Colin and the 9-11 Reading

I've been doing what I do when I lose someone I love: putting their name in the search in the folder of my journals (which I've been writing digitally since, I don't know, the turn of the century) and seeing what I come up with about them. I found an entry I'd written on September 12, 2009. The day after a reading that Tom Spanbauer had put together (I believe) in remembrance of 9-11. 

By then, I had been a member of Tom's Dangerous Writers class for four years. I'm not sure how long Colin Farstad had been a member, less than I. I think this may have been Colin's first public reading of his work (alongside Tom and Dangerous Writers Kevin Meyer and Elizabeth Taylor). It was at Powell's on Hawthorne, which was a big deal for a new writer, and all four had written original essays, about 9-11, for the event.

Here are a few chunks from my journal, chronicling the event (and for context, I had read at a different reading recently, and I reference it in my comments).

First in the journal there was a section I'd headed: Random quick blips from yesterday. In no certain order.

Last night after the reading when Tom told me that the way he was able to keep himself from crying, reading his piece, was looking at the old man in the front row and pretending that man was his father and he was going to laugh at him for crying. I said, “Wow, that’s so,” and paused just a moment, “twisted.” His smile went from big to bigger, and I told him the emotions he showed just made the reading that much better for us.

 

Colin at the podium. That spread of books on the shelves behind him. Big Colin smile. He’s been so excited about this and saying things like, every time I go over the railroad tracks, or see 11:11 on the clock, or, or, or – I have to close my eyes and make a wish. Afraid it wouldn’t happen after all. But it did.

 

Before the reading, telling Colin how he’d told me, before my reading, his way of being nervous earlier in the day before his performances (Closureyes) but then, getting up to show time, coming to a calm. Telling him how that helped me not be nervous for my reading and hoping the reminder would be good for him too.

That last segment is a little hard to follow. What I was saying is that when I had been nervous about reading my own work in an earlier event, Colin had told me that when he performed with his band Closureyes, he always got nervous early in the day but by the time he went on, the nerves would be gone. That comment had helped me feel less nervous about getting up to read, and so I hoped that telling him so, before his own reading, would help him not be nervous too.

OK, so here's another chunk, later in the journal entry, when I had stopped jotting random moments and was writing out the event as it had unfolded:

Colin [read] third. He probably read slower than he usually reads in class – yes, I think he did. But he was a bit fast and he has that way of mushing his words together. Made some lines hard to catch. Me, I kind of like that he read like he reads, that Colin way, but it’s too bad that you missed things. Like the cool way he dissected and inverted the god is in the details thing.

Some bits of his piece: Kissing without kissing. Letting the girl smoke in the apartment. Taking comfort in the human touch (that was said twice, I think, and was the last line of the piece). The story I tell over drinks and cigarettes. Shoulder to shoulder, cavemen around the campfire. Knee to knee on the couch (with his roommates watching the TV).

Colin got to introduce Tom. Well, not introduce, but call him up. Tom spoke as he always does. That soft blue powder voice, the hesitations and the places where that voice stumbles – all of it charming.

I wish I had Colin's 9-11 essay to read again now. To get the context for the lines I pulled out, the kissing without kissing, the cavemen around the campfire. To remind myself what I meant when I said that Colin "dissected and inverted the god-is-in-the-details thing." (Hyphens added because I've learned some about punctuation since 2009.) Mostly, though, I'm just happy that I thought to write down some of the moments of an event in Colin's life that obviously meant a lot to him. And happy to have been there in the audience for it.

And happy that I've always had that impulse to snap pictures even when I've never had the aptitude for it. 

The readers preparing before the start of the event.

Colin receiving his applause.

where it all began, for me, with steve arndt

Truly, Steve Arndt is the reason I am a part of what feels like the best, most thriving and supportive literary community in the country. If you're a part of that community, this may be true for you too. And if you're part of that community, I'm sending a big hug as we all get used to the hole he leaves behind.

I've been doing what I do when I lose someone. Looking at pictures and reading what I have written about them and our story together in my old journals. I wanted to share a little. This collection is some journal entries and some emails, actually, because it tells the story better.

My backstory is that I had been emailing back and forth with Stephen (my Stephen, the O'Donnell one) for months without having met him, and was going to be taking a trip to Portland to visit my family and meet him in person for the first time. That first visit to meet Stephen, I also met Steve.

From my journal, October 5, 2004. This is before the trip. In here, I'm writing about chatting with my aunt Kathy on the phone about the man I was coming up to meet.

