a moment in the day: cheers

The newspaper man and I sit at a two-top in the coffee shop, a to-go cup each. My coffee is called something like a Chile mocha, which I ordered because I'm meeting with a newspaper man and that makes me feel equal parts grown up and little-kid excited in a way that something as luxurious and ridiculous as a "Chile mocha" seems to call for.

I arrived ten minutes early. He'd told me to look for the "tall, balding old guy who will look like he's very out of place." When I walked in, the first thing I saw was two tall, balding guys sitting side by side in those kinds of coffee shop seats you sit in when you're by yourself or waiting for someone. One was working at an open laptop computer. One was on the phone. Neither appeared to be particularly out of place. I tried to pretend to look both in the eye for a quarter second and then I ran away to the counter to order my Chile mocha. Then I spent the next ten minutes wondering how long I'd wait before forcing myself to go back around the corner to confront the tall, balding guys, one of whom was surely my reporter but I didn't know which, and I was so happy when my actual reporter stepped around the corner and was a completely different tall, balding guy, and he had my book in one hand so I'd know for sure.

During the course of the interview, we've been talking about what what scares us in a good way - monsters and ghosts and vampires and science experiments gone wrong - versus what scares us in a bad way, a real way, and he brings up Donald Trump.

"I shouldn't say this" I say (I mean, he's got the recorder going and everything), "but he and I share a birthday."

"I'll go you one further," he says. "I share a birthday with Vladimir Putin."

In the next second and at exactly the same time we both raise our to-go cups and give a laughing, though understandably ill-at-ease, cheers.

City of Weird Contributor: Brigitte Winter

Now that City of Weird is out and in stores, I thought I'd write a little about each of the wonderful contributors. I'm going to do it one at a time, generally as a lead up to one of our events. As our Powell's City of Books book launch is coming up on Wednesday, September 12th (facebook event page is here), I'm starting with those authors. Today: Brigitte Winter.

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I had never met Brigitte Winter before accepting her story "Octopocalypse: a Love Story" for City of Weird. She's a longtime Portland-lover but lives on the East Coast. We're lucky to be having her fly out to be part of the book launch.

"Octopocalypse" fit right into City of Weird with its giant man-eating octopus, but what I really loved the story for was its subtle but wicked sense of humor, it's steamy, sexy scenes, and most of all, the beautiful, gentle, real way the relationship between the characters of the sisters was written. When I had all my stories chosen and was looking for a figure to carry the book cover, I zeroed in on Brigitte's octopus right away. It really was no contest. I kept this secret from Brigitte as I was building the octopus and creating the design, but when she flew in to Portland and we met for the first time, when I had the design down but hadn't made the final adjustments yet, I gave her a sneak peek, a flash of the image on my phone, and it was fun to see her laugh.

We met at Vintage Cocktail Lounge in Montavilla, the actual setting where characters Kathy and eMa (that's no typo) meet at the beginning of the love story portion of the tale. When I arrived, Brigitte and her life partner Dustin were already there, along with a pal octopus. They told me Dustin had originally come up with the name Octopocalypse, and it has been used not only for this story, but an art show that they launched together in Baltimore.

Art is a central theme in Brigitte's short story, as well as her life. She's a fabulous jewelry maker and is the executive director of Young Playwrights’ Theater, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that inspires young people to realize the power of their voices through creative writing.

Here's a little snippet of her lovely piece "Octopocalypse: a Love Story" to give you a taste of her work:

I should have noticed something was wrong when the cats started disappearing, but I was too busy falling in love. 

Her name was eMa—the lowercase letters embracing a single uppercase M. She changed the spelling when her art was good enough to sign, she told me. “eMa has nice symmetry.” 

eMa had electric blue hair and her nose was pierced like a bull. She only wore circa 1950s dresses from House of Vintage, and she made her own jewelry out of junk she found at the ReBuilding Center on Mississippi—lots of hinges and screws and other tiny hardware glued to old brooches she bought at estate sales. She was as weird as everyone in Portland, but also like no one I’d ever met— definitely like no one back home in Connecticut. eMa was Portland, and she was beautiful, and she was exactly why I moved here.

