Skip to main contentThe iconic rock-'n'-roll reference buried in the name of Portland's biggest literary event, Wordstock, isn't off base. The four-day event—created as a fundraiser for the local nonprofit Community of Writers by the program's head, Larry Colton, in 2005—is a festival of sound in its own right. Wordstock 2006 lured up to 19,000 people to the Oregon Convention Center last April. And this year's edition is, in a word, epic: The book fair is packed with readings by more than 180 rock stars of the lit world, from Charles Baxter to Portland's own Jonathan Raymond to Jane Hamilton. Plus, there's the all-lit edition of OPB's LiveWire! radio show and spoken-word showdown. Portland roller-derby queens the Rose City Rollers even got in the promo act last Saturday by playing a game of tag with Wordstock's signature big red chair—in the middle of Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard. The prospect of seeing the words of writers like Dave Eggers and Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen made flesh is enough to make local bookworms scream like tween girls at a Hannah Montana concert (and, undoubtedly, some will). Before the action starts, WW talked shop with a quartet of writers we're excited to meet, and we're doling out a more few suggestions on who else to add to your list of new lit crushes.
PETER SAGAL
[PRURIENT INTEREST] The host of NPR's
—who has also written a number of successful plays, among them
and
—has published his first work of nonfiction,
, a collection of investigative essays on bad behavior, in which he interviews porn stars, professional gamblers and friendly swingers to find out why, how and what it's like. BEN WATERHOUSE.
You're a happily married father of two and the host of a public-radio quiz show. What, if anything, qualifies you to write about vice?
Absolutely nothing. Actually, my editor was also working on a book by Slash, from Guns N' Roses, which is of course filled with stories of all sorts of debauchery...but when people write about the sordid deeds of their past, even when they end on a moral upswing—"so I got off the drugs and now everything's great"—there's still always an apologetic tone. Sort of, "I did these things, so they must have been OK on some level." But I came to my subject matter as a total alien. I'm a pretty vanilla guy, writing for people like me, who are curious.
What moved you to write it in the first place?
I've done a number of interviews so far for the book, and all of the public-radio people have asked, "How could it occur to you to do this?" and the public guys have asked, "Where'd you get this great idea?" I think a lot of people hear about this stuff and wonder what it's like or how it's possible.
Has your public-radio career entirely overshadowed your work as a playwright?
Yes, sadly. Back in the early days of Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me , when our listenership numbered in six figures rather than seven, as it does now, I used to say, truthfully, that more people heard the show each week than had cumulatively seen my plays. And I was a fairly successful playwright, in that my work had actually been performed by real theaters.... Now I stand onstage in front of thousands, but I think I'm often happier in the back of a 50-seat theater.
A lot of people are surprised by how different my plays are from my radio persona. They're very dark...I once totaled up the death count in my plays and, including the Holocaust, which figures heavily in one, I came up with 6,000,015.
What's on your home answering machine? I assume it's not Carl Kasell?
It's my wife and my 3-year-old daughter. I recommend you call it.
What's it like playing second fiddle to that Ira Glass, with his fine coke and expensive call girls?
Ira has gotten all pimped out since he moved to New York. I play second fiddle to no one, though, and I proved it once in a bowling tournament between the two of us. I destroyed him. I think that showed that Chicago belongs to me alone.
Do you remember the score?
It was like a zillion to something embarrassingly small.
Powell's City of Books Stage, 11 am Saturday.
LIKE SAGAL? CHECK OUT:
The cartoonist for
, who compiles hilarious cartoons by other artists that are too obscene or too weird to be printed in the magazine.
Harry Shearer: He does half the voices on The Simpsons , he was in This Is Spinal Tap and now he's in town for Wordstock.
JANET FITCH
[COMING-OF-AGE NOVELS] Seven years after her debut novel,
, became a national bestseller, Janet Fitch has written another book about a young woman struggling to find herself in Los Angeles. Set in the 1980s punk scene,
follows Josie Tyrell's attempt to piece together her life—and the reasons why her boyfriend Michael committed suicide—with the help of Michael's emotionally manipulative mother. For Fitch, a lengthy creative process is standard fare: She was publishing and writing short fiction for 20 years before writing
. The L.A. native and onetime Portlander spoke to
about the common threads in her two novels. PAIGE RICHMOND.
The language in White Oleander was so figurative, but Paint it Black is much more direct. Why make that shift?
It's a different rhythm. The voice of White Oleander stems from the mother, Ingrid, who's a poet. She has just diffused her daughter in this kind of luxuriant, lyric language, so that becomes the music to the book. I hear a book before I see the characters, what's going on. Paint it Black has a very staccato rhythm to it. There is a directness to the punk view of the world.
Both novels include complicated mother-daughter relationships. How much of that is informed by your own life?
A bad parent looks at a child and says, "This is who you are, this is how you're going to be." But a good parent looks at a child and goes, "Who are you? What do you need from me?" An artist is growing a world inside themselves and attending to the need of that creation. And being a mother and an artist, as well as being a daughter, I know what that's like, trying to shape something that you are creating and trying to work with a child who needs you. And it's a dance.
There is a suicide in each novel. Has anyone close to you committed suicide?
I must say I have been lucky in a sense that no one close to me has been a suicide. But I've certainly been depressed. And I have known very depressed people around me, and I have had to consider the possibility of suicide. I think that too much attention in literature has been paid to the person who commits the act...I'm just more interested in people left holding the bag in life, and how do we come to grips with these situations that other people hand us.
Powell's City of Books Stage, 3:30 pm. Sunday.
LIKE FITCH? CHECK OUT:
More sentimental than Fitch, Montgomery's memoir
traces the parent-daughter relationship.
Scott Nadelson: Nadelson's short stories are about dysfunctional but caring families.
SHANE KOYCZAN
[TALK ROCK] If a spoken-word TV channel one day replaces MTV, blame Canada. Or to be exact, blame Canadian poet Shane Koyczan, who writes the kind of deft, vivid prose that is best seen as well as heard. The author of 2005's
and the only Canadian to win the National Poetry Slam (in 2000), Koyczan uses his lumbering body as a prop bag and his often gawky, occasionally elegant reactions to love and loss as an emotional equalizer. Part stand-up comic, part secular evangelical spirit on stage, Koyczan's warm, strident voice tumbles over his words, gathering speed and gaining mass second by second like a snowball thundering down a mountain. His hands and neck move like a '60s soul diva as he spouts references to everything from James Cameron movies to Beethoven, painting word pictures that flash from greasy spoons and stop signs to the very muscles of the human heart.
caught up with the Canuck via telephone—as he made himself a chicken burger lunch—to talk about raw emotion, poetry groupies and the pressing need for juice in this world. KELLY CLARKE.
After watching you perform on YouTube, I have a very important question...how do you combat dry mouth?
[Laughs] You really have to slow down, because your tongue does get dry. [Speaking fast is] a logical thing for me to do while performing...if I'm trying to get something across that I consider very urgent I might speed up the cadence a bit for effect, I guess. Sometimes emotion gets the better of you, and you don't even know you're reading that fast.
I hear you entered the 2000 U.S. Poetry Slam Competition because you needed money. But that's not when poetry caught you...
My friends and I ran a reading in Penticton, a very small town [in British Columbia]. Five people would come and listen to us read poems back and forth to each other. I didn't know what slam was. I didn't know there was a scene for it. It was what we'd been doing all along.
Not knowing what "slam" is seems to be a stumbling block for people. It's like they imagine Mike Myers doing the "Woman, Whoa-man" poem from So I Married an Axe Murderer
That's more beat poetry. Slam is not a reference to the style of poetry, it's in reference to the competition aspect. It's a forum for spoken word. I think that's where people get confused. There is comedy, sonnets, hip-hop, all kinds of poetry inside of slam.
