Nora Robertson

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.”

Stadler was a writer-in-residence in the summer of 2005 for Michael Hebb and Naomi Pomeroy’s Ripe restaurant group when he started the Backroom conversation series.  Stadler managed the Backroom collaboratively with Coolley Gallery curator/director Stephanie Snyder and musician Curtis Knapp.   Adapted from the communal seating and fixed menu of Ripe’s popular family supper, the Backroom brought together such artists as Gore Vidal, Stephen Malkmus, Calvin Johnson, Mary Gaitskill, Tom Spanbauer, and many more on such topics as art and friendship, or the way writing can shape a city.   The menu itself was shaped from each evening’s discussion by meeting with the chefs in advance, and a letterpress chapbook by Pinball Publishing of related content by the artists was given out. I went to one of the early ones in the back of the Gotham Tavern and remember how the way we talked so openly with people we’d never met over gorgeous food seemed to spill over into the way we talked with the panelists after the initial presentation.  It felt more like a small college seminar.  “A lot of the impulse is how do you get the audience to heckle or do something?  Or cheer?” Stadler told me.  “I no longer blind myself to the difference between [the intimate setting of Backroom] and a group of 2000.  I know that when you’re sitting in a big audience, your agency is unknown to the person in front.”

Backroom has now become a non-profit project of Portland’s Charitable Partnership Fund and continues in a variety of spaces, not always hosted by Stadler or Snyder.  An interesting aspect of Backroom is that they make their website, paypal and mailing available to anyone who would like to host an evening.  So far six people have taken them up on it, including Randy Gragg interviewing Chinese architect Yung Ho Chang.  Stadler told me “what we made very quickly became a tool used by a whole community of people.”

In 2009, Marc Moscato founded the Portland version of the Dill Pickle Club, which has organized several public conversations on topics like Northwest music, the legacy of the WPA, and the importance of preserving oral history.  “With the disappearance of public forums…we have lost an important facet of our culture: face-to-face conversation and airing one’s ideas before a general public,” Moscato wrote in his monograph on the original Dill Pickle Club in 1920’s Chicago.  “The makeshift, participatory nature of yesteryear’s public forums also bears many resemblances to today’s movement of DIY, decentralized art spaces.”  The Dill Pickle’s events often involve a field trip.  However, the Northwest Passage music evening I went to was at the Waypost café and brought together Vanessa Renwick with Cool Nutz and Calvin Johnson.  Renwick screened House of Sound, her homage to the North Portland record store that was a center for the African-American community.  Renwick’s film was intense and evoked a sense of forgotten history that reminded me of her film about the Lovejoy columns.  Cool Nutz talked about coming up in hiphop in Portland, which provided a nice context to Renwick’s film and also contrasted with Johnson’s story of coming up in indie rock.  The evening ended with Johnson playing a song for us and dancing.  This immediately got a bunch of phones out recording this, probably to put online.

For discussions of art and place, Portland Monthly’s Bright Lights, Big City series at Jimmy Mak’s has brought talent like Dan Wieden in conversation with editor and host Randy Gragg.  Performance Works Northwest’s 2010 Artist Dinner series has sat down with performers like Linda K. Johnson, Lisa Radon, Kristan Kennedy, and Plazm editors Josh Berger and Tiffany Lee Brown over a meal cooked by the hosts, Linda Austin and Tahni Holt.  Book festival Wordstock featured several conversation events this year on topics like the future of reading and the difficulty of humor writing, and why we should write short fiction. For discussions of civic issues, Oregon Humanities has been hosting Think & Drink, a happy hour series at rontom’s, and the Conversation Project, which brings public dialogue to rural towns around Oregon.

The advantage of public forums is that they enable human interaction in our local physical space around art, ideas and politics in a way that invites the audience to get involved, to heckle.  At the Dill Pickle Club’s Northwest Passage evening, Voodoo Doughnut owner Tres Shannon was calling out questions for Renwick from the back of the room during her lecture, and it seemed entirely in the spirit of the evening.