Confessions of a defector

For the second year in a row, I celebrated my 75th birthday at the Wordstock Festival. If you have to work on your solar return, Wordstock’s a grand place to do it: a swirling, teeming whirl of book lovers, exhibitors, publishers, book purveyors and of course authors.
Ironic indeed, therefore, that I came home on Sunday evening, exhausted but proud, to gifts that included a brand new ….. wait for it ……………. Kindle.

Yeah, a Kindle. You know, Amazon’s “wireless reading device,” the one whose advent of recent years was widely heralded as the death knell for books and bookstores both. And I got not just any Kindle, but the new improved model: smaller, lighter, faster and greyer than its ancestors, with free wifi and 3G built into it, making it reputedly of use where in the wide world.

With all the zealotry of a convert, immediately I popped for a sleek black leather cover for the device that actually has a night light built into its spine — an ingenious, marriage-saving innovation.

First downloads: Atwood’s latest, The Year of the Flood; Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs; and Between the Acts, Woolf’s brilliant and underrated novel that it’s time I revisited.

But the irony is not lost on me: I came straight from a festival where a constant topic of conversation concerned what happens to hardcover books in the digital age, and I gleefully launched into downloading virtual books.

The issues surrounding Kindles and their kin are legion. Most obviously: if you can already get many books steeply discounted by shopping at Amazon, and then the Kindle download costs close to half of that, who is making money anymore? If you guess it’s not the authors, you would be correct. One commentator has called digitalization of extant texts “the greatest act of piracy since Francis Drake sailed the Spanish Main.” But old or new, everyone takes a hit, from publisher to vendor.

One apparent winner in the digital death match (apart from the makers of e-book readers) is the consumer, who gets more for less. And therein lies the hope of the whole endeavor. If people can instantly gratify their impulses to get and read a certain book or newspaper or magazine, perhaps they will do it more often, and ultimately spend more money.

Sounds good. But then what happens to bookstores, which need to hold onto a vast inventory to be of any use? For that matter, what happens to festivals like Wordstock or the Brooklyn Book Festival, events that lure noteworthy authors with the promise of selling a lot of books?

Naturally enough, the answer is that they will have to gradually reinvent themselves and create new or augmented reasons for being. For instance, it’s great that I can start reading The Year of the Flood this instant. But nothing compares to trotting down to the Schnitz, as I did last month, to hear her and Ursula K. Le Guin chat about writing. And I will certainly have read Armistead Maupin’s new book Mary Ann in Autumn by the time he arrives at Powell’s (on November 12) -- only if I read on the Kindle, what will I give him to sign?

Anyway. There is a groundswell of thinking about the rights of everybody involved (see this, for example) — so much so that I’m tempted to go to law school (not really) just so I can part of hashing it all out. But as my own behavior attests, the genie is out of the bottle; one day books in print may be yet another artifact we refer to nostalgically as “sooooooo 20th century.”

Actually there are downsides for readers in this as well as upsides for writers -- but that’s another post. To be continued...

Wordstock takes off!

Since many people have asked what I recommend for this year’s edition of the Pacific Northwest’s largest literary and book fest, here’s a few very subjective offerings that I’m seeing for sure. Mind you, these are in addition to the big names I mentioned here last month: Meloy + Lethem + Chang + Egan + Bender. Plus my helpful hints at The Editing Room. But hey, why not take them all in? For ten minibucks you can stay all day both days, October 9-10 — and celebrate my 82nd birthday with me on Sunday in high style.

So. First off: if you make theater in Portland, you know Gemma Whelan, the Irish director. But did you know she’s a novelist? Well, special for you: her brand new novel, Fiona: Stolen Child has just been released. Gemma will read from the book on Sunday, and also participate in a panel discussion entitled “First Book, First Person.”

You may also be interested to know (or forewarned) that this year dueling film crews will be trawling the halls of the Oregon Convention Center. Monica Drake is behind a fictional film set at “a literary festival much like Wordstock” — I hear the role of an infant was just cast the other day — and the irrepressible Arianne Cohen, author of The Tall Book, will have a team all the way from Germany trailing her as she wends her way through the bustling weekend. Will the two crews bump into one another, a là Stanley & Livingstone, and start filming each other? That would be very po-mo.

A new gambit this year is what we’re calling “conversations” — not panels, just two or three people conversing around an allied topic, like when Jon Raymond and Jim Lynch discuss “place-based writing” on Sunday.

As for panels, hot ones abound this year. Among my faves: “Ghosts with the Most,” in which four successful ghostwriters talk about the perils and the pinnacles of the biz. That’s on Saturday. That same day, members of San Francisco’s The Grotto (including Stephen Elliot of Rumpus fame) and Portland’s Periscope cover how creating within a community of writers can jump start your work.

