ut omnia bene: burnt tongue 2

domi rocking a very burnt-tongue-like hairdo.
photo courtesy of kathy mcferrin

Writer, organizer and all-around powerhouse boi-about-town Domi Shoemaker put on a hell of a show last night at Crush Bar in Portland. Burnt Tongue 2 was the second in a quarterly series of readings created to honor Tom Spanbauer, author of four books and creator of Dangerous Writing. Emcees Doug Chase and [my husband] Stephen presided over a packed house, and in the lineup were current and former Dangerous Writers along with some special guests. I thought I'd try to give you a little snippet of thought about each.

Chloe Caldwell was up first with one of my favorite essays from her book Legs Get Led Astray. "My Mother Wanted to be Betty Boop" is a beautiful list poem about her mother - and ultimately about longing. I already loved this piece after having read the book, but last night, given that foreknowledge and given the pace of Chloe's reading, I was able to linger a little longer over each thing Chloe told us her mother wanted - so that when she came to the line "My mother: taking off her bra underneath her shirt when she came home from work, and saying that it was the best part of her day," my reaction surprised me. The line is funny and brought a chuckle from the audience, but underneath that is a realness and simple heartbreak that brought tears to my eyes.

photo courtesy of lidia yuknavitch

From motherhood, we shifted to the topic of chlamydia with a chapter from Colin Farstad's novel The Four Month Summer. Down in Tom's basement during Thursday afternoon Dangerous Writing workshops, I've heard Colin read many different incarnations of many different parts of this book. And, as Stephen mentioned in his intro, I've even listened to Colin read the book in its entirety at a lovely salon. So, I have plenty of context for what he read, but for Burnt Tongue 2, Colin did some masterful editing to turn the chapter into a painfully hilarious stand-alone piece.

photo courtesy of kevin meyer

Then John Hinds took us out of the men's room and into a jungle night laced with psychedelics in his short story "The Cosmic Raven of Enlightenment." I've always loved John's easy style as he writes about the big dark mysteries of the world. The piece he read last night came with a bonus segment on the particularities of farts that I can't believe he was able to read with a straight face.

photo courtesy of kevin meyer

Kathleen Lane. When I saw the order for the evening, I couldn't believe Domi was going to make me follow Kathleen Lane. One of the smartest, quirkiest writers around. She read one of my favorite short stories from a collection she's putting together, a fabulously voicey piece about a child's quest to discover if she might be the murdering type. I love Kathleen Lane's brain so much, if I were a zombie she'd be first on my list.

Next, I read a flash piece I was invited to write a while back for the launch of the mysteriously ill-fated website Reading Local: Portland. The story is called "Airplane Seat" and I think I read well, and since I'm not really here to talk about my own piece or performance, I give you another picture. Note the pumpkin sitting unceremoniously at the back of the stage.

photo courtesy of kathy mcferrin

Following me was Gage Mace, taking the stage and donning a hat, saying he'd brought it not knowing if he'd need it or not - presumably to keep the lights out of his eyes. You can see the hat, undonned for the reading, off to the left in the picture.

photo courtesy of kevin meyer

Gage read the opening to the novel he's been working on in Dangerous Writing, a story about coming of age while fiercely holding onto youth in the days following Bobby Kennedy's assassination. Thursday before last in the Dangerous Writing basement, he brought this piece in to be workshopped after tinkering with it to make it more stand-alone for the reading, and it was one of the treats of the night for me, getting to hear the finished result of that work, live, only a week and a half later.

photo courtesy of domi shoemaker

Closing out the first half was Kevin Meyer. Kevin has been a Dangerous Writer longer than I, and the novel he's been working on, which he's just in the finishing stages of now, is dark, funny, surprising and full of excellent snark. Not only is he a great writer, he's also a great editor, so when he left the group not long ago in order to move to California, he left a huge hole in the DW basement. I practically jumped up and down when I found out he couldn't stand being away from the group and his novel and was moving back. The scene he read last night takes place at the edge of a South Dakota cyanide pit and involves abandonment, teen angst and butterscotch schnaps. I think I'll leave it at that.

