Portlandia

Washington Park’s Japanese Garden

Folks in Portland see themselves as different–even the Lyft drivers will tell you–like the young Ethiopian driver who insisted drivers in Portland were very polite as a rule, always using their signals, yielding to incoming vehicles, etc. Truck drivers don’t even block intersections or sidewalks. DC truckers like to go out of their way to do that, then they glare at you, daring you to protest.

Sean says the same thing’s true about Seattle where he’s living We were meeting in Portland for some variety; neither of us had seen the city before. He likes to surprise Seattalites with some East Coast snarl now and then–says it keeps them on their toes. Where on earth would he have learned that?

Except Seattle traffic is worse than Portland’s, so the frustration is a bit more taxing on Seattalites’ manners, again not anything like DC traffic. They say Los Angeles is worse, but DC is working hard to catch up.

During his time on the throne, Ronald Reagan declared the Washington Metro complete, no need spending any more of the crown’s money. SO let’s just widen the Beltway and put a toll on it so only the privileged can play; there’s egalitarian thinking for you. They’re only now getting around to completing the Silver Line to Dulles Airport–you know, that other airport.

Plenty of tents pitched along sidewalks and underpasses in Portland. For one of the wealthiest countries in the world, that’s hard to explain, and I expect it’s a worrying issue for the ethically right-thinking people of Portland. The going rumor I heard was that a northerly migration from California was part of it–has it gotten too expensive even for the homeless in California?

Portland is not a businessman’s town, not the white shirt and blue tie kind anyway. You do see a number of young hippies dressed in dreadknots and layers of funk against the cold. Here and there, you pass through areas where the distinctly sour smell of pot stands out–not like it’s everywhere though you do run across it. Leaving Powel’s Books the other night, three young hippies and their dogs were hanging by the door, and the pungency was strong.

I had an odd thought–for a city so involved in distinguishing itself as urban and evolved –streetcars, and bike lanes aside–the physical buildings, roads, etc. aren’t dissimilar from cities in the Northeast. Could be the river flowing through the middle feels familiar. Though I’m told the Columbia River is way cleaner than the Potomac, and it’s named for the founding fable not for an Indian the Europeans conquered.

After two days of hiking the length of the city, Sean declared that we’d completed the tour. Which was good; my foot’s plantar fascia was talking to me. I used to consider the plantar fasciitis as the price for the competitive running I was caught up in. Now, it just hurts. However…

Portlandia Rules! 

Moss on a rock, not a rolling stone

The folks at Pages & Platform threw a great writers’ conference, the second reason I was in Portland. It was a full immersion, three-day course. One day about bringing a book to market and two days of everything from shaping the story’s spine to defining how to craft a good scene. The topics covered were sufficient to comprise an MFA curriculum–if with a more compressed timeline. Attending were a roomful of writers, all ages and backgrounds, long-form fiction practitioners, memoirists, young adult writers, a children’s picture book writer, even a screenplay writer, all in varying stages of production. No short story writers that I know of, and no one claimed to be a working poet–only myself, the part-time poet who wants to publish a novel. Most were women–only one other man–and all were feminists.

The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne was the launch pad for the conference. Working as an editor himself, Coyne explains in the book that he originally developed his Story Grid to codify what he’d learned about evaluating books for several large publishing houses. Story Grid is a method of breaking down a story (take a novel for example) into its component parts meant to analyze it against the traditions of story. Traveling to Vancouver on vacation a year or so ago, I lugged the twenty pound paperback copy. D was sure I’d gone over the edge. I stumbled across it a couple years ago after discovering Steven Pressfield's blog on the subject. Then Tim Grahl’s courses on book marketing, who led me to Sue Campbell and her merry band of editors.

We use stories to describe our world; the best communicators are storytellers. A presenter of, say, a theory on health is likely to begin by saying ‘let me tell you a story’… We talk about the ‘arc’ of a story, meaning how it begins, what the hook is, how the story develops and reaches its climax before drawing to a close. Coyne argues that there are required scenes in each particular genre that help readers stay grounded in the story, without which it strays, and the readers may stray as well.

