Three things I want you to see at Wordstock

Full disclosure: these are three events I planned, so of course I consider them must-sees. They’re all omnibus occasions -- panel discussion/reading events, designed to extract maximum performance value out of each sojourn. Check it out.

Voices from Another Portland
Saturday, 2pm, Wieden + Kennedy Stage
Remember last June when I gushed over my favorite summer book, Portland Queer? Now meet five of the book’s contributors, as they read from their stories and wax philosophical over writing about Portland places and experiences as viewed through a different lens.

Editor Ariel Gore assures these writers – Marc Acito, Jacob Anderson-Minshall, Wayne Flowers, Colleen Siviter and moderator Dexter Flowers – are writers who love to perform and/or are performers who love to write. Sounds heady!


Stages of Playwriting
Sunday, 2pm, McMenamins Stage
Our three guests – Marc Acito, Storm Large and Cynthia Whitcomb – have all had recent hits on Portland stages that are now primed to wow audiences on the national scene. These writers will talk about the many advantages of workshopping homegrown work – including the support of local collaborators, an avid fan base, and most importantly, fellow writers (all three participate in the Big Brain Trust). Plus this panel is moderated by bon vivant Floyd Sklaver, so what’s not to like?

And yes, that is indeed Storm in the photo at right -- because I will stop at nothing to attract people to these panels – all dolled up as Gretchen Lowell, the dangerously fetching antiheroine of Chelsea Cain’s novels. (Chelsaa, you know, is also appearing at Wordstock: Sunday, 1pm, Colubmia Sportwear Stage.)


Border Crossings
Sunday, 3pm, McMenamins Stage
First of all, this discussion is moderated by Portland media goddess Dmae Roberts, okay? And then her guests are Marilyn Chin, Canyon Sam, and redoubtable Portlander Polo Catalani. Together they’ll discuss the tricky business of how you represent other cultures in writing without casting them in the dubious distinction of being exotic or resorting to other forms of orientalism. This is bound to be a lively discussion.

Saturday, by the way, is my 2nd annual 75th birthday. So show up for me, why don’t you.

Portland Queer

Every so often I read a book the reminds me that the whole time I’ve been tearing around the city doing whatever it is I do, there’s been a whole other thing going on that has nothing to do with me and my daily shenanigans. Portland Queer, subtitled Tales of the Rose City, is just such a book.

Conceived of and edited by scrittorista fabulosa Ariel Gore, the 24 entries in this collection cover the territory figuratively and typographically. In some ways a response to Portland Noir (at least inasmuch as they were released within months of each other). PQ seemed at first to lack Noir’s defining aesthetic. For me, it took reading the book cover to cover before I realized that the range of style in the collection is a unifying aesthetic. Rather than a book going in 24 different directions, it’s a diverse diversion spanning a broad range of human experience. As Ms. Gore says of the stories in her introduction:

…giddy, faint, qualmish—like falling. Like love. Destabilizing. Moving targets. Like a part of the whole and at the same time outside of it. First person. We who are always running away and looking for home.

Most of the stories are in the first person, that voice that suits the short story so splendidly. They range from the profound to the nugatory, from searing to frothy. There are pieces by such noted writers as Marc Acito and Tom Spanbauer, and there are gems by writers I’ve never come across before.

Favorite among many favorites: “The Trailer,” by Megan Kruse, which felt elegiac and autumnal – a refreshing if somber antidote to today’s 100+ heat.

Is it any accident that many of these stories explore or celebrate or criticize Portland as the land of a thousand genders? Many of us gravitated to the town through sheer psychic dead reckoning and can’t believe our luck. But that doesn’t mean it’s time for the credits to roll. Notions of home are often synonymous with constructions of identity. Both weave in and out of each other inextricably in these tales that range from Alberta Street to Hawthorne to Washington Park to the Rose Café to Starky’s Bar and beyond – all familiar settings that dress the stage for some startling revelations.

And it all happens right here in Portland, Ore. Under your nose, perhaps totally unobserved by you. Check it out, you might be surprised. I know I was.

Huh. It does have to do with me, after all.

Signs of the Times

Saw a calligraphed, hand-painted sign that read EXIT on the top of a trash heap near Broadway and all my existential dread leached out through my skin.

Spotted a young lady in the Pearl holding a cardboard sign that read "Will design for food." But that must've just been a goof, don't you think?

Heard a rap song on the radio with the refrain "Stop jackin my style, bitch."

Noticed that whereas when I first arrived in Oregon in 2002 (that was the previous recession, if you still remember that relative walk in the park) the Sunday Oregonian's employment listings ran to 8 pages, last Sunday they only spanned TWO. Sure, a lot of ad revenue's been lost to the Internets, but still.

On a lighter note, fabulist and bon vivant Marc Acito just wrote an article for WalletPop about the economy that I actually got something out of and laughed while I was at it.

Just in case anyone's still checking this blog, after my posting only two entries in two weeks, a lot's been going on with me, and one of those things has been a quiet desperation. Which puzzled me, because materially things are going pretty well. But spiritually....

Attended most of last week's Made in Oregon readings, and had a great time, too. But of course it was also strange. Strange to look at work I had programmed but no longer had any connection to. Megan asked me: "wasn't it sad to be there? to not be part of it anymore?" And I said, truthfully enough for the moment, "Oh NO, it was great, like being at a party you didn't have to host!"

But the next day another friend, a natural empath, asked me how I was doing these days and I sort of ... caved in. She touched the hidden spring and all this sorrow welled up. And realized I'd been depressed for weeks.

Partly it's not getting to work on the festival I helped plan, but it's also the sense of dislocation. Like that moment in Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland, where the path she walked in on is swept away behind h er, and then the path ahead is swept away. She's come from nowhere and there's nowhere to go.

Coming up is JAW's big weekend -- which I highly recommend to you, but I'm not sure I'll go myself. I want to go, and bear witness to the work of everyone involved and to enjoy new writing by some of my favorite playwrights. I hope I'll go. But I might not. I can only take so much vertigo.

Marc Acito Attacks!

This Tuesday, the 29th, my pal and colleague Marc Acito is having a book signing slash extravaganza at the Bagdad Theatre to celebrate the publication of his second novel, Attack of the Theater People. And I will be missing it, but for a very good reason; I'll be attending Visions & Voices, performances of outstanding new work from several Portland high schools, at the fab Gerding Theater.

I wish that you and I could at both events, but here is Marc himself to stump for his affair: