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.

a moment in the life of my book: edit

My mug of morning tea is too hot to drink as I sit at my computer in my writing room, reading aloud through the piece I'm going to be reading next Friday night at BOLD Coffee and Books for the third event for Who Killed One the Gun?. I'm reading out loud to practice, to get the words of this excerpt comfortable in my mouth, because my mouth is a twelve-year-old ice skater who needs years of practice before she could ever possibly stick that double lutz. But I'm also doing a tiny bit of editing as I go. There are a couple passages in here that the audience won't understand if they haven't been reading the pages that come before.

I pause at a joke that's the last in a running gag that runs through several scenes. Nope, no one will get it. It's got to go. Fingers on the keys, I make the change and continue with my reading. 

If I admit it, it feels kind of delicious to read this out loud again. Like I did throughout the writing and editing process of this book. Even making that tiny change takes me back to the way it felt when I got to tinker and play with these words. These words come clumsy out of my mouth as I read, but in my head the skater glides and twirls. 

Steam curls from my mug of tea. I recite.

The preacher sweeps his eyes round his quarters like he’s making sure One the Gun is properly taking it all in. The lids are low on the preacher’s eyes, somber, his neck bobbing below the surface of the cross of his shoulders. Gun scans the bookcase, the small chest at the foot of the cot, the religious-looking clay figures decorating the short mantel above the fireplace.

Ooh! This might be funny. What if, later in the book, when One the Gun goes to search the preacher's home looking for the gun, he opens a bureau and he finds—

Wait. 

Wait, the book's out in the world, remember? You can't edit the book any more.

Oh yeah. 

OK. 

Back to reading.

______________________________________________

(By the way, the event is at BOLD Coffee and Books, Friday, January 23, 7 PM. I'll be joined by Erin Hall, author of Dear Sylvia, Love Jane. More info is here and here.)

a moment in the day: practice

Out loud in the car:

That way the noise is. Tyrant, show thy face!

As I drive, I’m practicing for the Shakespearean house salon we’re doing this Saturday where a whole group of us will be reading Macbeth. I don't know the text well enough, so for a lot of the drive I'm just speaking the same passage over and over. The pages with my parts are sitting on the passenger seat—but no peeking unless I’m at a stoplight. A glance to jog the memory and then recite, recite, recite.

That way the noise is. Tyrant, show thy face!
If thou be'st slain and with no stroke of mine,
my wife and children's ghosts will haunt me still—doggy!

A woman walking a little, brown poodle along the sidewalk.

If I don’t practice to the point of near-if-not-complete memorization, I am not a good reader, especially in public. I'm bored of the repetition. I want to stop and switch on the radio but I need to focus.

I cannot strike at wretched kerns, whose arms
are hired to bear their staves: either thou, Macbeth,
or else my sword with an unbatter'd edge I—dude, dude, dude!!

I slow the car as I approach the intersection. I'm sure the woman with the pink hair who just nearly barged into the crosswalk on a green light didn't hear me, but she stops and backs up the couple steps to the curb. And for the moment quietly unshakespear'd, I continue upon mine own way.

a moment in the day: pages

We're at the literary event, and they're about to announce my name. When they do, I'll get up and take these pages in my lap to where the microphone is, and I'll read my piece.

Tomorrow we've got an event that's even more involved, one Stephen will be singing in, one he's been making a beautiful, intricate costume for. Which he hasn't finished yet. In the car on the way over tonight, we were talking about events and how you can still get stressed after all these years.

"And why?" he said. "It's supposed to be fun!"

"I know!" I said. "I mean, I may mess up, but who cares? I've messed up before, and it's been fine. All that matters is that we get out there and we have a good time."

And we do. Even with the stressing, it's always fun. This is the thing we tend to forget when we're busy worrying over will we get there on time will the costume be done will I stumble over my words will I lose my place will I drive around twenty minutes looking for parking will I read poorly will no one laugh at the funny parts will someone come up to talk to me and I won't remember their name will I trip on my way to the microphone and fall on my face will my pants fall down.

