Posts Tagged ‘Portland writers’

Neon Frontier on KZME 107.1FM: Reading Series Get National

 

People often have mixed feelings about readings. Readings can be long and boring, Or they can be performances, parties, political rallies, scenes.  Portland, like a lot of other cities, has a long history of underground readings through many cultural moments, from Ken Kesey’s Poetry Happenings to today, when Portland is on the national tour circuit.  I sat down with 90′s slam host Reuben Nisenfeld, Smalldoggies‘ Matty Byloos and Carrie Seitzinger, Bad Blood’s Zachary Schomburg, Literary Mixtape’s Erik Bader, and Loggernaut’s Erin Ergenbright, Jesse Lichtenstein and Paul Toutonghi on Portland series then and now.  Check it out on 107.1FM in the Portland metro area, Sunday, October 9th, 5PM.

Listen to the KZME podcast here.

Neon Frontier on KZME 107.1FM Debut: Sid Miller with Crow Arts Manor

 

Neon Frontier, my new radio segment on KZME 107.1FM’s Artclectic show, debuted on September 11th with an interview with Sid Miller, Burnside Review editor and director of Portland’s newest writing/arts center, Crow Arts Manor.  Neon Frontier will explore how Portland’s cultural space has evolved through conversation with the artists and makers who have shaped it.  I sat down with Sid to talk about what it means to start a DIY instituition, kind of by pulling up your own bootstraps.

Take a listen to the KZME podcast here.


Preview from Wordstock this Sunday: From Playboy to the Bible

From Playboy to the Bible: Adapting Writing for Screen and Image

New Yorker cartoonist Shannon Wheeler, writer Mark Russell and filmmaker Andy Mingo sit down with writer Nora Robertson to discuss collaboration between writers and artists in visual mediums. Get a look at a sneak peek of Mingo’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s short story “Romance” that recently appeared in Playboy, images from Wheeler and Russell’s adaptation of the Bible, God Is Disappointed in You (Top Shelf in 2012), and Robertson’s poetry film with Jason Bahling, The Humble Egg. Wordstock, Oregon Convention Center, Sunday the 9th, 4PM, Oregon Cultural Trust Stage, presented by New Oregon Arts & Letters.

From God Is Disappointed in You:

God had but one rule: do not eat from the two magic trees which he’d planted at the center of the garden. Why he put them there to begin with is anyone’s guess. But, having received this cryptic admonition, Adam and Eve’s curiosity was piqued. And having a talking snake constantly coaxing them into eating from the trees certainly didn’t help. Eventually, they succumbed to temptation, eating the magical fruit and unlocking its secret power, which seemed to consist mostly of making them uptight about nudity.

Their blatant disregard for his one and only rule introduced God to a new sensation, one he would experience many times during his long association with human beings: God was pissed off. Furious, God evicted Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, forcing them to fend for themselves in the surrounding wilderness. To add to their misery, God also ordered them to become parents.

 

The Evening Of Conversation: Back Room, the New Oregon Interview Series, the Dill Pickle Club, and More

When I started the New Oregon Interview Series in 2009, formal discussion of the local creative culture was in decline.  My editor Tiffany Lee Brown had been a panelist in Vera Katz’ 2001 talks on Richard Florida’s ideas about the creative economy.  In the meantime, a major recession had made a lot of creative economy theory seem irrelevant.  A more intimate approach that let the artists speak about their experience of the cultural space seemed more relevant.  It was also more in touch with a new form of entertainment: the evening of conversation.  A mostly spontaneous discussion between a moderator and participants in a casual space like a bar or restaurant, the evening of conversation is more lively because it reverses some of the traditional power dynamics of public speaking.  It’s a real conversation, and promises something any fertile civic culture needs—a public forum.  Writer Matthew Stadler told me in an interview for the New Oregon series that “public space is an action, it’s not a piazza.  It’s a set of actions that give strangers common ground.”

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Help Get Out Plazm’s 20th Anniversary Issue

Plazm, a Portland-based arts & culture magazine, is celebrating its 20th anniversary publishing the likes of David Byrne, Storm Tharp, and David Lynch and interviews with Yoko Ono, Iggy Pop, the Magnetic Field’s Stephin Merritt and Gus Van Sant, and much more. “To my mind, we’re about importing and exporting culture,” editor and founder Josh Berger commented. You can be a part of the goodness by helping to get the next issue out through the Kickstarter below. Prizes include Jon Raymond, writer for Wendy and Lucy and HBO’s recent Mildred Pierce mini-series, naming a future character after a person of your choice.