So how do you characterize what you do onstage?
Talk rock.
Where'd you come up with that?
I have no idea. Drunk at a wedding?
What's a hallmark of your poems and performances?
I think I might just be a little bit better at accessing emotions and remembering why I wrote [a poem] in the first place. Some people just recite their work, and it's very good and very polished, but they refuse to step back into the spot where they were when they went through what they went through. I think you need to stand onstage with a certain level of emotional nudity. And I feel comfortable with that, seeing that I am very uncomfortable with physical nudity.
I think right there, flipping back and forth between a raw emotional state to comedy, that quick flip, that's a Koyczan signature.
I believe in what Charlie Chaplin said: "Humor sharpens our sense of survival and preserves our sanity." I think you need humor to deal with the atrocious things you go through, be it unreciprocated love or death...
Tell me about a poem where you used humor to deal...
"Visiting Hours" is a poem about a friend of mine, Ann, who I knew growing up in Yellowknife. She died of breast cancer [in 1989]. She was such a funny woman, she refused to deal with it just with sadness.... She saw the humor, too. That's where it started for me. That's probably the first experience where I thought, there's humor in this.
In your work, you really pick up on some emotions, like love—
Well...OH MY GOD. [loud beeping sound in the background] FLASH FIRE.... [smoke alarm shuts off] [grunting sound]...[silence]…OK, we got it under control.
Did that really just happen? As I was saying, you have a great way of describing that gawky-wonderful awe of being in love, or lust…
Yeah, that's the thing, they're not love poems, they're longing poems. I think they're easier [because] you're able to put yourself out there in that position of, like, "I'm all fucked up over you." Because it's not a love poem I'm able to say, "I wanna rip off my own head and throw it toward your lips" and I can get away with it...because they already said no. So, it's all good.
Come on, after you say that onstage, you've gotta pull chicks…
I've definitely had offers...and groupies. But I'm more interested in people who are interested in me before they see the show. I prefer to date scientists and doctors...they have a different world, they look at things differently.… When I get offstage the last thing I wanna talk about is [literature]. I want to stare at a wall and drink copious amounts of cranberry juice.
What's the most uncomfortable aspect of this job?
I'm still a very socially awkward creature. I have a hard time dealing with compliments. There is nothing that I can say that is beyond "thank you." I mean it, I have nothing better to say but "thank you" and I'm a writer? What the fuck?!? I'm like, argh, I should be better at this.
How do you know when you've got a crowd's attention?
If you see people in the front row crying, then they are probably with you. That's a good feeling.
What's the oddest experience you've had onstage?
I did a poem about a girl that I was seeing who had passed away and then...somebody threw a pair of panties on stage. I was like, wha?, did you not hear what I just did?
What color were they?
They were beige. But they were actually really nice, though.
What's the best thing that's been thrown onstage?
When people throw themselves on stage. It's strange to have the stage rushed after reading my poetry. Great…and scary. I have beautiful, beautiful, amazing fans that sometimes travel great distances just to see a show, so I cannot begrudge them their excitedness to run up onstage.
Anything else readers should know about you?
Just…if you're gonna throw anything onstage at [Wordstock], throw juice boxes.
With fellow spoken-word artist Taylor Mali at First Congregational Church, 1126 SW Park Ave. 7 pm Sunday. $22.50.
LIKE KOYCZAN? CHECK OUT:
Weedman careens through life, from a stint at
to a busted marriage, but her laugh-out-loud wit always stays intact.
Jonathan Raymond: Bears out, with grace, the Northwest's own transient, improvisational high lonesome—in a way that Will Oldham knows to understand.