That never happens. Your pants never fall down.

And here's the thing. If you have fun no matter what goes wrong, what can go wrong?

At the front of the room, now, the co-host calls out my name. As the audience applauds, I head on up.

She hands me the mic and I turn to the audience. Big grin on my face.

"Hi!" I say. I hold up my small stack of pages: the lifeline and security blanket of every writer. "So, before we get started, does anyone have my first page?"

a moment in the day: stain

The back room of Crush Bar is packed for tonight's event of the Burnt Tongue quarterly reading series. Stephen and I sit at a little round table at the back of the small room, he with a burger and a cocktail, I with a shameless plate of nachos and a glass of red, and ahead, through the crowd dappled with flecks from the overhead disco ball, Kelly Jeske stands on stage at the microphone, reading her essay - stories of betrayal, of death, of burial, of rage, of rising up, of life in this new world.

A lot of tonight's essays have been about life in this new world. One particularly favorite piece was entitled "The Morning after the Tangerine Apocalypse." We're preaching to the choir, yes, but it feels good to be here in the midst of all these good people, all feeling the same horror. The evening started with a shout, a communal primal scream that host Daniel Elder led all of us in bellowing up to the rafters or to high heaven or to the abyss, one very satisfying word: fuck.

With all of this, I'm only slightly distracted by the fact that I seem to have dripped wine on my top. One small spot of darker purple on the lighter purple fabric. I thought I'd done so earlier in the evening, only to look down later and see it gone. Then even later, damned if I didn't do it again, and it must be for real this time, because - wait - look down and... what the hell! It's gone again!

Both times this magic happens, I only let it lightly brush across my consciousness because the reading pulls me back in and holds me hard, Kelly Jeske, reading about burial, she and her young daughter burying a dead mouse in the yard. Not as a funeral per se but, "to see deconstruction and transformation that happens deep below the surface."

"The morning after the election," Kelly reads, "she surfaces out of sleep, uncovers her warm brown body, eyes shining. She says she fell asleep before Hilary became president."

A huge tear, one of many tonight, jumps from my eye. It seems to have so much force that it misses my face entirely. It lands, yes, on my shirt. 

brave on the page at powell's city of books

Every Portland writer dreams of reading at Powell's City of Books - not to mention plenty of writers across the country. What a cliché to say, but it's true. I had the chance to be part of an event there in 2009 when Portland Noir came out. Though I wasn't one of the readers, I got to hang out at the table and sign books afterward, as a contributor to the collection, and it was definitely one of the thrills of my writing life.

Last Monday, January 7th, I read at that podium as part of the Powell's event for the book Brave on the Page. It was an incredible event in many ways. The lineup was...wow. Reading from their essays in the book, along with me, were Kate Gray [Another Sunset We Survive], Gina Ochsner [The Necessary Grace to Fall], Robert Hill [author of When All is Said and Done and a personal writing hero of mine] and writer / editor / publisher / powerhouse Laura Stanfill. After the readings, writing guru Joanna Rose [Little Miss Strange] moderated a panel on writing, process and creativity with Jon Bell [On Mount Hood], Kristy Athens [Get Your Pitchfork On], Scott Sparling [Wire to Wire] and Yuvi Zalkow [A Brilliant Novel in the Works].

Jon - Robert - Scott - Kristy - Laura - me - Joanna - Yuvi

When we gathered for a photo afterwards, Kate and Gina were lost in the crowd and we couldn't pull them over, but here's most of us - framed by a wall of black and white comic book pages. When you think about reading in the Basil Hallward Gallery in the Pearl Room of the City of Books, you have to wonder what art show will serve as your backdrop. I loved this. It was nearly floor to ceiling.

Robert Hill

We had a wonderful, enthusiastic crowd of approximately 150 people, including local writing luminaries like Tom Spanbauer, Stevan Allred, the recently-Oregon-Book-Award-nominated Carter Sickels. And one of the coolest things to me: so much of this crowd was writers. I suppose that's to be expected when the book is about writing and the essays speak to the writing life and the panel is all about craft - but as expected as it was, it still made me very pleased, so many of us gathered in one place to talk about this thing that is sacred to us.

