Nora Robertson

I always love how the Tin House summer workshop lets you hear Steve Almond talk about sex writing, or Aimee Bender talk about the plot-driven plot, all for $15. Burnside Review editor-in-chief Sid Miller is founding a new writing/arts center, Crow Arts Manor, that will make it highly accessible to work with some of the city’s finest artists such as cartoonist Jesse Reklaw, fiction writers Monica Drake and Lidia Yuknavitch, poets Emily Kendal Frey (pictured below with Miller) and Zach Schomburg and Mercury journalist Marjorie Skinner to name a few. Similar to LA writing center Beyond Baroque, Miller would like “ongoing arts education to be a right, not a privilege.”

The launch reading was held in E.A.T., the new restaurant and event space at Milepost 5 and included instructors Mary Szybist, B.T. Shaw, Schomburg and Frey, as well as a few past Burnside Review alumni. There was a tour afterwards in the Crow Arts Space itself, one of those cozy Milepost 5 studios with an office tucked behind a conference area with a big table presumably for workshopping . I immediately felt at home with the canning jars of quirky objects like dolls and plastic food, and the gallery of visual art along the white-washed walls.

The actual stage space of E.A.T., which is called The Chapel, reminds me of a Lutheran church with that Oregon-type coastal landscape framing the right side of the speaker’s head where there might have once been an altar. There was a sense of gathering which seemed fitting for the inauguration of an organization which will build the arts community within Portland and also came about through some collaboration. Miller had been looking for a space for about two years before Shaw, who is a Milepost 5 resident, put Miller in touch with director Gavin Shettner. Milepost 5 was at a point where they were looking to partner with an established Portland-based arts organization for the second phase of their development. The board of directors includes poet laureate Paulann Peterson and literary figure Kevin Sampsell. “Having run Burnside Review for seven years gave me some advantages. I’ve formed a ton of wonderful relationships with artists throughout Portland,” Miller commented, “It was fairly easy getting people on board with this project. It seems that most of Portland feels that Crow Arts Manor will fill a void.”

Programming will include classes, readings, gallery space and a library. Coming up in May and April: Jesse Reklaw’s Elements of Cartooning, and Emily Kendal Frey’s The Sequential Poem. Zach Schomburg’s The Narrative Prose-Poem class is already sold out, so act fast. Six week one-hour workshops will run only $95, and one-day workshops will be offered for $40. Class sizes are limited to 8. In June, also see a reading for the spring issue of Conjunctions and a screening by Found editor Davy Rothbart of My Heart is an Idiot, a documentary about love that spans two years and over a hundred cities.