Sid Miller Launches Crow Arts Manor: Arts Education is a Right

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.”

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SHARE #8: Force

THE PROMPT

The lovely Margaret Malone and Kathleen Lane invited me to come as an artist to SHARE recently. Previously, I had attended their showcase and been quite overwhelmed by the amount of cool stuff in progress around the space. Mark Russell was nice enough to be my plus one, but when we got there, we discovered the happy accident that actually the regular SHARE is a participant-only space. For two hours, everyone in the room is creating. You get the prompt when you come in the door, which this time was FORCE, and you just go. Mark is a writer too after all, so we decided to collaborate.

Our process was that we started from the idea about force as a rule or change forcing you to do something. Mark began to write satirical airport rules so I started to think of a narrative that would play off of the airport setting, and then we juxtaposed the two pieces without looking at what each other were writing.

THE PIECE
Italics for Mark’s piece, regular font for mine.

The night before I went home to the US, Matt and I got to the Budapest airport completely out of cash. It was a boxy white space with high ceilings and concrete pillars and looked Communist. It looked like it would have rules. We had enough cash to stay in a hostel when we got to town but had decided it would be more fun to stay up all night drinking, so now we had to sleep in the airport. It’s the kind of thing you do when you’re not really getting along. Going out had been Matt’s idea but got no argument from me. If I held a plastic cup of red wine and coke in a dark cellar bar blasting the Pink Floyd, it was easier somehow to ignore the way his brown eyes never seemed to meet mine, the way he always seemed to be looking away from me.

On behalf of the Federal Aviation Administration, welcome to the United States. Please remove any metallic objects, belts, electronic devices, toiletries, shoes or prosthetic limbs and place them in the eight ounce cup provided to your left. Please note that as part of the new American Culture Preservation Initiative, a fine of forty-eight dollars will be assessed on anyone discussing the Broadway production of Spiderman, sporting a tribal armband tattoo or reading a Harry Potter book if you are over the age of thirteen. I mean, really people.

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LIVE at the Body Show Benefit: B. Frayn Masters

Sketch comic/Back Fence producer B. Frayn Masters at the Body Show Benefit telling a never-before-heard story about losing her virginity, growing up Catholic and a fateful baseball game at the Body Show Benefit. The benefit was a premiere for The Body Show:The Humble Egg, an experimental short film by Nora Robertson and Jason Bahling about a kitschy 60’s cooking show for housewives that hurtles the host into a private world of tangential madness and repressed memories of her grandmother. Hosted by Mark Russell. Documentation by Karl Lind of In the Can Productions.

LIVE at the Body Show Benefit: B. Frayn Masters from Nora Robertson on Vimeo.

The Future of Publishing + Matthew Stadler and Aaron Colter

Publishing in the last decade has become a much less vertical cultural space. It’s like the difference between NY, which has tall skyscrapers with penthouse offices at the top, and suburbia, where the hotspots are more spread out and equal. Because of the internet, it’s more possible as an outsider to get attention, to talk with whoever in the world is interested in having the same kinds of conversations. The challenge is to cut through the noise to find the people you want to talk with.  PageTurn’s Future of Publishing performative lecture event last Wednesday aimed to take on how publishing is evolving in this new cultural sprawl, something the talks in part addressed. A small crowd of mostly Portland literary folks drank wine in the tall boxy white space of the Cleaners and watched a lineup of seven-minute powerpoint presentations by Dark Horse Comic’s Aaron Colter, Publishing Studio’s Matthew Stadler, Wordstock director Greg Netzer, and IPRC director Justin Hocking, and others.

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The Body Show Benefit: Gigi Little

A woman decides to jump naked out of a cake to surprise her husband for their anniversary, and quickly ends up baking hundreds of sheet cakes. Gigi Little’s writing has appeared in the anthologies Portland Noir and The Pacific Northwest Reader, and she has written and illustrated two children’s picture books, Wright Vs. Wrong and The Magical Trunk. She works as In-Store Merchandising and Promotions Coordinator for Powell’s, and before moving to Portland, she spent fifteen years in the circus. To hear more of this story, check out Gigi at the Body Show Benefit, Nov. 3rd, door at 7PM, 7:30-9:30PM, $5-15 donation.

EXCERPT

I never thought I’d be the kind of person who’d like frosting a cake in the nude.  But, oh, I do.  First is the smell of the sugar all around.  Then there’s the way it feels.  Trust me, if you think running a knife along frosting is kind of sensual, try doing it with nothing but air against your skin.

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