Kate Gray

I really liked the mix of essays chosen for the event. Kate Gray's "Shiny Object, Shiny Object" was full of great suggestions for writing and getting the job done, all of which I [wish I could] adhere to. "...After an hour on a bike, the focus on one-foot-two-feet, spin-spin-spin, everything else falls away. And I am balance and shift and friction..."

Gina Ochsner

Gina Ochsner spoke about the very particular issue of cynicism and what it can do to our confidence, our writing process. "...If I allow cynicism to drum with the heavy hammers of no good, no good against the tympanic membrane, I hear the winter wren in the dark hemlock behind our house. I can't recognize the beauty of its song nor appreciate the fact that the smallest, plainest birds compose the sweetest songs..."

me

Again, it was a nice mix - because Kate and Gina's essays spoke about process and craft, Robert Hill and Laura Stanfill's essays combined writing topics with personal stories, and mine was a purely personal story - one that, when I lived it, had been full of shame and, when I read it last Monday, got a surprising amount of laughs from the audience. I love when the stories of your life do that:

"...Ring of the phone, his voice in my hear, high, almost feminine: 'Can I share something?'

"It wasn't really sharing since he'd only called to read me a story he'd written, and he didn't really want to know what I thought unless I loved it.

"Sometimes I didn't, but I hated to disappoint people..."

Robert's "Why I Write Out Loud" is about words - about sound and texture and cadence - but is also about family. "...I grew up on stories told at bedtime, told on car trips, told at the dinner table, after dessert. My mother told these stories, five or six of them, over and over, in rotation..." and "...Every syllable of these words told in my mother's raconteur's voice full of wit and Brooklyn inflection I loved hearing, every entertaining sentence told again made the usual silence of our family bearable..."

Laura Stanfill

Laura Stanfill's "Overnight" describes the writer / mother dilemma, Laura lying in bed, waiting for her daughter to fall asleep so she can get up and write her novel. But this tiny essay is so much more:

"...The boy in my novel gets diagnosed with a weak constitution, and he believes what the doctor says. He stays in bed. He reads and rests. He wishes. My daughter rolls over, tilts her chin up, breathes deep. She started kindergarten this fall. The shift of her world has begun. Someday both my girls will leave the house without me. They will be broken apart by small things. I tell stories about brushing teeth, drinking milk, getting enough sleep, instead of filling pages with lace and music. Someday my girls will choose whether or not to be good to their bodies..."

Joanna Rose

Sadly, I can't include a bit of voice from Scott, Yuvi, Jon or Kristy, since their portion of the event was all off the cuff, not in any book for me to refer to. But it was such a terrific panel. Funny, fascinating, just the right length. Joanna Rose led them through such topics as dealing with holes in writing, "fact vs. truth," and the benefit of writing groups - illustrated perfectly in a story Joanna told in which, while workshopping a scene with the Pinewood Table writing group, Scott Sparling learned that women in showers do not squat to pee.

Kristy Athens - Jon Bell - Scott Sparling - Yuvi Zalkow

These guys were great. Every one of them. And after the formal panel, Laura brought all of us back up front for a Q&A, taking questions from the crowd.

- A little goofing with the mic, which didn't quite reach me in the very center of the group. It was an honor to sit in the middle of these smart writers and try to keep up with the great questions and answers.

I said it was an incredible event in many ways, and another of those is the support Brave on the Page has had from Powell's. Forest Avenue Press is a very new press, a micro-press, yet here we were with a big event hosted by the City of Books. Also, the  books are printed just one floor down on the Espresso Book Machine. I think Laura Stanfill has something really special going with Forest Avenue Press, and the support she's gotten says loads about not only Powell's and the writing community in Portland but also - and most of all - Laura's energy, ingenuity, and smarts.

