The sun is out, and so I decide to walk from my spot in Southeast over to a photography store up in Northwest, by way of downtown. In some ways, the west side of the Willamette feels like a different city. Hills sit on the horizon, bordering Forest Park, where the more affluent can tuck themselves away with sweeping views of the entire town, and as you move in closer, there’s—from South to North along the river—a hospital campus, Old Town, a university, downtown, The Pearl, and Slabtown. Beyond that, there’s a stretch of warehouses and industrial plants. This section of Portland is quite small in proportion to its eastern counterpart.

From where I’m at, it’s most convenient to cross into downtown on the Hawthorne Bridge. It takes about 15 minutes to walk to Waterfront Park. I’m not very dialed in to the going-ons and so I’m always finding out about a festival being put up or taken down in real time. Sometimes the park is full of sailors, sometimes there’s a rowing competition, a market, a parade, a rally. I never know what to expect.

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Today, the park is quiet. There are a few runners passing through, folks commuting by bike, a fella taking a nap on a bench. My favorite kind of day. Sun’s out, no crowds, just enough people moving about.

I take a more direct route to the photo store, still favoring familiar streets and overpasses. I hear drums and detour near the library where I come across a Fry Bread Festival: Indigenous music, wares, people. A comforting reminder of my hometown—I take in the smell and sound, browse a few booths, but decide against taking photos. Keeping to the south side of Burnside, I continue on.

The first time I visited the PNW I was enamored with the vines that ran up the sides of overpasses. All the moss and fern, which grew despite tar and concrete. I take some pictures looking across at the Pearl from a funny little sidewalk which sits isolated between the highway below and another road. I notice giant boulders placed meticulously at the edge so no one can set up camp, but rocks collect trash anyway. Across the street, there is a mix of new and old buildings, apartments and smaller residential homes.

Going without a car in Portland, I’m privy to a unique perspective of the city. I know my way around via bus lines and bridges to avoid on foot. I know the easiest neighborhoods to navigate on bike and which ones have too many hills. I’ve also come to recognize many faces of the folks living on the street, the areas they stick to, how they act on a good day versus a bad one. I learned to be more aware, how to check in with some people and give others space. Be kind and keep moving. To me, it seems cars give people an illusion of safety. Safety from people on the street, perhaps from the weather. Safety from having to directly or meaningfully engage with the community they live in on a daily basis or maybe just freedom to choose when. I generally feel safe walking around this section of Portland, my biggest threat being the occasional distracted driver.

After dropping off film in Northwest, I cut back through Goose Hollow into downtown Portland. This time, I take a longer route by walking the outer perimeter of the PSU Campus, following that same highway in the opposite direction. The Southwest hills loom overhead, and this pocket of Portland is much quieter. I notice the absence of hacky-sackers on this beautiful sunny day. I wonder how the college experience is impacted by living in a city versus a “college town.”

I appreciate the walkability of any college campus. At the center of PSU, there’s a park with paths that lead directly to building entrances. Roads and parking lots are on the opposite side of the buildings and through streets are planned with pedestrians and cyclists in mind. Downtown Portland existed before the campus expanded, so this isn’t the case everywhere—just the 6-block stretch of Southwest Park Avenue, which extends another 6 blocks into downtown where the Portland Art Museum is.

“Walkable communities” feel particularly unique to college campuses in the U.S.; hubs where all your needs can be met, by design. Post office, medical center, housing, grocery, public transit. All available and accessible without a car. A value that gets lost with expansion and suburbs.

My walk on campus feels brief and I’m back downtown. The sun is setting as I pass the courthouse which is no longer fenced off. Other buildings sit empty, boarded up windows decorated with large, colorful murals. People walk around, cars pass by, and Portland continues on. The flaws of this city seem impossible to ignore because people care. There is civic engagement, there is action, there is response. People show up to imagine what else could be. There is a gallery installation, which utilizes the window space in some of these vacant buildings showcasing local art to passersby. Temporary spaces become something beautiful, then disappear again.

Since the summer of 2022, Harrell Fletcher and Laura Glazer have organized a weekly autobiographical writing and publishing workshop at the Columbia River Correctional Institution, a minimum-security prison for men in Northeast Portland, Oregon. It operates similarly to writing workshops in other contexts, where participants write during the week, read their work during class, and receive feedback. Fletcher and Glazer bring in writing materials, books for inspiration, and visitors, including Miranda July, Constance Debré, and Karleigh Frisbie Brogan, who give advice as professional writers, editors, and publishers.

Worth It! is the third book in the Same Time series published Some People Press, an imprint created by Fletcher and Glazer to make the writing from the prison workshop available to the public. It was written by Joey Lucero, who joined the workshop about six months after it started and spent close to a year before his release writing his often hilarious autobiography. Lucero’s life has been filled with misadventures and his writing is remarkably revealing, humorous, and hopeful in the face of the challenges and tragedies that he has experienced.

Half of all profits go to the authors of the books and the rest helps fund Some People Press’ operational budget. To support the project please consider purchasing Some People Press books and becoming a paid subscriber to the SPP Substack.

Bread Truck

My mom had a problem with me and my girlfriend Claire living in her house in Southeast Portland, so I went out and purchased a 1971 International bread truck that had been converted into an RV. There was chicken wire holding in shelves that held live chickens and boxes of eggs. The guy I purchased the truck from lived on a farm and the truck looked like it had been in a barn for a while. It had no brakes, so I had to rig up the emergency brake with some old speaker cable that stretched when you used it. There was no driver’s seat, in its place was a plastic milk crate, a little bicycle mirror replaced a missing side mirror, and there was no doghouse to cover the motor—it was exposed from the inside. There was a five-gallon bucket of gas with a hose coming out of it going straight to the carburetor. All the doors had been welded shut, except one.

I paid the guy $200 and he handed me the title and keys for that thirty-foot-long beast of a truck. When I started it up, a series of hiccups and rattles came from the engine. A huge backfire and black smoke billowed from the exhaust. I don’t know how to drive stick, so I had to keep it in first gear all the way to my house—about twenty blocks away. I parked up the street, got into my yellow Ford Ranger, and drove over to my friends Ryan and Brian’s house.

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When I walked down the sidewalk in front of their place, I noticed a pair of thick leather shoes that had been cut in half. Cutting them in half must have taken a lot of effort, I thought. Then I saw a pink ten-speed bicycle that had been twisted into a pretzel. I made my way through women’s jeans ripped to shreds and what looked like a life-sized Barbie’s Dreamhouse hit by a bomb. I found Ryan sitting on a pile of women’s clothes with a pair of wire cutters in his hand, struggling to cut through the neck of a turtleneck sweater. I told him, “Maybe a hacksaw would work better. I’ll hold one end, you hold the other, then we can saw down the middle.”

Tears were rolling down Ryan’s face as he chopped away. I mumbled, “You know she never really looked good in that thing anyway.”

He cried out, “Jenny left me!” then burst into tears.

I told him, “Don’t worry, brother, I got a bread truck! We’re dumping our old ladies, detailing the bread truck, driving to San Diego, and starting a band, whadaya say!”

Ryan smiled through his tears and said, “Really, brother?”

“I got the bread truck just up the street. All we have to do is make it to the car wash. Only thing is, I can’t drive stick.”

“I can drive stick!” Ryan said.

“Okay, let’s go!”

Mind you, Claire was standing next to me the whole time, but she was so high she didn’t know what planet she was on. I had to pull her down from climbing the tree in front of Ryan’s house before we all got in the truck and headed over to my house where the giant, half rusted, 1971 International bread truck sat, complete with boxes of eggs and chicken poop. You could smell the truck as we walked toward it, but when you opened the door the pungent smell of gas and rotten eggs was actually the least of our problems.

I told Ryan, “There are no brakes. I rigged the emergency brake and it kind of stretches when you pull on it too hard, so be careful.”

Sitting on the milk crate that was there instead of a driver’s seat, he turned the key and the series of hiccups began. Pumping the gas pedal, the truck started to shake and sputter, two loud backfires in a row sent thick, black smoke into the air. The motor was running. I gave Ryan the thumbs up, he gave me the thumbs up back.

Claire wanted to go in the bread truck, but I told her it wasn’t a good idea so we got in my Ranger. I pulled up behind Ryan and we began to coast down the hill toward the White Stag. We made a right turn at the bottom of the 52nd Avenue where the bread truck sent out two more backfires. It was really shaking—visibly rocking back and forth. When the giant truck reached the top of the hill, it stalled. I heard an explosion and saw smoke coming out the window on the side. When I looked over, I noticed Ryan was holding his hand up with the emergency brake handle in it. I could hear the gears grinding and the clutch exploding echoes across the street.

The bread truck began to roll back down the hill in reverse. I swerved, just missing it before it rolled over a parked car like it was nothing. Then Ryan smashed over another parked car that flipped the truck up on two wheels and rolled over a fire hydrant that blasted it with water. After taking out a cyclone fence and someone’s front porch, the bread truck came to rest at the foot of a pine tree. Two chickens and a plume of feathers flew out, and through the smoke and feathers, Ryan sprang out the side door.

52nd Avenue looked like a war zone—wrecked cars, water from the fire hydrant shooting into the air, and chickens running in every direction. The neighbors were out in the street. They had Ryan by the arm and were yelling, “Call the police!”

I pulled up in my truck, got out, and yelled back, “He’s infected with leprosy! Get off him!”

The man holding Ryan grimaced and let go of his arm. I grabbed him and said, “Come on, brother, let’s go.”

“Infected with leprosy?” he asked, amused.

“It was the only thing I could think of.”

We jumped into my truck, drove home, and parked in the garage. The police came to the door and said they believed my truck was involved in an accident.

My mom opened the garage door and said, “My truck has been in this garage all day. Sorry, it must have been someone else.”

They said, “Is Joey here?”

“No, he’s not here. Do you want me to give him a message when he comes home?”

“Nah, don’t worry about it. Have a good night.”

And I never saw the bread truck again.

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Every November and December, Willamette Week’s Give!Guide brings Portland’s nonprofit community into focus, creating a campaign that encourages thousands of small donations that help sustain the city’s cultural, environmental, and social ecosystems.

For Fonograf Editions, Give!Guide is a crucial opportunity to continue our volunteer-led work bringing experimental literature, sound, and art into the world. Every donation comes with an incentive. To learn more, visit FE’s Give!Guide page.

Edy Guy: FE has renowned acclaim and international presence, garnering recognition from The New York Times, Paris Review, and other major publications, yet it remains a small, indie press. What do you credit this success to? What does this success say on behalf of independent publishing?

Jeff Alessandrelli: Fonograf Editions is indeed a small, indie press. Some of our releases have received recognition from places like The New York Times and The Paris Review, for which we’ve been very grateful. Other releases have sold sparingly, just a few dozen copies. I think our success largely stems from the fact that as editors we care the same about both the big books and the small books. Prior to founding FE, I ran a small chapbook press with my friend Bret called Dikembe Press. We exclusively published chapbooks, tape-bound, pretty cheaply produced. I loved being a part of Dikembe because it was never about scale; it was purely about putting work into the world that we loved. No one was going to get $ or fame or any of it. So I took that ethos into FE as well. And I think a lot of independent publishers are the same way. We don’t really run P & L (Profit and Loss) statements. None of us are really getting paid, at least not much—and there’s a freedom in that. At FE we think of publishing as a vocation, not a profession. It might sound trite or cheesy but it’s true.

FE publishes spoken word vinyls, which is quite niche. At the 2025 Poetry Confluence in Portland, Oregon you spoke on a panel with Rae Armantrout, co-editor Adie Steckel, Charles Valle, and Endi Bogue Hartigan about the sonic importance of literary work. Do you find that the vinyls capture something (in regard to sound) the books on their own can’t? What is that something? What’s the archival significance of publishing on vinyl?