You can check out Brigitte's writing and jewelry at http://www.brigittewinter.com/

For more info on the Octopocalypse art show, you can check out the facebook event page here.

City of Weird Contributor: Mark Russell

Now that City of Weird is out and in stores, I thought I'd write a little about each of the wonderful contributors. I'm going to do it one at a time, generally as a lead up to one of our events. As our Powell's City of Books book launch is coming up on Wednesday, September 12th (facebook event page is here), I'm starting with those authors. Today: Mark Russell.

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Sometimes I like to think about the fact that I know the guy who writes The Flintstones.

I mean, the fact that there is a new comic book based on The Flintstones is amazing in itself, and the fact that the writing in this comic is not just based on rock puns and old Honeymooners episodes, that it's actually quite hilarious and beautifully subversive and full of social commentary, that all kind of blows my mind. The fact that it's written by the guy who periodically comes down to the Academy Theater to watch Seventies movies with me, though, that is the best.

Mark Russell has churned out a remarkable pile of wit in print in the last few years. I remember the time just before his career really took off, when he was talking about his upcoming book God is Disappointed in You. The publisher, Top Shelf Productions, had made up little stapled chap books with some of his funny interpretations of the Bible, along with Shannon Wheeler's illustrations, and he gave me one.

I couldn't have imagined, then, where he'd go in his creative life in only a few years. God is Disappointed in You is a very funny, beautifully accurate brief retelling of the Bible, book by book, and his follow-up, Apocrypha Now gives the same droll, irreverent though respectful treatment to the Gnostic Gospels. They're out, now, in a lovely slip-cased box set.

Then DC snapped him up, and he was writing the comic Prez, about the nation''s first teen-aged President. Again: it was full of Russell's wit and his keen eye on politics. I think Max Robinson says it best in his article Why DC's Prez is the Best Comic You're Not Reading:

"...not only is Mark Russell and Ben Caldwell’s 2015 reimagining of Prez a great comic, it’s the best satire comics has seen in years."

Oh, and Ben Caldwell's art is super fantastic!

And now, The Flintstones! Ladies and gentleman, this is not your grandpappy's Flintstones.

Here's a fun fact: one of the lines in Mark's City of Weird story "Letters to the Oregonian" he lifted and reused in an issue of The Flintstones.

I love how clever and droll and just plain Mark Russell the story is and I'm honored to have it in City of Weird. Here's a little taste. Complete title: "Letters to the Oregonian from the Year 30,000 B.C."

Dear Editor, 

This is in response to “Fire: Invention of the Year?” (Oregonian 5/13). Last month, my partner and I were visiting her clan in California. One night, over dinner, her Uncle Thrak said, “You’ve got to try this,” and lit a fire. At first I was like, “Oh, great, more yuppie chic from Uncle Thrak!” But I have to say, heating my mammoth rump with fire was life-changing. Intentionally burning your food (or “cooking,” as they call it) really unlocks the mammoth-flavor. I kept thinking how great it would be paired with a marionberry compote or live ants. 

So last week, after dropping our son off at Cave Song Adventurers, we bought our own fire starter kit. Our first attempt at cooking ended in a forest fire (sorry, Tree People). But we chose to view this as a lesson and not a failure, and found that, once you get the hang of it, cooking is not only fun, but also a powerful tool of self-expression. 

In fact, we found cooking with fire so rewarding that we opened a mammoth-fusion food cart just west of the burned forest. We’ve taken to calling this area West Burnside.

Crolak Grogg-Truk 

Gorba Grogg-Truk 

Proprietors, 

Whammoth, Bammoth, Thank You Mammoth

For a wonderful, in depth look at all of who Mark Russell is, check out his feature on On the Block Radio with Andrew Gurevich.

City of Weird Contributor: Rene Denfeld

I drive past Powell's City of Books' downtown store every weekday on my way to work. Usually I cross the river via the Burnside Bridge, but lately I've been cutting over to Belmont/Morrison and taking the Morrison Bridge. You could say it was because of the road construction on Burnside, and you'd be kind of right, but the real reason is that taking Morrison lets me come upon the Powell's marquee head on rather than from the side and gives me a better view of City of Weird up there in "lights." Looking at the book title up there is like looking at my own name, but it's better because it's also like looking at 31 other names, the name of Laura Stanfill our publisher, and all thirty contributors. 