What else. Rumors abound of rogue journalists going the way of literary paparazzi this year; will the VIP Room be stormed? We find out Friday night at the aptly named authors’ reception.

Back to norbal.

Tonight TBA:10 comes to an end, and I get my life back. Sort of. Because now it's three weeks to Wordstock!

It's been an awesome Time-Based Art Festival, though, with many more palpable hits than misses, and I'm already looking forward to TBA:11. Meanwhile, here's a little something to send everybody off with a little primitive time-based art from le ancien regime.

Guilty pleasures and other recent manias

Sorry there hasn't been time for coffee lately. Or blogging or generally gadding about. I've been ... reading. Yes, that's right. One of my favorite things about working with Wordstock -- the literary and book fest that starts in just 36 days -- is that I get to indulge my mania for reading to the max and still feel like I’m working. Here are just a very few of the books I’ve recently read as “research” for October, when I meet their authors in person.

All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, by Lan Samantha Chang. This somber, affecting novel by the director of the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop starts like it’s going to be a scathing satire of grad school writing programs, and then goes on to span decades in the lives of several poets to show what they sacrifice and what they gain back from their lives as scribblers. Wonderful.

The Big Burn, by Timothy Egan. Ordinarily I’m not a big nonfiction guy, but this book -- about the nation's largest forest fire, which burned more than three million acres in 1910 and has affected conservation policy to this day -- had me spellbound in the introduction, well before it gets to its actual subject. Suffice it to say that Mr. Egan can write.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender. Don’t be put off by the title. This book’s intriguing premise -- about a girl who discovers she can taste the feelings cooked into food by their emotive preparers -- beguiles you with humor and then takes you to disturbing places.

Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem. This is my first foray into the notoriously genre-busting work of Mr. Lethem, and let me tell you, it’s heady stuff. Clearly the heir apparent to territories blazed by Thomas Pynchon, this novel envisions a dystopian Manhattan so deliriously colorful that I want to move there this minute.

Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy. Awesome. Majestic. The sheer austerity of this writer’s prose provides a series of canvases you get to project yourself into. Many of these stories are haunting in their spare portraits of people on the horns or moral dilemmas. You want to judge them, then realize that would be an act of self-criticism. I now want to read every word this writer’s ever written. Oh, and Portland connection: how endearing is it that she’s Colin’s big sister?

More to come. Moremoremore.

In my tribe

Go to most any writers’ conference and a peculiar strain of war stories often surfaces: viz., tales of the writing group from hell. So plentiful and outrageous are these stories (the curmudgeon who never met a phrase he liked, the woman who wrote solely about elves, etcetcetc) that I actually ducked invitations to writing groups for years.

But I began rethinking my anthrophobia this past fall. At Wordstock I got to meet most of the Seattle 7, a group of amazing writers who met for years and wound up all getting published at the same time. And I organized a panel that was ostensibly about playwriting, but which wound up getting populated by several members of Portland’s Big Brain Trust, including Marc Acito, Storm Large and Cynthia Whitcomb. All these writers clearly had tremendous admiration and respect and bonhomie for each other. You could tell from the way they badgered each other mercilessly in public. I knewI wanted that.

Well. Put an idea out there, Madame Blavatsky sez, and a clarion call ripples through the universe. Post-Wordstock, in a chance conversation with a playwright I know, it came out that we have both been writing novels — for years. We knew we needed the support of a group, but my friend was equally leery of them; she had not had great experiences joining extant meetings. So we started collecting people. We discovered a local director whose first book comes out this fall and who was well into her second manuscript; and then another playwright, who had recently realized her latest script was crying out for a long-form treatment.

Voilà — a gang of four. We’ve been meeting weekly for months now. And while this blog may have languished as a consequence, hey! The novel’s coming along great. The simple fact that I’m committed to providing my gangsters with 10 pages a week whether those pages are gibberish or gold, has been near-miraculous for this scribbler. What I was missing from my writing regimen all along is now embodied in these weekly sessions: an audience. A respondent audience, not a vague abstraction.

What’s fun, too, is that we’re all refugees from the theater. Not that any of us have abandoned the form — quite the contrary. But our theater backgrounds inform our writing in surprising ways. The compression of dialogue, for one. And perhaps even more importantly, our instincts for what constitutes a “scene” in a narrative is, well … theatrical. Aristotelian. Beginnings/middles/ends. We understand how images — and not just words — can give a story tremendous unity.

I love my small tribe and our as-yet unnamed cabal. (Suggestions?) Stay tuned for more dispatches from the trenches.

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.