FE started out as a record label; it was an “arm” of the press Octopus Books. Our first five releases were albums by poets Eileen Myles, Rae Armantrout, Alice Notley, Harmony Holiday, and Susan Howe/Nathaniel Mackey. I grew up listening to a lot of Caedmon Records; that label and their LPs were instrumental to my development as a poet. In my opinion, yes, a poetry LP is different than a poetry book. It’s more atmospheric, more inspirational (listening and mis-listening for me often begets the start of a poem of my own), more interpretive, less focused. The listening experience can indeed be an experience if you let it; it’s different than reading a white paper/black ink poetry book.

As for the archival significance of publishing on vinyl—I’m not sure, although when I was immersed in poetry LPs, listening to Gertrude Stein or William Carlos Williams on vinyl moved me in a way that listening to them on my computer or my phone did not. It felt like a portal had opened, probably because listening to anything on vinyl is archival these days. The two archival poetry LPs that Fono has done, one by John Ashbery, the other by Audre Lorde, were hard work but super rewarding for the press. (FE editor Adie B. Steckel produced and edited those and they are lovely to hold and listen to.)

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The financial component of publishing is not talked about as much as I’d like. Even large houses offer meager wages in major cities where the provided salary would place their employees at the poverty level. Many people in these roles hold advanced degrees. They are aware—and sometimes reminded—how competitive and rare these positions can be. Publishers, especially small presses, after printing, publicizing, and distributing work, are often at a net loss for their business. In consideration of these conditions, it seems that publishing is not intended as a viable career path. Are we evading entrapments of capitalism or maintaining an unstable industry and thus creating more precarity?

The more I learn about publishing the less I understand, honestly. Due to the fact that 90% of new books sell fewer than 2,000 copies—and that’s only focusing on major presses; the number is even lower for small presses—I think it is extraordinarily hard to make a living in the publishing industry. As you note it’s even harder to make it work in big cities, and people with advanced degrees are still working as junior editors, making little $ as they try and work their way up. That said, I don’t think a lot of the people interested in publishing (or writing generally) go into it to make $. (I wrote about these topics previously, here and here.)

Speaking for Fonograf Ed’s situation, we started out as a for-profit, with $16,000 of seed money that I inherited when my grandmother died. In 2018, we shifted to being a non-profit because our LPs were very much not making any $. Since then we have exclusively lived off sales and grants, and our bank account looks a little different each month. Some of our staff members now take very small monthly honorariums or get paid per project. What we can pay people is 100% not enough to live on. I don’t know what the future will hold. FE’s 10^th anniversary is next year and at this point we are still mostly existing on enthusiasm. I have no idea if that will hold for another 10 years. Finally, we are also mostly a poetry press (65-70% poetry, 35-30% everything else) and one of the things about poetry that you learn early is one doesn’t make a living from it but a life. So that mentality is something that I take with me from book to book and year to year.

I hesitate to bridge this topic, but it’s omnipresent and hard to avoid: with the infiltration of AI, what opportunities and traps do you foresee for writers? Top of mind for me: I’m anticipating more stylistic innovation, harder to replicate by machines, and—since I do believe the world is organized toward some kind of balance—a return to slower means of production and consumption (print mags, etc).

I haven’t used AI very much, but when I have it’s a magic that I am, perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly, suspicious of. The environmental impact of AI, along with the freewheeling intellectual property theft, is what worries me more than the impact it might have on actual writers. Going back in time, Plato was against writing because he—rightly—predicted that it would cause people to not use their memories as much. They would forget and humanity would become slaves to the written word. Circa 2025, I don’t think anyone would have it the other way. In the future AI might be just another tool in the ambitious writer’s toolbox. I personally think people will always value the human-made over the AI-made, but it also depends on the project/genre/situation/etc. I guess we’ll see and my mind is, at least partially, open.

You spoke with Brad Listi on the Otherppl podcast recently in response to your piece on Zona Motel about minor writers. You mentioned how 28% of Americans read at the lowest level of literacy. This is concerning and, I’d argue, organized by design of troubling politics. It also doesn’t help those of us in publishing. So, I ask you, why read?