Now that books are going out to stores and the events are about to begin, I thought I'd write a little something about each of these wonderful people who made this book what it is. I'm going to start with the writers who will be reading at the Powell's launch this coming Wednesday (facebook event page is here, just saying), and today's writer is Rene Denfeld.

I'm a total, raving fangirl for Rene Denfeld. When she sent me a story for City of Weird, I kind of couldn't believe it. It was like being given a short story by, I don't know, Audrey Hepburn (if Audrey Hepburn were a writer). I mean, there's the initial, wow, she's a remarkable artist thing, and the wow, she's a star thing, but remember, Audrey Hepburn was a humanitarian, devoting much of her life to UNICEF. Rene Denfeld is like this to me - someone I so admire for her art but who I am kind of in love with for the good she does in the world.

Rene is an investigator who represents men and women facing the death penalty. Many of whom are already on death row. I cannot imagine the hurt she takes into herself while uncovering their stories and when having to let her clients go if there is nothing else she can do for them. I fully believe that the personalities and identities we possess come from genes and environment and experiences and influences and injuries we cannot control. My heart aches for the people whose luck landed them on paths that lead to the prison cells where Rene often meets them. Even considering that mine might be an extreme viewpoint, the compassion Rene gives people - and the way she approaches issues with openness and without judgment... there's that fangirl thing again.

Here are her words from a wonderful feature in the Oregonian:

I find long-lost family members, friends, and other witnesses. I spend a lot of time in prisons, trailer parks, tenements and shacks in the woods. I locate ancient records in dusty basements. Sometimes I uncover terrible secrets. In a nutshell, I learn why. What made this person? Why did they do the things they did? it can be a very sad, difficult job. People honor me with their memories, and so I absorb a lot of pain. But it can also bring moments of profound insight.

Rene used these experiences when she wrote her beautiful, French Prix award-winning novel The Enchanted. I saw the same combination of imagination and boundless heart in "The Sturgeon Queen," the story she wrote for City of Weird. I had asked submitters for stories playing on sci-fi and fantasy tropes, all taking place in Portland, and Rene gave me a man-eating sturgeon - and so much more. It's a story about Portland's history, about human kindness and human oppression, about gentrification, growing old, telling stories, telling lies, and the lost world of the Native culture that once thrived in the Pacific Northwest.

Here's a taste of her words, from the opening to the story.

My grandma told me this story. You have to mind my grandma. She liked to say she was a descendant from the natives that once filled this area—the men who worked the falls, lowering their nets, the women who waded for wapato in the low-lying river fields. 

My grandma was fond of telling stories, and at one time or another, she also claimed to be a native of Russia, the daughter of a convict who married a slave, and, once, when she was knee-deep in Wild Irish Rose, said she was a descendant of Mr. Clark himself, on his wild ride up the river, on which she said he sprayed his seed like a cottonwood tree in spring. 

I love her writing for the heart, the wit, the lovely, musical language, the sheer storytelling skill of it. I'm so excited and honored to have this story in City of Weird.

Rene also wrote the nonfiction books All God's Children, The New Victorians and Kill the Body the Head with Fall. Her next novel, The Child Finder, will be out in fall of 2017.

little shop of horrors at portland center stage

Little Shop of Horrors was beloved in my household when I was growing up. At the drop of a hat, we would put on the soundtrack and sing our hearts out at the dinner table, and now, years later, with all of them far away in California, the thought of that shared joy over music and blood-thirsty man-eating potted plants makes me want to cry. Watching it again, Friday night at Portland Center Stage, I think I smiled the entire time.

It wasn't just nostalgia, although the moment the song "Skid Row (Downtown)" began, I had that thing happen where all the skin on my legs tingles. I think that's my body's equivalent of getting the chills. And I know those chills in that moment, and the grin that spontaneously clamped itself to my face, were pure nostalgia. But the way that smile wouldn't let go through the whole show, and all the laughter that probably annoyed the woman seated to the left of me, that was pure Portland Center Stage.

