pacific northwest reader spotlight #13

I keep forgetting to post my own spotlight from The Pacific Northwest Reader. What kind of failure of a furious self-promotor am I? Figured I'd give you a few paragraphs from the opening, and since that's more than most of the spotlights I've done on this book, I'm just going to shut up and let it speak for itself...

"Never mind that I moved to Oregon to find true love in a man I hardly knew. Who I’d only met through e-mail. Who was probably gay. Not to mention the whole thing about me running away from the circus. That stuff is incidental to the way I love this place. Or maybe it’s not.

"I’m the kind of perpetual tourist that comes from having spent fifteen years seeing the country but not seeing it. Most of what I saw of America was the inside of a tent. On days off from the circus, we’d hit the road to watch another circus. I was married to a man who lived and loved, worked and played, talked and thought nothing but circus. I tried to adapt. If I couldn’t see Mount Rushmore or Colonial Williamsburg, by god I was going to be happy taking a blurry picture of some historical marker from our moving car. In order to fill the great need for that something else in life, I became desperately fascinated with anything new I could lay my eyes on. Or wrap my heart around. To this day, I’m still a fascinated person. Back then I was just desperate.

"In 2003 I took a trip—not a circus trip, just a me trip—to Portland, where I saw an art exhibit. The artist painted himself in 1930s Hollywood gowns. This seemed brave and strangely sexy. I sent him an e-mail fan letter, which turned into a year’s correspondence, which turned into a decision to change everything.

"Oddly, in all my fifteen years losing my pants across the country—which is to say I was a clown —I never played Oregon. There was something comforting in this as I packed to leave my then-husband in autumn 2004, as if the Portland rains could wash away every last clinging whiff of cotton candy and elephant urine. And my old life."

[here's me in my new life, along with the aforementioned "artist"--a painting he did for his last show at froelick gallery]


les deux, acrylic on panel, stephen o'donnell, 2009

[alright, i feel kind of funny posting my own bio, but in keeping with the rest of the pnw reader spotlights, here's mine from the book...]

Gigi Little now works as In-Store Merchandising and Promotions Coordinator for Powell’s City of Books. Her short story “Shanghaied” was published in the book Portland Noir, and during her circus days, she wrote and illustrated two children’s picture books: Wright Vs. Wrong and The Magical Trunk. She and her husband, Stephen, live in Northwest Portland.