Hellzapoppin’: Wordstock opens!

For you kids, Hellzapoppin’ was a riotously popular revue, in its heyday, that changed all the time. It was understood anything could happen at any time. You know it better through its descendant, the ancient TV show, Laugh-In.

But never mind, because that’s not what this post is about. The old title was also once a synonym for a constantly revolving kaleidoscope of activity, and today, on the eve of Wordstock’s opening, that describes things pretty well. With over 160 authors participating, it’s a thrilling advent.

Probably you know that you can get the weekend schedule of authors speaking, reading and teaching at the Wordstock website, but did you know that meanwhile a cavalcade of coterminous activity is happening all over town?

One must-see event is Chicago’s celebrated 2nd Story troupe, the company that “combines high-energy performance storytelling with live music and delicious wine.” What better way to inaugurate a festival celebrates the spinning of tales, right?

Doug Whippo from 2nd Story on Vimeo.

But wait, there’s more. Naturally you know Live Wire!, the live radio event that “isn’t just a show, it’s a happening.” Well, Saturday night at the Aladdin brings us the 5th Live Wire! Wordstock Extravaganza at the Aladdin Theater, starring a glittering bevy of Wordstock guests including Sherman Alexie, Richard Dawkins, Chelsea Cain, Candy Tan and more.

Both events are sure to be popular, and as a die-hard Portlandian you know that Live Wire! always sells out, so don’t wait for hell to freeze over. Get those tickets now.

Wordstock 2009 cometh

The shame! The ignominy! A semi-fortnight since my last post. The Social Mediation Committee will be recycling all my URLs.

Woke up worrying about this today, and checking my stats I discovered that yesterday I had a total of 25 visitors. Twenty-five. That’s a nose dive of 87.5% since this same time last week. And yes, that matters to me, because now that I work from the Home Office in Portland OR, my various blogglings are the Space Age equivalents of water coolers.

For you kids, 20th-century offices uses to provide free-standing obelisks filled with H2O, and when you padded over to get refreshment, fellow quaffers were great sources of gossip, bonhomie, and free-floating anxieties.)

As always, there are reasons aplenty for my dilatory behavior, and today I’m going to blame ... let's see ... yes, Wordstock. With only 18 days to go before the region’s largest book festival opens, things are heating up. I’ll spare you the administrative details – except to assure you that they are legion – and just direct you to the Festival’s blog, where posts are spreading out like spilt honey from some of the 120+ authors participating in the festivities this year.

Check it out for interviews, ruminations, and tantalizing peeks in the mysterious art and business of writing for a living. (And for answers to the always intriguing question of what I’m doing when I’m not blogging and schlogging.) Jacquelyn Mitchard’s lovely visage graces the Wordstock blog right now; coming soon, a drily droll entry by Victor Lodato.

My new BFF: Victor Lodato

If you don’t know Victor Lodato’s writing from his startlingly imaginative works for the stage (The Bread of Winter and 3F, 4F, to name just a couple), perhaps you’ll remember that he was the unwitting center of controversy several years ago. The New York Times ran a feature about a phenomenon that many playwrights know all too well, and the article made Victor its poster child. The title: “Workshopped to Death.”

And it was true enough; Victor, long the darling of lit departments all over the national theater scene, rarely got to make the jump from readings and workshops to full production. By now enough critical mass has formed for Victor to survive the lethal syndrome; a recent follow-up article in The Washington Post notes that a critical mass has now formed around awareness of Victor’s body of work that is leading to full productions. "It's sort of like you're not somebody until the Times says you're nobody," Victor quips.

Fortunately, he didn’t spend the intervening years waiting for the approbation of artistic directors. Much of that time went into writing his first novel, Mathilda Savitch, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux releases for public consumption on September 15. The advance buzz is resounding, and for good reason; this book, written entirely in the voice of its eponymous heroine, surprised me on nearly every page.

It’s Mathilda’s distinct voice, paired with her zealot’s determination to impact her world, that makes her such a vivid 13-year-old. Here’s how she presents herself to us in the book’s first paragraph:

I want to be awful. I want to do awful things and why not? Dull is dull is dull is my life. Like now, it’s night, not yet time for bed but too late to be outside, and the two of them reading reading reading with their eyes moving like the lights inside a copy machine. When I was helping put the dishes in the washer tonight, I broke a plate. I said sorry Ma it slipped. But it didn’t slip, that’s how I am sometimes, and I want to be worse.