I read to be surprised and mystified and to center my attention. Also to inspire my own work. I was a reader first and always will be, but being a writer now, what I read has a direct impact on my own writing. I don’t ever really get writer’s block because of my reading practice, which is wide and varied. I think everyone should read all the time, but it doesn’t necessarily bother me that they don’t. That said, if one wants to be a writer—any type of writer—reading is the first and only really necessary step to making that happen, and being of the old school I think books are better than reading on a screen. But that’s just me.

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Soothing a corneal abrasion I got from looking up at the snowfall, my first ever (ocular injury and snow day). To think a flake could cut like that. The fake tears proved good for countering smoke-induced irritation from the fire seasons to come and other things I couldn’t cry out myself.

Item: A roll of “EGGS” stickers, 500-count, from Safeway
Location: Woodstock

Revolution. Like bullet shells after pounding the Pink Whitney, unpeeling and slapping bright ovals all over campus until the brick buildings looked like yellow-spotted lizards. The shit-faced squadron of freshmen (whose friendship didn’t survive the semester) rewrote our small world’s signage: Emergency EGGS. All EGGS Bathroom. Caution: EGGS. The next morning resulted in an uproar. A proper whodunnit ensued—upperclassmen chattered conspiracies in the Commons while professors raced to efface their sticker-studded office doors. Even an Instagram account was created to document the most creative EGGS placements. We made sure to keep a few stickers to accessorize our own surfaces. Micki stuck EGGS on her Hegelian reader and Sophie, her iPad case. I had three to partition: one for my Yamaha amp, one for my Nalgene bottle, and one, on a blackout night a few weeks later, for my forehead, thinking little at the time of what it meant to be an egg.

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Item: A copy of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor, paperback, from Powell’s
Location: Old Town

Swiped from the “trans stories” display case in the Blue Room. Iffy ethics for sure. Lent it to a friend for her boyfriend to read after I finished it, unaware he didn’t like two things about me.

Item: Two six-packs of Japanese rice lager, expired, from a closet in the Student Union
Location: Reed

A bonus for custodial work. Got a summer “apprenticeship” cleaning out the many neglected corners of campus on account of my student body government campaign, which advocated for boosting “accessibility” in recreational spaces. I spent my birthday week scooping years-worth of litter and loose hardware into industrial-sized trash bags, at one point picking up a shit-covered condom with my bare hand. I didn’t want to be there—in the closets, on the campus, in the city. Any sense of “home” I expected to find in Portland, much less college, evaded me. Where was my knight in shining Gore-Tex? Yearning preoccupied me as I rolled out empty kegs from the Beer Nation storage unit, breathing from my mouth to avoid the stench of thick yeast. Under a rubber chicken I found stacks of unopened six-packs, presumably from the previous drinking season, expired by only a month or two. Google said it was mostly fine to imbibe and so I did, alone, later that night, approaching comfort until asleep. I woke up and was twenty.

Item: My copy of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor, paperback, from a friend’s ex-boyfriend’s house
Location: Ladd’s Addition

Reclamation.

Item: A Pleats Please Issey Miyake Midi Skirt, black, from Crossroads Trading Co.
Location: Hawthorne

Affirmation. I didn’t know him very well then, but he had a line of credit he proffered to split. Turned out to be zero dollars and forty cents, the negligible remnants from his last shopping spree. Regardless, we indulged each other in the dressing room, trying on lacy tanks and pink pants, catching glimpses of each other’s bodies, which were not entirely familiar yet. Looking at his bare abdomen, the excitement it evinced of me, made putting on the skirt awkward, thin pleats spilling over an incongruent lump. It was definitionally embarrassing until he brought me to his smile and, for the first time, kissed me. A kiss to confirm an internal surge. Well, the skirt was over a hundred bucks and had a few stains, but it fell so perfectly off my hips into his messenger bag. No credit needed.