Even the musical entertainment at intermission was put on by DW Alumni: Joe Rogers and Kai Mathisen cranking it as Post-Op Blondie. One voice and one guitar - a perfectly balanced edgy sound that seemed just right for the evening.

photo courtesy of kevin meyer

Bradley Rosen opened the second half with a big burst of burnt tongue - maybe the most excellent burnt tongue there is. The term Domi took for the name of her lit series comes from one of the techniques Tom Spanbauer most espouses in his Dangerous Writing school of thought. Burning language is taking language and messing it up in a way that creates character. If "character lies in the destruction of the sentence," Bunkie, the sweet, naive hero of Brad's novel The Bunkie Spills, is one of the richest characters in the world.

Event producer Domi J. Shoemaker took the stage next, reading a piece from her novel in progress, a novel of huge voice - in fact, voices, as the narrator Joni suffers from dissociative identity disorder [or what used to be called multiple personality disorder]. Although suffers from seems wrong here. The character has certainly suffered, but each different voice has such humanity that the multiple personalities seem like the one good thing that has come out of all of Joni's hardships. The spot where Domi wanted to sit for her reading was very dark, so emcee Doug Chase stood up to be her one-man lighting director.

photo courtesy of tracey trudeau

photo courtesy of domi shoemaker

Special guest and DW alumna Monica Drake read a sweet, funny essay about the anxieties and longings associated with brushes with celebrity - her "date" with Kristen Wiig, the famous comedienne who has optioned Clown Girl. Monica's such a master storyteller, and as much as I love her kooky fiction, I've been loving the pieces of nonfiction we've had from her lately, like this smart, honest piece. I'm so looking forward to her new novel The Stud Book, which can be preordered now.

photo courtesy of domi shoemaker

Our penultimate reader was Lidia Yuknavitch, another special guest for the evening. Though she's not a DW alum, her writing is so full of voice, her poetry burnt, her themes a straight shot down to the sore place Tom is always asking us as writers to go to. She read a piece of her latest novel Dora: A Headcase, a chapter that talks, in fact, about one of Tom's favorite artists, who he evokes more than any other artist when talking writing, Francis Bacon. This particular piece from the book takes you seamlessly from narrator Ida's on-fire broken-teen anger-whirlwind voice to the beautiful, hopeful voice of a five-year-old in love with her mother. Young Ida is watching her mother play a piano recital:

"...Her back is straight and strong. Her hair is wrapped and wrapped up around in great swirls of French twist. Her gown is off white silk and chiffon, and off of her shoulders, so that her shoulders look to me like perfect pearl drops. Everyone is holding their breath in anticipation.

"No one is everyone more than I am. I am hot underneath my black velvet and a little itchy and yep a little bit I have to pee but I'm also wanting. I could eat her. I want to run up that instant and crawl into her lap and fold myself between her jaw and and collar bone and suck her shoulder..."

If I could, I'd transcribe like a whole page of this part of the book for you, so you could really understand what it was that made me cry, watching Lidia read this.

photo courtesy of domi shoemaker

Last up was the man of the hour, Tom Spanbauer. Which I suppose rhymes a little too much. Tom read a chapter from his upcoming novel I Loved You More. As a Dangerous Writer who has had the privilege of hearing Tom read pieces of this yet-to-be-published novel in his own basement, I feel... well, there's a part of me that feels like I kind of own this book the way you feel you own something just for loving it. And there's part of me that feels jealous of this book, jealous like, hey, other people aren't supposed to get to hear it, only me. Last night's piece was at times scary, at times sexy, at times gross [part of it takes place in the aftermath of an explosion of sewage], at times beautiful, at times heartbreaking. And at the bottom of it all, it's about what the whole book seems to be about in so many different ways: what it is to be a man. I'm floored every time I hear a segment of this book - the grace and the enormity of it.

Reminiscing about the evening, Stephen had this to say, and I think it's the perfect comment to sum up this sweet thing Domi put together:

"Married to a writer, I go to a lot of readings and hear a lot of great writing. But last night was something very special. And one of the incidental delights of the evening was watching Lidia Yuknavitch across the room - she was in my direct line of sight - just beaming as she listened to the other writers read, her love for what her fellow writers do and who they are was so obvious. And I keep thinking that it was just the perfect expression of the amazing, loving camaraderie that is what Portland's writer's community is all about."