The three editors involved in Pages & Platforms are all writers themselves and graduates of Story Grid training. Sue Campbell calls herself a book launch coach; Anne Hawley and Rachelle Ramirez story grid editors. Rachelle helped greatly with a short story of mine a few months back, Saint Tropez Sketches. So the neophyte blogger was there to hear their secrets.

We had nametags at the writers’ conference. “My pronouns are he, his and him.” Sean suggested we all just might move to ‘they’ and bypass the rest of that confusion. If there were a way in English to avoid bringing sex into it, life might be less stressful. Sex, sex, sex–can’t we all just get along?

Feeling provocative at the conference, I mentioned American Dirt, asking whether the author indeed had usurped another culture’s story. It’s something to think about and our lunch was taken up with the subject. I can’t comment on the merits of the book, since I haven’t read it and wonder who has. There’s a sentiment in Portland (in the general world of liberalism) that light-skinned writers must accept our limitations when it comes to writing about the oppressed, since we whites are privileged.

I’ll freely admit that I’m more privileged than previous generations of Irish coal miners. Certainly more privileged that my father, or his brother, both victims of the mines. When I lived past his 47 years, I cheered for myself. Oregonians are very sensitive about their privilege as whites, and evidently there aren’t too many people of color in the state.

But as a writer, it’s my belief that working at imagining the lives of the most foreign to ourselves, raises the stakes and gets us closer to creating something of value. I can’t claim to know what living black is like, but I can claim to write about being human. Besides, writing about yourself may just be the fiction you tell yourself and it’s boring as hell, seeing how you’ve already lived it.

Being an old hippie dreaming of peace and love didn’t get me a whole lotta love, er cred at the writers’ conference.

And another thing about Portland, the favorite woman’s hairstyle is straight black hair with bangs. The next favorite is any of a rainbow of hues. With bangs. And lots of tats. One of the conference hosts had a tat beginning near the inside of her wrist disappearing up her sleeve that suggested an Edward Gorey character. I was dying to ask if it was and could I see it but kept my mouth shut; D would have been proud of my restraint.

Evidently, some wearers of tattoos take umbrage at others pointing out their favorite designs. I’m probably too late to the party, being at the stage where things are beginning to sag. To me, tats are great conversation starters.

A chef I once met on the Outer Banks described a tattoo he’d had needled all across his stomach–of his lower digestive track, like the skin and muscle had been peeled back to reveal the organs. He explained it symbolized his surviving a motorcycle accident that had done serious damage to that region and the tat was to celebrate his survival. When no one else was looking, the chef winked and lifted his T-shirt, and sure enough, there it was. D and I thought it was an only-on-the-Outer-Banks kind of scene–his being willing to share like that. Nonetheless, in the writer’s conference, I adopted the reserve of a Zen Buddhist monk and never asked to see the rest of the Edward Gorey tattoo.

Larry David would be sad to hear of such a lack of chutzpah.

Bamboo fountain

Writers Anonymous

Writers are weird–not ghoulishly Steven King weird–just different. Open. Candid about themselves, particularly about what’s brought them to writing, and seemingly tolerant of others’ misspent youths, appreciating the self-deprecating humor that accompanies it. And they can go deep into what’s been broken in their lives, or that they’ve stumbled over along the way. It’s true that if you can’t see yourself, it’s hard to see others, so a certain amount of introspection (and navel gazing) is necessary.

Words are a writer’s tools, like carefully selected chisels to work a large block of granite, small, patient taps at a time.

Baby, I Don’t Care 

I’m reading Baby, I Don’t Care in between other books. Took it to dinner my first night in Portland, sat at the bar and read. By Chelsey Minnis. The NY Times’ Book Review made it sound interesting.

“At times, in ways both comic and deadly earnest, Minnis can seem like [Emily] Dickinson broadcasting from hell.”

from NY Times Book Review

It’s a book of poetry–mainly identified as such because the poems are a half page at most, two verses max, one sentence per line. But it’s more a series of sharp-needled jabs by a sharp-tongued woman of intrigue rather than poems in the traditional sense. It could be a novella, only there’s no overt arc to the story, just feathers floating after the bird flew through the room.