ADRIAN TOMINE
[GRAPHIC NOVELIST] Adrian Tomine was something of a boy wonder when he became widely recognized on the national comics scene in 1995. The then-21-year-old artist, who got his start distributing mini-comics in Sacramento, Calif., won a Harvey (the comics equivalent of an Academy Award) for early issues of his comic series
. The last dozen years have seen him experiment with as many artistic approaches—but his storytelling remains grounded in realism and is intrinsically character-based. His characters, largely misfits and outcasts, are always portrayed with compassion and empathy.
, Tomine's longest and most layered work to date, tells a story of social inversion and broken relationships. It also finds Tomine—a Japanese-American artist who never wanted to be defined by that label—dealing extensively with issues of race for the first time in his career.
spoke to Tomine via telephone from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y. CASEY JARMAN.
It must be cool to be so deeply involved with an art form like comics that's still in its early stages.
Yeah, it is. As a practitioner, it's nice because it feels like there are lots of possibilities still ahead that haven't been explored, and also it's just nice to be a part of a business that's still so small and young and friendly. I mean, it's not scary Barton Fink kind of stuff, like trying to work in the film industry. And it's an industry that, at this point at least, totally rewards talent.
Where a lot of comics artists keep coming back to similar protagonists, there's a huge amount of breadth between your character choices.
[Those are] departures I have to make in a creative process from my own personal experience, because as a guy who stays at home most of the time and draws comics, the actual day-to-day experiences are often quite mundane. There are a lot of cases where a story originates out of conjecture or a brief observation that leads to a storyline...where I'm trying to figure out something that I've seen or experienced that was maybe a little strange at first.
What feeling do you get when you complete a story?
It's more a feeling of having purged something rather than an accomplishment. It's very rare that I'll go back and look at something once it's seen print. [Shortcomings ] took me many years to work on, so I felt like I was living with these characters and the storyline for a long time. So when I finished it, it felt like summer vacation feels when you're in school. Freedom.
So how do you keep from rushing through your work, then, when you get three-fourths of the way through something?
Not even—how about one-fourth of the way through? I guess that's one of the good things about working in a public way: You feel this obligation. I feel it to readers, but I also, strangely, am thinking of my fellow cartoonists a lot when I'm working. I think, aw, they'd give me such shit if I bailed on this halfway through.
Why did you decide to tackle race where you hadn't before?
I was just really trying to find a way to make a tentative baby step closer to finding my own voice, and I tried to think of a story that might be a little more specific to my own experiences. But I was at a conflict then, because was I just giving in and doing the story that I never wanted to do? Almost since the start of my work being published I would often get asked by journalists or fans, why wasn't I using comics for a platform to address racial issues, since I'm of Japanese heritage?…I didn't learn to become a cartoonist to express all these political ideas I had. And so, I think even with this book I was still trying to stay focused on things like character and dialogue. There's really nothing that I'm trying to bash over the reader's head.
But did you learn anything about yourself by making a decision to address these issues critics had wanted from you all along?
I think I did force myself into some types of introspection that might not have come up otherwise. And I think I also learned a lot from the audience's response to the book. But I don't think I've satisfied those early critics. I think I've frustrated them more than ever.
LIKE TOMINE? CHECK OUT:
A comics author with a similar knack for detailing troubled relationships, and he's from Portland!
Douglas Wolk: A fantastic Portland-based pop-culture critic with a deep affection for comics of all stripes.
Wordstock's main book fair takes place at the Oregon Convention Center, 777 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. 9 am-5 pm Saturday-Sunday, Nov. 10-11. $5. Tickets available through TicketsWest. Find a full list of authors and schedule of events at wordstockfestival.com. For more Wordstock listings, LINK. Women&Words: Wieden&Kennedy Atrium, 224 NW 13th Ave. 7 pm Thursday, Nov. 8. $20. wordstockfestival.com. Carl Hiaasen: First Congregational Church, 1126 SW Park Ave. 7 pm. $27.50. LiveWire!: Aladdin Theater, 3116 SE 11th Ave. 8 pm. $22-$25. See wordstockfestival.com for more info.
WWeek 2015