder and make something that is so human and so strange that it can't be duplicated by an algorithm."

That chair-fall came back to me as Egerton stood stageside, blushing (or he could just have been flush from wearing a suit in the June heat) at those single-sentence tributes. I have always doubted that my one-liner was enough to send him sprawling: But when a physical comedian gifts you with a pratfall as a thank-you for your gag, you take the compliment. And as the line shuffled forward and each writer got the chance to deliver that single sentence, single thought, sometimes even a single word, it was Egerton who, for once, was forced to absorb the gratitude.

And he's leaving the Austin scene(s) in which he's been so heavily invested so much more developed than when he arrived. The Writers' League of Texas is taking the reins on One Page Salon. Equally important and dear to his heart, the Typewriter Rodeo, co-founded by Jodi, will continue. And as he's reminded Master Pancake co-conspirator John Erler, he'll only be a flight away. Still, it will be a different scene without an Egerton in it. Yet that's not what he was thinking about as he leafed through old Alamo guides and sorted through CDs bought at countless gigs in clubs now confined to history. That's when the wistfulness shows. He paused. "I know there's going to be a hole in our lives that I'm going to feel when we get up there.

"We were really lucky to be in Austin during the time we were here, just incredibly lucky to experience the weirdness and the art and the strange music." But, he added, "I remember there was a comedy reading event at a coffee shop. I'd just turned up to write, and it was just closing up, and I went, 'I didn't even know this was going on.' ... There's waves of cool, younger creatives doing new things. I feel I'm leaving the scene in good hands."