When I said his name was Stephen, she said that was funny because she has all sorts of Stephens around her, and she wanted to introduce me to Sienna’s boyfriend Steve, who is a writer and has taken a year off to write a book and who is connected to the apparently very huge writing community that is in Portland. He is involved in writing workshops and such, and I guess she told him about me, and she says he’d like to talk to me. So that was interesting, too. I said, you know, I’ve always been afraid of the social aspect of the whole writing community thing, and I realize that maybe if I want to get anywhere, I have to jump into it. Very terrifying, but I would like to meet and talk to him and see how things go there.

Now from October 25. I'd flown up, hung out with family, met Stephen, and here was my first meeting with Steve, out at dinner on, I think, the third night of that visit. (When I mention "Seth's book," that was a novel I had been writing at the time.) 

We were sort of in the middle of that discussion when Steve and Sienna came. That shifted the dynamic of the conversation, but it was still very nice. I enjoyed meeting Steve, who is involved in writing and has an accomplished mentor. I can’t remember all that he said, but a couple times I found myself intrigued by the way he speaks about writing or art in general. I remember talking to him about the voice I use in Seth’s book, how I think it’s a good point of the novel. He expressed an interest in giving me some encouragement, and we exchanged email addresses. And all laughed over some pistachio dessert that no one liked but Stephen and which Kathy remarked quite loudly was, “Really crappy.”

This photo is the very first photo I have of Steve, from that dinner.

Now, an email from him from the next day.

last night, if i talked too much, forgive, so nice to be in a conversation about art with artists. not that its some kinda exclusive club. really like stephen and hope to know him better over time.

please if you wanna have a dialoge about writing and won't mind my shity spelling, please e me with your thoughts and concerns. my biggest thing right now is just sitting down and doing writing. in a relationship what you thought was good use of time in the past slips into another good use of time.

hope you arrive safe and strong, steve arndt

And from a later email:

let me know the next time you come up. would love to introduce you to my mentor here in portland, tom spanbauer, ('the man who fell in love with the moon," a pulitzer nominee in 93 and most recently, 'in the city of shy hunters').

yes to stephen, same way i spell it, he has an easy humility that gives comfort.

yes to bob dylan, 'he not busy being born is busy dying.'

take care, thanks sea

I don't know if the yesses were in response to anything in my own correspondence or just Steve talking poetic, as he tended to do without thinking.

Another email. This is me to Kathy on November 1, 2005. She'd told me if I wanted to move to Portland, I could stay with her while I got myself settled. And she offered to pay my way to take some classes at PSU if I wanted, because they had (have) a writing program, something that you could actually earn a degree in. A degree in writing was, at least at the time (I don't know about now), a rare thing.

Hey, I'm thinking seriously about PSU. There are so many reasons I feel it would be something smart for me to explore. I'm actually looking into getting my college transcripts and such together now. Who knows if I'd actually get in, but I really like what I've read about the English department—and Steve Arndt (sp?) has really done a lot to sell me on the writing community there. I was telling Mom: it's more than just school, I think. I've always tried to avoid the idea that to get somewhere with writing you need to get involved in a writing community, do workshops, network... all stuff I was terrified of. I kind of feel like, yes, I need to do this type of thing to get me out there—but that I'm really too shy to do it on my own. And I feel like, hey, Steve might help me feel comfortable enough to... kind of go for it.

This is what Steve did for people. This is what he did for me.

Back to my journal. I want to share one last entry. This was when he took me to meet Tom Spanbauer. I said "class" below, and Tom did famously run a class, his Dangerous Writing workshop, but this was a one-on-one session between them. In it, Steve took a chapter of the book he was writing and read it aloud and then there was discussion about the pages afterward. I felt very privileged to be able to sit in on this intimate work time between them.

February 12, 2005. 

I went to class with Steve and it ran an hour overtime. I felt very welcomed by Tom, and I made a couple comments about Steve’s chapter, and Tom received the comments and engaged me. At one point, Steve looked across the table at me and asked, “Would you say that’s written like most writers write their books?” Or something. And I said, “Do you ask that because you’re not sure or because you already know the answer?” and Tom laughed. 

Steve had said that this latest offering was kind of bland and he wasn’t all that happy with it, yet it was brilliant. I told him after he’d read that it was so good I almost didn’t want to join the class. And they both took that as the compliment it was meant as. And Tom actually told me that at times, he’s been jealous of Steve’s work.

