spotlight on songstory: vanessa veselka

[wow, i like how the angles in the little logo make it look like the logo is breaking loose and about to fly off the screen.]

I'm excited to have such outlandishly good writers in the lineup for my reading SongStory, which is coming up fast - March 7th. Vanessa Veselka is up for the Oregon Book Award, for Pete's sake! Here's a little taste of what Vanessa will be reading - a piece of fiction called "Flora in Pregnancy."

*

There’s not going to be a baby shower because there’s no one to plan it. Everyone thinks someone closer to me is taking care of that but they aren’t and I’m sure as hell not going to ask people to come over and throw a party for me.

             

I ran into Jenny Blitz at the Laundromat.

          

 “When’s the baby shower?”

            

 I told her it was on my calendar at home.

             

My midwife says I should look at my pregnancy as an opportunity to get closer to my women friends. But I figure they’ve had their chance. Ten years of punk shows, basement parties, and having sex with all the same people should have been enough to break the ice.

                         

“Don’t you have any female friends?” asked my midwife.

            

 “None I’d let near a child.”

*

Vanessa will be reading with Kevin Sampsell, Lidia Yuknavitch, Courtenay Hameister, Brad Rosen and me on March 7th at Someday Lounge as part of the March Music Moderne music festival.

Facebook invite is here. And info on the other great events that are part of March Music Moderne is here.

Vanessa Veselka is a writer and musician living in Portland, Oregon. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress, and a mother. Her work has appeared in Bust, Bitch, Maxmum Rock ’n’ Roll, Yeti Magazine and Tin House. Zazen is her first novel.

bounty deconstructed

Here's a blog post Stephen wrote that explains in more detail just what those skirts were doing hanging in the hallway and what that lace around his wrists was for. With pictures!

here.

a moment in the day: bounty

Kale, broccoli, walnuts. Jewel-colored carrots so thin I can cut them with scissors. Juice stains the cutting board purple-red. I make coffee and call it all breakfast.

Late-winter six o'clock dark in the apartment, and hand-sewn skirts hang against the walls, white and shadow against white and shadow, like petulant angels with their backs to me. Stephen has made these to wear for photographs so he can get the drapery just right for his lovely paintings of himself in dresses. He's just up, now, and moving around in the bedroom, and if he were to have an impulse to model one of his creations, I'd be hungry for more than just breakfast.

In a moment, he comes into the kitchen wearing PJs and a hoodie. At the wrists of the hoodie hang wide ruffles of white lace [separate, of course, not sewn into the hoodie], also recently made, and he gives me a tiny glance that means he hopes I notice. An eighteenth century nobleman in twenty first century pajamas, reaching to the cutting board for the coffee.

cupid

When I opened Stephen's Valentine's card yesterday, I said, "You'll be surprised how similar mine is."

I kind of love that we had the same creative impulse leading up to this year's V-Day. But I ask you, how could we not?

Nicholas as cupid. Above is Stephen's card to me. Valentinian Arithmetic. Who says Stephen is a Scrooge when it comes to Valentine's Day?

And below, mine.

There he is. Not only Nicholas as cupid again, but we used the very same Nicholas picture. I used two, but still. Here's the detail:

 [here's the

cherub whose

accoutrements

I usurped

for nicholas'

wardrobe.]



 Up close, you can see the various parts of the piece have different textures, but I tried my best to get something close to the original image I was playing with, which was a vintage, Victorian-era valentine. I tried like mad to find a texture for Nicholas that would emulate the card, but ah well - this was as good as I could come up with, and for a small, printed card it was good enough.

I kind of love that in the vintage valentine, it looks like the gentleman is groping his fair lady's breast...

Here's the original. I tried to find a picture of Stephen that was close enough that I could keep the moustache, but alas. Biggest part of the job was slowly recreating sky at the top and sides of the piece so I had room for my doggy cupids. All the extra sky came from those tiny bits of blue bordering the flowers, so it was a painstaking process.

I should mention that Stephen's just as obsessive about this stuff as I. The shadows around Nicholas on the satin sheet? All recreated by Stephen via Photopaint.

a moment in the day: valentine's romance

I stand at the bathroom mirror making up for our Valentine's dinner. Out in the studio I hear a most romantic sound: the whirring of Stephen's sewing machine as he zips himself up a red satin dress.

seven

Stephen and I have been together for seven years, now.

uh oh.

I told him it would be funny to rent The Seven Year Itch for Valentine's Day. [Actually, what we rented was the Bogart film High Sierra.] Seven years ago, the movie was Amelie. There was a time, somewhere in the middle of things, where we realized all we do is watch movies and discussed the fact that we should be more creative and find other things to do. I think we're both glad we gave that up.

When we were first together, I always hated when the movie was coming to an end, because there's always that moment afterward where you feel like you have to discuss it, and I was still too afraid to give my opinions about things. That's what seven years means - not an itch but a comfort place, where we lie in bed after the movie and talk easy and just enjoy each other's company.

I didn't come here to tell you that. I came here to tell you that on our first Valentine's Day together, there was a moment when Stephen walked into the room and said, "Here, this is for you." And presented me with a dryer sheet he'd just found stuck to his shirt.

cymbeline

I probably shouldn't admit this, especially since my uncle is one of the most learned Shakespeare scholars in the country, but it scares me to see Shakespeare. I'm always afraid I'll find myself lost inside his language.

And I really shouldn't admit this, since before I became Merchandising Coordinator at Powell's, I ran the Drama section, which includes a whole aisle on Shakespeare, but I assumed Cymbeline was a woman's name. Turns out, it's the name of the king. Although the play is more about the king's daughter, Imogen. Although in Portland Center Stage's version, called Shakespeare's Amazing Cymbeline, the star is really the piano player.

I saw the show on Saturday night, and I was a bit on the fence about this new character, who plays the piano and provides commentary throughout the performance. He frames the show nicely - his entrance and exit give context and a poignancy - but he was basically explaining what was going on. On the other hand...he was basically explaining what was going on! In other words, it's kind of nice to sit there in the theater all proud of yourself for being decidedly not lost during an obscure Shakespeare play - but knowing you have a safety net just in case.

Part of why the piano player worked was the acting. You have to have a delicate touch to pull off a part like this, and Michael Keck has that delicacy and a storyteller's panache and a nice hint of humor.

All the acting in this production is top-notch - particularly, I thought, Kelley Curran who plays Imogen. She has a great, weighty voice and the ability to be completely convincing in moments of personal anguish even when Shakespeare's plot line is...well...pretty ridiculous.

And that's another thing about the role of the piano player. As he plays his music and ruminates in the moments between the action, he muses about story. "Who will win the kingdom?" he says. "That's what every story is about."* With his appearance in the play and with his musings, the piano player reminds us of the artifice of story - and makes the convolutions of this particular story easier to swallow.

One of the most interesting aspects of Portland Center Stage's version of Cymbeline is the fact that, though there are lots of characters in the original play, PCS gives us only six actors.The whole production is a leapfrog game of quick-change artistry and character juggling. In fact, at the end, the dressers were brought out for a very deserved bow.

Cymbeline is performed in the Ellen Bye Studio, which is a lovely, intimate space to see a play, and that made it extra surprising to see all the quick changes of the cast - particularly at the climax when most of the characters were on stage together. Actors would deliver their lines, then simply step out of the room, leaving it up to us to imagine them still there, while they leapt - poof - into a whole new character and stepped back in from some other entrance, to deliver the next line with perfect Shakespearean aplomb.

 The show goes through April 8th.

*[OK, so I can't remember exactly what the line was, but I hope that's close enough.]