I was worried, as I always am when I'm watching a performance of something I've known in movie form, whether this production would be able to stand up to that old, beloved version. And would they go for a classic rendering or throw in a twist (which sometimes works, sometimes doesn't)? Portland Center Stage's production of Little Shop of Horrors is totally classic*, and totally works. It's got the beautifully pipsqeaky Seymour, the bombshell-squeaky Audrey, the giant puppet plant, all of it. But I wasn't jonesing for a Rick Moranis or a Steve Martin. I guess the closest I came to missing something was, early on, being aware of just a hint of longing for Ellen Greene's (the original off-Broadway Audrey who reprised her role in the 1986 film) surprising voice switch from squeaky to something husky and odd and powerful at certain spots in her songs. I knew I couldn't expect it. That was not classic Little Shop, it was classic Ellen Greene, and to have another actress mimic that would not be right. Still, I had a little craving. But it didn't last long. Gina Milo's voice is beautiful and pure, and her high notes are powerful in their own right.

Gina Milo

She also works the line between humor and sweetness very well. When she came to the end of "Somewhere That's Green," this moment of poignancy that has to struggle to exist in all of Little Shop's luscious camp, I thought to myself, wow, I totally believe her.


Nick Cearley, too, was funny and nuanced. He played Seymour as Seymour should be played, but with lovely timing that kept the most easily caricaturable part in the show from being a poor parody.

Jamison Stern and Nick Cearley

Jamison Stern was particular and beautifully slimy as Orin, Audrey's sadist-dentist boyfriend. The scene in the dentist's office, Orin in his nitrous oxide mask, that terrific prop and the way the sound quality of his voice was used - egad, it made me the perfect kind of uncomfortable.

I so loved Johari Nandi Mackey, Alexis Tidwell, and Ebony Blake as Chiffon, Crystal, and Ronette. Their beautifully melded voices and knowing commentary, sometimes playing Greek chorus behind the action, sometimes egging that action on, was a fabulous thread throughout the show. And for me, seeing this now after a long time, seeing it as an adult in this particular time and place, there was an extra layer to the musical that Chiffon, Crystal, and Ronette provided the grounding for.

Jamison Stern, Alexis Tidwell, Johari Nandi Mackey, and Ebony Blake

Having a drink at the Gerding before the show, my date for the night, Liz, discussing a recent documentary she'd seen, remarked, "I'm always aware of my privilege as a white woman, but what I hadn't been as conscious of was how hard it would be for me to give that privilege up." It was something I'd been thinking a lot about, myself, recently, and the statement stayed with me as I watched the show: Chiffon, Crystal, and Ronette sitting on a rundown Skid Row staircase, Chiffon, Crystal, and Ronette always on the streets, watching as more and more privilege was heaped on white Seymour and white Audrey and white Mushnik. As the action ramped up and the rift between the haves and the have-nots got wider and more dangerous, I realized what I hadn't as a teenager who'd been in love with the music and the fiendish humor in the play: this thing, underneath it all, is about some pretty serious stuff. And our hero, for all his clumsy sweetness, who, yes, only goes along with this man-eating-plant stuff when the victim feels, you know, kind of deserving, nevertheless lets privilege keep him from attempting or even considering destroying the plant until he feels sure that destroying it won't take away what he's gained.

Along with all this layering (and for another really interesting perspective on that, read Bob Hicks' review here), Portland Center Stage's production of Little Shop of Horrors is smart, hilarious, beautifully produced and a flat-out rocking kick in the pants.

It's playing at the Gerding Theater from now until October 16. More info is here. Thanks to Patrick Weishampel for the pictures.