Yes, I think I'll leave this collection of snippets there. I think Steve would (reluctantly and self-deprecatingly) approve.

a moment in the day: tom

It's Friday at work, and I'm at my desk with the earphones on, the weird ones that hook over your ears and hang across the back of your head. Plugged into the computer under my desk. They give me a slight headache but the sounds in my ears - the sweeps of big band, the Helen Kane boop-a-doops, the sparkling rain of Fats Waller's piano - make my brain happy as I edit my spreadsheets. My every Friday task, preparing the chosen titles to go up as New Favorites the coming Tuesday at Powell's, with extra special placement and a 30% discount.

This time one of the titles is Tom's. Tuesday will be official launch day for I Loved You More, Tom Spanbauer's first novel in seven years, published by my favorite publishing company, Hawthorne Books. I'm so excited I could jump up and dance, my head with the headphones on it yanking the computer clean out from under the desk, to drag behind me, across the floor of the Marketing Department, and play Ginger Rogers to my Fred Astaire.

Seven years - has it really been that long? I've listened to what seems like every word of this book come out of Tom's mouth, the group of us sitting around his basement table on Thursday nights. Years of Thursday nights as he wrote and edited and perfected this thing, sharing pieces with us at the end of workshop whenever there was time. All of us listeners felt like each note of his novel's music, each jot of his incredibly honed skill was ours in that basement because he gave it to us first.

This really is mine, this little moment, my fingers on the computer keys, putting his name in spreadsheets. The spreadsheet that I will send out to the merchandisers who will display the book. The spreadsheet that I will send out to the computer guy who will put the book on sale. The spreadsheet that I will forward to the graphic designers who will make a slide for our website and shelf talkers to sit under the stacks in the stores. Each shelf talker has a staff pick blurb, and guess who got to write Tom's.

No one is better than Tom Spanbauer at exposing the hidden pain inside us. In I Loved You More, he reaches even deeper, plumbing the terror of death, love, AIDS, cancer, propinquity, and the complex business of being a man in the world.

As I type his name into my spreadsheet, the song in my ears is Lulu's Back in Town.

*

Check it out on Powells.com here.

a taste of the frozen moment: THE VISITATIONS

[the book is THE FROZEN MOMENT. the publication date is DECEMBER 17th. here's a little TASTE of one of the stories...]

THE VISITATIONS by Tom Spanbauer

Two weeks of hot hot bright August. Portland. During the day, the kind of heat your old house soaks up into its bones.  At night, the heat is inside the walls, under the floor, comes off in waves from the ceiling. Forget about going upstairs. All your long skinny windows open with those pop-in expandable screens.  

At night, they walk by, drunk from the Alto Lounge or the Belmont Inn. They are loud and horny, passing cigarettes, joints, yelling fuck on their way to the bars on Stark and  28^th. Youth. You remember youth. How you walked from bar to bar. The night at Zefiro’s you drank espressos and dirty martinis back to back. Nat Shermans, Galois, Camel straights.  In one of the narrow toilettes, the door locked, a line of cocaine tapped out on the sink.  Above the toilet, the photo of the young naked woman on the beach.  A moment that one night when you stopped.  You looked around.  This isn’t supposed to be good for you, you said.

[Tom Spanbauer is the author of Faraway Places, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, Now is the Hour and In the City of Shy Hunters. You can find his website here.]

Tom will be reading along with contributors Michael Sage Ricci, Margaret Malone, Charles Dye, Liz Prato, Mary Wharff, J. W. Griffith and Brad Rosen on December 17th at The Woods. The facebook event is here. Books will be available at the event. You can also order books through Publication Studio here.

on finishing the novel

 It's hard [impossible] to say when a book [story] [poem] is finished [beyond the moment it's printed, of course]. But there has to be a moment when the writer stops and looks and says, "There. It is what it is." I don't know exactly what it was, last night, that made me sit back and say this about my novel. What final word gave the manuscript its thingness, its completeness. I opened the door to my little writing studio, went down the hall and into the kitchen, poured one swallow, each, of champagne [cava] into two glasses.

Me being the ritualistic person I am, the over-celebrator I am, I took some time to decide which glasses, and I finally chose the thick ones with the little starbursts etched in, the ones Stephen's grandmother gave him [left to him?]. Stephen always says Grandma Betty was the person who most encouraged his art, who taught him to "see." [She makes a tiny appearance in my novel, and Stephen's art makes a huge appearance.] I took the glasses the two steps out into Stephen's studio and handed him one. I said, "I've signed the painting."