Some poets spend decades, developing like slow growing trees. Minnis is in a rush to get it done before she gets any older.

The book is all about this persona of a woman I once may have met but can’t remember her name. In real life? Could be, but I couldn’t handle more than a passing taste, which is the point of the poems. Her persona is a hip, take no prisoners, break the china and steal the loose change kind of girl, who, as much as she allures, is waving you off with a martini glass in the other hand. Girl, because an older woman wouldn’t be so wilful and in such a rush–and an older woman in the same role would be harder, bitter even and she hasn’t quite gotten there yet. Here’s hoping she never does. There’s humor in the poems, bent humor, but still…

When I think of the energy Minnis puts into the pose, I can only shake my head, smiling the while. Though it wearies me. I’d like to know what a feminist would think–is Minnis giving back too much hard-fought ground? Proving the point about women not being serious creatures in the eyes of their male companions? Is the point she’s so blithely acting out a doubling to laugh at herself and still stand apart? I’ll take the last question and raise her one.

It was ‘splained to me in Portland that I belonged to the privileged Patriarchy. Good thing I learned about that; I might have missed the point. But if I had those diamonds Chelsey Minnis keeps begging for, I’d probably give her all of them to watch what she’d do. Surprise me.

Sally, we need to talk

I mentioned last week I was reading Normal People by a young Irish writer, Sally Rooney. I had high hopes for this one. With a strong review in the NY Times, and lots of praise for a writer not yet thirty. I began reading it after the Amazon drone had launched it missile-style oh so softly slammed against the door. I’m sorry, but that was a person you just crushed.

Reading the first several chapters, I was hooked, so I packed it for travel. Finished it late last night. I finished the first quarter in a slurp, charmed by how well she wrote of a teenage romance set in Sligo, literally upstairs / downstairs as the Brits like to say.

Previous to traveling, because I was still finishing The Prince of Tides, I suggested D read the book first to fill a space in her book calendar. She reported back she was underwhelmed, and that puzzled me. So I took stuffed it in the suitcase and took off for Portland. I started again from the beginning: great setup, so now deliver!

Seems D was right.

Anne Hawley has an theory about fiction writing she calls ‘head bobbing’. Defined as when a novelist–not building her story one complication at a time and building ever more intensely–instead goes up and down and up and down, i.e. head bobbing. The Story Grid defines a story as having an opening hook, a middle build and climax. Key word is ‘build’ as in moving from one complication to a more complicated one. We all expect the build.

Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code represents in my mind the classic of head bobs. I came to hate that book. Opening premise, complication, fosse fosse fosse, denouement, repeat on a low boil until THE END. The ‘fosses’ are Robin Williams’s from Bird Cage, which I’ll watch until they shut off the TV in the nursing home. All right, all right, I’m getting to it.

I loved Sligo, Ms Rooney, and I’d love to meet you in a Sligo pub, but please don’t write another downer–as in I cheered for both ye protagonists. Though I’d read enough by the first half of the book; I was frustrated by the repeats running off to the end. If you love the girl what the fuck are you waiting for–angels blowing horns? And girl, if he makes you come as only he can, why give him up? Great sex is hard to come by. Stalk him, be persistent, show some gumption, Marrianne!

If it was meant mainly to lament the violence to women, the story was entirely too circumscribed. That’s not a topic to go shy with, like your girl, Marrianne does. And Connell, OMG! the dude seriously needs to grow some brass thingies while he learns how to talk to her. Great concept, tooth-drilling repetition. And by the by, if I come back next time as a housekeeper cleaning toilets, I’ll be real sorry.

Sally dear, please, we need to talk!

Feeling like an Ogre

Layla howls so happy when she sees me. Last night, gone for a week, I might as well have been gone a lifetime. Fifty pounds of squirming joy is hard to wrap your arms around. And sophisticate that she is, she doesn’t care who sees her, either.

Last night into today it’s been pouring. In February it should be numbed and piling on the snow, but it’s not. So Layla settles by the couch, partially on my foot. We’ve never had her like before. Huskies are not the kind to emote unless they understand the harnesses are being brought out. Oh welcome! How I’ve missed you!

Layla should have been an actor.

Ain’t I cute?