Not quite a coming of age story, this book – Victor’s first – examines a turning point in the life of a precocious virago whom circumstances have caused to grow up a little too quickly. Now on the verge of a premature adulthood, Mathilda is often laugh-out-loud funny, but just as often she’s maddening, disturbing, or unexpectedly poignant. She lurches between a brat’s chatty volubility and the perspicacity of a world-weary adult – the psychic equivalent of a boy’s voice cracking. Some readers may be distracted by this, but to me it was the author’s very point in delineating someone of this age and with these problems. She’s in a liminal space: too schooled in adult matters to be a kid, too young to bear adult disappointments.

In sort: this is an astonishing book – read it! And come hear Victor talk about it next month in Wordstock: October 10 at 1pm. Find out for yourself how he channeled this unforgettable character.

By the way, a bonus: the book's cover happens to be graced by one of my favorite collaborative art teams, Walter Martin and Pamela Munoz.

My Big Trip

You’ve noticed it, haven’t you. The spotty posting. The distracted tone. The slack facial muscles, the drooling. Okay, not that so much. But the rest. Just admit it, it’s okay.

The photo below at right might lead you to believe I’ve been working out quite a lot. And meditating big time! Actually, true to tell, some of both has indeed been going on (and let me tell you, meditation is all it’s cracked up to be – I highly recommend it -- not the huffing and puffing), but the startling image you see before you is – but of course – the handiwork of Rose Riordan, Photostop terrorist par excellence. Some people take up crocheting, or raising ferrets, or Adam Lambert, but Rose, well…there was a time when she had quite the moonlighting thing going on with morphing my mug into all manner of amusing contexts.

This was all very affectionate, mind you, but invariably such things fall into the wrong hands sooner or later. Apparently the image resurfaced recently at a former place of employment, with a sarcastic caption appended to it: “the angel of the community.”

Ouch.

I’ll spare you my theories about reverse Stockholm Syndrome and just move on. Because things have been so busy lately as to make me think of my previous gig as a kind of vacation. Two major endeavors are taking up a lot of psychic energy these days, one for Willamette Writers, the other for the fabled Wordstock Festival , two organizations I’ve admired for a long time, but the all day/all night life of the theater obviated doing much with them.

WW has its mega-conference coming – August 6-9, thanks for asking – and I’m organizing the volunteers for the workshop side of the event. And I’ll be spending my birthday this year at Wordstock (October 8-11); presently I’m helping to make contact with the authors who are participating this year and inveigling them into allied activities such as panels and interviews. Activities we’re currently inventing – fun!

Neither of these are paying gigs, but they’re both open doors into communities I only glimpsed through barred windows in the past – communities that will form the predicate for an expanded sense of participation in the infinite universe of scribblers like me.

Wish me luck. I’m going in.

There’s more, too, but I can’t post about it, for reasons you might be able to guess. In the fullness of time, however, all will be revealed…

Wordstock Loves You

Oregon playwriting gets a boost of well-deserved recognition this Sunday when the five finalists for the 2008 Oregon Book Awards find out who gets the Angus L. Bowmer Award for Drama.

Literary Arts presents the drama award every other year, and each time it’s adjudged by a prominent literary figure from out of state, in order to avoid even the appearance of cronyism. (Isn’t that cute? I think Literary Arts is unaware of how teeny tiny the theater universe actually is….) Now that the name of the lucky winner is in the can, we can learn the judge’s erstwhile secret identity: the fab and glam Sherry Kramer, who is not only a fiercely original writer but also one of the best playwriting teachers in the nation. So it will be interesting indeed to see who Sherry selected for top honors.



The competition is fierce: Dori Appel of Ashland, for Hat Tricks; Jacklyn Maddux of Portland, for Strange Sightings in the Great Southwest; Steve Patterson of Portland, for Lost Wavelengths; Francesca Sanders of Portland, for I Become a Guitar; and George Taylor of Beaverton, for Renaissance.

Confession: I’m partisan here. Francesca is an alumna of PlayGroup, the playwriting group that I host at PCS; and Steve is a current PlayGroup member. The play for which he’s nominated got a workshop in JAW 2006. Good thing the choice of ultimate winner is not up to me.

BUT! Here's what is up to me. Prior to the announcement Sunday evening, all five playwrights will be appear at Wordstock, speaking on a panel moderated by moi-meme. I’ll ask each writer to read a brief excerpt from his/her nominated work, then I’ll ask some questions, then you’ll ask some questions.

Date: November 9, at the climax of the 3-day festival
Time: 2pm sharp
Place: Oregon Convention Center, Wieden + Kennedy Stage, Room D-136

Wordstock, by the way, is Portland’s “annual festival of the book.” It's a big deal, a real celebration of writing of all kinds, from poetry to graphic novels. Click here to see its whimsical (and oddly touching) welcome video with a great bonus: images of gorgeous autumnal Portland.