[grandma betty]

Stephen says he knows a painting is finished when he looks and looks and his eye doesn't show him anything to change anymore. Then he signs it. He knows he'll continue to fuss with the painting after it's signed, sometimes for a long time, before the coat of varnish goes down, but for him, once he's signed it, it's finished. I know I'll fuss with the novel, and if it has the luck to be run through the ringer that is the agent process and the editor process and the publication process [a pact cosigned by Mephistopheles would help], I'll be doing much more than fussing with it, but for me, the signature's gone on the painting.

[delacroix' mephistopheles]

Funny thing, mentally signing my work. I spent so much of my childhood and young adulthood hating myself that things like my name left a bad taste in my mouth just because they were mine. I almost never said my name out loud, and writing it down was like writing the name of that bully "friend" who used to ridicule you and made you ride horses in fourth grade [smelly].

When I started workshopping the novel, the writers in my group would jot little wrap-up notes at the bottoms of my pages: "Gigi, this is..." Me being the ritualistic person I am, I would go home and consolidate all their notes into a master set of pages, making sure to copy their marks and comments exactly, including any spelling errors [don't ask me why], but in the beginning the one thing I didn't include was my name. I don't know when I started copying my own name down in these pages, but I do know that when I did, it was with the knowledge that the goodness of the process of really learning to write, and the loveliness of these amazing writers, not to mention Stephen at home, had helped me get to a place in my life in which I didn't hate myself anymore. If nothing more than this comes from these five years [six?] in Tom Spanbauer's basement [and that pact cosigned by Mephistopheles], it's still a wonderful, wonderful thing.

dix-huit

First Thursday was very nice. We were worried at first - arrived about 5:15 and found a parking spot on the corner just down from the gallery - and then discovered three open spots directly in front of the place as we were walking up: uh oh. It was the night of the Civil War, which - alright, I'll admit, I didn't know what that was before this year. The big game between the Ducks and the Beavers, and I have to say, at first thought, there's something incongruous about using the word War alongside dorky animal names like ducks and beavers. Although when you think about it, if the ducks and beavers decided to go at it, I'd probably not want to be in the forest.

When we walked in, I think we may have been the only ones. Other than Charles and Rebecca behind the desk, who said perhaps we could get up a right rousing game of bridge. Then people started to filter in, in dribs and drabs. And the other two artists in the show: Gwen Davidson and Ronna Neuenschwander.

The volume of people grew as the evening did so that eventually we had a pretty full house moving through the exhibits. Stephen was signing books. The gallery is selling the book he had made of his work, and it was sweet to watch him sign - and labor over the perfect inscription for Tom Spanbauer. I suggested "fucking novenas, man," but he thought up something better.

But what lovely - to watch people study his paintings. They don't just glance and move by, they study. Get right up close. Often smiling and laughing. I told Stephen later, when I'm at your openings, I feel proud, like I own you. I stand back and watch people look at your work and think, all of that is mine. It's not just the man and the art, it's the world he creates in that art. In a way, I feel like I own that world a little. The way you do when you spend time in Paris or Tokyo and forever that place belongs a little bit to you.

I hope he feels the same way, some day, when I finish this novel - that he's lived a bit in that world I've created of and for the both of us.

[ooh, and i wore the vintage dress lanaux gave me - and noni's pearls. i'll take any excuse to put on the old dog, of course, but whenever i step into the stephen world, a bit of elegance is extra warranted.]

what comes after the thing that came before

Dangerous Writing Thursday, and right off the bat, Tom told us he had something to read. Tom Spanbauer reading to you there in that basement is like you've died and gone to heaven but something happens so good there in heaven that you just die and go to heaven.

It was a piece he was asked to submit to NPR's This American Experience. So amazing. After Tom reads there's always a little block of quiet. A bit of awe, but for me, it's also about feeling like my puny brain can't possibly speak up to make comment on his writing. Sometimes, like Thursday night, for me, it's also about wanting to sit in that story for just a little longer.

I used to be the queen of the rewrite in that workshop. I'd go for weeks bringing in the same pages. Now that I'm further along in the process with this novel, I tend to start each reading by saying, this is what comes after the thing that came before. It's gotten so that sometimes readers, when they want to announce that they're bringing in what follows whatever they read last week, say, "that thing Gigi says." Last night, someone (Charles?) decided that anytime someone said this is what comes after the thing that came before, everyone would drink, and so we did. Even Tom. I'm talking about water and iced tea and the like - we're not perfecting our writing skills over shots of tequilla. Still, after the second round, someone (Colin?) said, hey, there was Dangerous Writing The Musical, and now there's Dangerous Writing The Drinking Game.

Am I getting the people right? Charles? Colin? It's probably all the drinking.