Laura Stanfill

After it was all out and over, Laura had this to say in an e-mail of thanks to all the participants:

"I keep thinking about reading in the Pearl Room as a dream come true and how it came true in a richer, deeper, more powerful way than I could have imagined. And nobody in New York made it happen, no agent or editor or outside party. We made it happen. Together." 

*

To order Brave on the Page from Powell's Books, click here.

To check out Forest Avenue Press, go here.

FAP is now accepting submissions from Oregon authors writing "quiet novels." To submit, click here.

burnt tongue 2 - a wrap-up

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

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

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."

getting ready for the reading

book plus lovely scarf laura
knitted me as a thank you for
designing the cover - part of
my outfit for the afternoon

I'm getting myself ready for the Brave on the Page Reading and Launch party. This means practicing my piece alone in my writing room, sitting on the couch with Nicholas on my lap, reading with the door closed even though Stephen's away, at work. This means taking my shower and doing my makeup, then taking Nicholas out for a walk, reciting memorized bits of my essay quietly under my breath as we walk down a sidewalk scattered with wet leaves. Reciting. Reciting. Stopping whenever I see a dog walker up ahead so they don't think I'm nuts.

I iron my blouse, get dressed. Do my hair. Take special care that it curls under on the bottom, curls back on the top, spray it with that stuff.

When I get back from Powell's after picking Stephen up from work, as soon as we walk in the door, Stephen says, OK, put the curling iron on.

Oh yes, this was always part of the plan. I'm no fool.

Les Lunettes, Stephen O'Donnell, acrylic on panel

You don't marry a man who paints himself in dresses and elaborate hairdos without taking advantage of his talents, especially if you're a woman with no sense of style whatsoever. Early in our relationship, I used to get defensive when Stephen wanted to fix my lame attempts at primping, but by now, we've gotten to that place in our marriage where both of us simply agree that it's just better to do the job right. I press the button to start the curling iron warming up again, and we consult on jewelry, stacking bracelets and earrings out on the table.

Before we get started on the hair, Stephen glances at my blouse and his face does that crumple thing that means he's politely letting me know that though I made a valiant effort, some assistance is in order. I take my shirt off. He goes and gets the iron.

Alas, sometimes even Stephen can't keep me on task. Re-ironed and re-curled, re-dressed and happily dolled up, I grab my book and am out the door to the reading - leaving the array of carefully-chosen jewelry behind.

frozen moments night: a wrap-up in [bad] pictures

Seriously? This is all I got from snapping away with my phone through the evening? OK, I'm not too surprised, but still. I tried with flash, I tried without flash. What I should have tried with, of course, is a camera.

Here's emcee Mark Saltveit, comedian and palindrome world champion. Seriously, he's a world champion. Somehow I thought he'd be introducing us all palindromically, so sort of on the spot before the reading started, he wrote one for me off the top of his head. It involves me as a singer opening up for Mark in one of his comedy shows: "Gigi Little, belt 'til I gig."

Mark kept things moving great throughout the night.

Here's JW Griffith. I was on the program following him. You don't want to follow JW Griffith. He's a brilliant writer and very smooth, very particular reader. He was the only one among us to read from his actual Frozen Moment piece: "How We Were, How We Are, How We'll Be."

Here's Kathleen Lane. She followed me. You don't want Kathleen Lane to follow you. She read one of my favorites from a collection of short stories she's been putting together. It's about normal stuff: chewing scabs, winding your hair around your finger and then licking your finger, stuff like that. Actually, it's about childhood and identity and the longing for connection. Beautiful.

Here's Michael Sage Ricci reading from his new novel in progress, a story about tattooing and murder. I was privileged to be the first person to hear the first chapter, when it was just written, so hearing him read it in public, I had a little bit of a 'that's my boy' reaction. Reading the opening to a novel at an event can be risky because there's so much setup that goes into that first chapter, but Sage's opener is totally riveting.

Next up in the parade of faceless photographs: our musical guest for the evening, Bradley Rosen. I didn't realize until we talked later that those were his own songs he played. Lovely. He closed the first half of the event.