*Above, I said the Portland Center Stage production is totally classic, but that's a slippery description. It isn't completely the same as the 1986 movie I fell in love with, which, itself, wasn't totally classic. The original was a 1960 move which I'd never heard of. Then came the off-Broadway musical that opened in 1982, which was eventually filmed, with a bunch of changes, including the ending, in the 1986 Frank Oz movie. It had been long enough since I'd seen the movie that, as we moved through the second act, I started to realize I didn't remember how it ended. I'm not going to tell you how it ended, but I'll say it's far better than the film.

a moment in the day: comfortable

It's late and I should turn over and go to sleep, but Stephen's watching that show about death, a topic humans can't get enough of. I forsake some sleep so I can watch it too. He makes us cookies in the toaster oven, and they're gluten-free and they taste like hard little rounds of sweet wood chips with tiny bursts of lovely, melty chocolate, and we sit in bed in front of the TV where terminal cancer patients lie in their own beds or their hospital beds. Doctors, palliative care specialists, grieving partners.

A doctor and the widower of a former patient talk about the delicate, impossible decisions they made about different rounds of chemotherapy. The doctor admits that he should have stopped treatment sooner and focused on making her comfortable. I'm struck by the fact that the two men, and particularly the widower, discuss this with elegance instead of rage, that the widower doesn't feel the need to lay blame.

Next to me, Stephen breathes and sniffs and eats his cookie. Under the covers, Nicholas works at grooming, occasionally pausing and giving my leg a little lick.

Shot of a woman in her hospital bed, the palliative care specialist saying, are you feeling comfortable, good, I'll be back later, shot of a woman in her hospital bed alone, being comfortable.

When I'm there, I want you to know, I don't just want to be comfortable. Promise me this, OK? I want to be engaged. Thinking about just lying there being comfortable while time drains away is a horror to me. One of the things that will torture you is that you won't know what to say to me, but just tell me a story of your life. Tell me that thing you know about the life of Mary Todd Lincoln. Set me up with a podcast about the size of black holes. Don't just leave the TV on - set me up with a marathon of Bugs Bunny. Read to me, read to me, read to me.

book cover: the hour of daydreams

When I started work on the cover design for Renee Macalino-Rutledge's novel The Hour of Daydreams, publisher Laura Stanfill said the challenge was going to be creating a design focused on wings or feathers that isn't like any of the other wing and feather covers out there.

Oh, lord. There are a lot.

And some really cool concepts / designs. I could look for other inspiration for the cover art, but I mean, come on. It’s a novel about a woman with wings. And what could be more lovely and provocative than wings, or their beautifully miraculous elements, feathers?

In the early stages of my tinkering, I actually constructed a winged woman who I used in a few samples. But Renee was more interested in my less literal approach, which mostly consisted of a lone feather falling from the sky in a curl that looked moonlike, seeming to pull the stars along with it. I curved the title text so that it was spooning that feather moon, and with the space surrounding this, I hoped I had created imagery that felt both expansive and intimate.

Renee suggested a number of different concepts for the landscape below, and I tried them all, and more: cityscape, water, village, field, trees, wild flowers... I asked about Filipino trees and plants that might be found in the story. I had fun trying on each new landscape and seeing what it did to my sky.

One of the things that kept occurring to me as I worked was that the title comes with a question. The Hour of Daydreams. What hour is that? In the book, this is the napping hour, when a little girl is supposed to be sleeping but instead sneaks outside with her grandfather and listens to his stories.

Knowing this, I wanted to set my cover design during the day, but I also kept coming back to the lovely folktale-like image of Tala, the winged woman, flying every night up to the stars with her sisters. No matter what I did, stars kept sneaking into my designs

And as much as the book is about magic, it's also about questioning magic. It's about deception and suspicion, the unknowing - all themes that, to me, speak more to nighttime than to day. And that word itself: daydreams. It starts with a root that has night built right into it - dream - and then turns the tables by adding day. Renee does some very similar table-turning in her book, and I hope I did some, too, with the cover.

Here's a little snippet from the book.

"Grandfather shared another story from his vault of words reserved especially for me. They filled up the silence, not the one that blanketed our barrio during the napping hours when everyone disappeared into their rooms, but the one that had followed me everywhere, for as long as I could remember."

The Hour of Daydreams comes out in spring of 2017. There's more info here.

Feather image copyright Partha S. Sahana. You can check out the original image (black feather on white, which I adapted), here on Flickr Creative Commons (licence info here), and you can check out the photographer's photo stream here.

Landscape photo comes via Morguefile.