Here's Liz Prato, who's a great teacher/workshopper as well as writer. I haven't taken her workshop, but friends of mine have and rave about it. As a writer, she's a quirky storyteller who crafts sentences with precision.

Here's Margaret Malone doing her lovely deadpan read of a short story I hadn't heard before. I always love Margaret's work, so deft, so elegant and full of dark wit. Sadly, if I haven't read a piece beforehand, after a reading the details of the story go out of my head and I'm just left with the enjoyment I felt and the longing to get that story back in me again - especially if I wait a few days to write it up. I was like that with both Margaret and Liz' pieces.

Closing the show: Tom Spanbauer, presenting a gorgeous psychedelic moment from his new novel I Loved You More. Two tidbits about Tom's reading. First, somewhere in the middle there, someone, maybe Someday Lounge staff, maybe Bigfoot, was making loud roaring sounds in the kitchen just off from the stage. Tom, with his lovely powder soft voice, kept reading, finished his piece, paused and then roared right back.

Secondly, I found out after the reading that Tom had actually lost the last page of his piece somewhere between the car and Someday Lounge. And he spent part of the early part of the reading rewriting it. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a remarkable man.

As I said above, I read second in the lineup.

For notes on how I did, you can read this.




Or look at this picture of my shoes.

In my defense, I want to say I'm usually a good reader. After that performance, though, I don't know. I may never read again.

By the way, I'll be reading on May 30th at the Jack London Bar. Details are up on my website here.

[OK, I wasn't that bad.] Frozen Moments was a reading to benefit the anthology  The Frozen Moment, edited by Colin Farstad. More information on the book is here.

a moment in the day: the reading

Spotlight is a yellow veil in front of my eyes, cheap net hanging from a bad hat, a Tiffany lampshade on my head. I stand at the podium reading to a good-sized audience at Someday Lounge, worrying that my writing is cliché, worrying that I'm mixing my metaphors.

In these new girly shoes with the high heels, I was afraid I'd trip coming up to the mic, but it's my tongue that's been tripping. I keep reading. If I look confident, maybe no one will notice.

Now the sentence that does its slip-on-a-banana-peel out of my mouth contains words that aren't even on the page. My pronouns are the Three Stooges, running around, and I is where you should be and you is where he should be, and maybe that's more Abbot and Costello than the Three Stooges, but I keep reading. If I look confident, maybe no one will notice.

Now I'm back on track, and things are going along fine. I read a line and the audience laughs. But as I read, I'm thinking about the experiment I decided to conduct prior to this event, where I would not let myself get all over-the-top about practicing like I always do, how I'd just read my piece through once or twice and then get up there and perform it, like every other writer does - how this was not a successful experiment.

My dry tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.

Now Shemp does that thing where he pokes the V of his fingers into my eyes, and my words take a tumble again.

"Can't I just read this?"

Did I say that out loud?

Keep reading.

Maybe no one will notice.

[pank] invasion night

[courtesy elizabeth taylor]

Actually, I'm misspelling it above. It's [PANK], all caps. I love that I read for a series and for a publication that is spelled with brackets. [PANK] is a great lit mag - both online and in print [beautifully produced, thick magazine full of small, lovely and often experimental poetry and prose]. With so much going on this week and a half, I haven't had a chance to write this up until now, so the Invasion is a bit of a blur to me now, as they are when I don't already know the pieces I'm going to hear, when I don't know all the faces to connect with the names. So, I know I won't do the evening justice. So, why am I doing it, then? Because it was a terrific night. A great mix of readers, of styles, of voices.

[courtesy domi shoemaker]

Hobie Anthony started the evening out, reading a few flash pieces and a portion of a novella. Lovely poetic language - but the only downside to the evening was that during this first reading, some sort of ruckus was happening behind EAT Chapel's curtain - maybe they were bowling back there. I missed some of Hobie's words. What he read was poetry and prose mashed into one beautiful [and sometimes disturbing] thing. You can check the flash pieces out here on [PANK].

[courtesy domi shoemaker]

Ryan Bradley read some of his own work and finished up with a reading of someone's popular song lyrics so that I could remind myself that I'm completely out of touch with the modern world. I had no idea what the song was. Didn't matter - it was still really funny, especially after hearing him read his own work. He writes smart, edgy poetry and prose. [PANK] has him here and here.

Third up, Monica Drake, fourth up, me. You do the math. This is the universe getting me back for feeling smug about arranging the rundown of SongStory so I didn't have to follow anyone. Man, Monica was good. It was an essay about forks. Forks! And it was funny and heart-breaking and insightful and blew everyone away.

[courtesy kathy mcferrin]

I read a piece I've been tinkering around with called "Rocket," about obsession, loneliness and plastic toys. I'm disappointed not to have a picture of Monica reading, but above is a shot of one corner of the audience, including Monica in white, watching the proceedings. Below is me - and that's Domi's cool seat, which she sat in to read later.

[courtesy elizabeth taylor]

[courtesy domi shoemaker]

I introduced Rebecca Olson, who read some lovely poetry with very particular detail, brevity, sumptuous metaphor. You can read three poems up on [PANK] here. Notice the way she not only plays with language but with voice in these different pieces.

Riley Michael Parker read part of a western story (novel?) called All Things End in Blood - totally cool and particular. At least I think that's what he read from - I don't remember whether he mentioned the title before he started, but he mentions it in this interview up on [PANK]. Among other things, I really like his sense of rhythm. His prose is musical even when it's hard-edged. Not surprising, his [PANK] story "Silver Dagger" was written after one listening to the Dolly Parton song of the same name.

Sadly, I haven't come across a picture of Riley to include. Nor a picture of Domi Shoemaker reading, but here's a shot, taken at the event, of Domi with mentor [and all-around wonderful guy] Tom Spanbauer.

[not sure who took this one...]

Domi's piece "Green Man" is about a nightmare - well, it's about more, but its setting is nightmare - and I thought her reading style perfectly fit. Smooth and sort of liquid, like the tone of the story itself. She uses language in such wonderful, particular ways. Incidentally, one of the cool things about [PANK] is that they have their writers record an audio version of the story / poem as well. What a cool feature, giving you an even more personal connection with the writer and the work.

[courtesy elizabeth taylor]

Over to the right is M. Bartley Seigel, poet and editor at [PANK]. He read poetry that was multi-multi-layered and fluid, image upon image morphing into insight. Check out, in particular, This is What They Say, They Say, up on Monkeybicycle here. And Five Poems, up on Bluestem here.

Hoping I'm still getting the order right after all this time, I'll say Kevin and Chloe closed the show. They were a surprise - like the special guest stars. Chloe Caldwell reading a lovely, smart piece from her new book Legs Get Led Astray called "Girlfriend," which plays on the phrase "You have a girlfriend now" - and Kevin Sampsell, her editor at Future Tense Books - tag-teaming with his own addition "You have a boyfriend now," which I learned he'd written just that day, which made me terribly, terribly jealous. Terribly. The original is a wonderful piece, and this special double-header was terrific.

Here below is a quick shot Monica Drake took with her iPhone, I believe: Chloe and Kevin.

[courtesy monica drake]

Actually, I wonder if that's the back of my head that's in the way. If so, sorry, Kevin.

Great mix of readers and styles, great evening. This [PANK] Invasion was put together in conjunction with Burnside Review and Housefire.

[courtesy domi shoemaker]

[courtesy domi shoemaker]

Here, to finish things off, are a couple more pictures of the evening. First a couple audience shots - which don't do the crowd justice as they were only taken of the front of the house. And down below, one of my favorite shots: M. Bartley  Seigel, [PANK] editor and poet and our guru for the evening, enjoying watching the fruits of his labors. I think he should be very proud and satisfied with what he pulled together. From all of us Invaders, thanks, Matt.

[courtesy domi shoemaker]