Item: Two bottles of La Quercia Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, 750 mL, from New Seasons
Location: Richmond

I saw a lot more of the boy and his messenger bag that winter. He stuffed it with handkerchiefs and sex clinic condoms and loose-leaf sheets scrawled over with poem drafts—poems about us and the garden he wanted to start. Soon enough, I was helping him load his bag with seed sachets swiped from the health food store. By late spring, we were celebrating the first bursts of flowers. Common yarrow, wild sunflowers. I borrowed his bag on special occasions to get things I felt we deserved—despite our crust punk predilections—such as imported red wine for our six-month anniversary dinner. We finished the bottles in a flash, drunkenly filling their necks with the Maximilians of our combined efforts.

Item: A pair of Knockoff Ray-Bans, non-polarized, from Space Age Fuel
Location: Mt. Scott-Arleta

Material and moral compensation. Was having a go of it—got rejected from an internship in New York, meaning I was stuck in Portland for at least a summer longer. Was on my way home from a commencement rehearsal when the gas tank, which I hadn’t filled in weeks, rumbled on its bottoming-out dregs. Rushed to the Space Age near my house—the one across the street from the Pentecostal cult campgrounds—and entered from the wrong side so I had to reverse my way to the open pumping station. Sun got in my eyes as I backed straight into a safety pole, bludgeoning my bumper. I thought of my dad red-in-the-face and felt my lips tremble, but instead of crying I went inside to pay for my fill-up in cash. That’s when a swiveling display of flimsy eyewear taunted me, saying, you could’ve prevented all of this. As I drove away, a pair ended up in my sweater sleeve, then my face. The plastic lenses didn’t protect my eyes from the blaring sun—which, even during the drizzly test of attrition that is April in Portland, I did not welcome kindly—but at least they kept the pedestrians from witnessing my tears once they came.

Item: A roll of Scotch Shipping Tape, with dispenser; a bag of M&M’s Peanut Milk Chocolate Candies, 10.05 oz; a bottle of K-Y UltraGel, 1.5 fl oz; a three-pack of Little Trees Air Freshener, Supernova scent, from Walgreens
Location: Creston-Kenilworth

Miscellaneous.

Item: One driver-side mirror cover for Toyota Prius 2010, cool grey, from a parked car
Location: Hosford-Abernathy

Moral and material compensation. Mine was taken the day after I moved into my partner’s house in late May. Maybe my fault for parking on the street, but the driveway had already been claimed by the other roommates’ cars. My partner and I shared a bed on the second floor overlooking lower Division, where we relished in the vista of DILFs from the concrete distro center across the street on their smoke breaks. Still we didn’t catch the culprit who pried the minor surface from my car, its rump already crumpled past redemption. I didn’t mind the cosmetic faults, but I feared the wrath of my father’s materialism, which was waiting for me back home at the end of the summer I didn’t want to end, having finally located some murmur of love here, between freightliners and rose bushes.

Come the second week of September, a month designated for transitions, I organized my possessions into a heap on my partner’s low pile rug. It was my last night in Portland. I was moving out in the morning, driving down to California to see my family before relocating to New York. My partner and I spent the evening grieving the separation before it happened, attempting to delay its arrival by ordering a beer at every dive on the street until we were shitfaced, as in, lawless against time. I wore his Digable Planets shirt, the vinyl graphic cracked like pavement. He wore my black skirt; it was now his, as were my bargain bin LPs and half-bottles of Sally Hansen. My paperbacks and corkscrews and shoplifting tactics. My knight in shining polyester. He cried with pride as I latched my fingers onto the innocent car’s side mirror near midnight, tugging with the crescent of my nails until the plastic cover popped off. We staggered back home and disassembled straight into bed for the last time. Woke up naked and heavy in the 9:00 AM brightness, unable to stomach the finality. And like a bandaid on an ax wound, we snapped the stupid accessory into place as we loaded up my car.

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“One problem with gentrification is that it always gets worse.” —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

“‘Keep Portland Weird’ isn't just a slogan: it's a promise to not fall for the trap of homogeneity and art is the only way to do that. Especially as AI is stealing all original thought and regurgitating censored nothingness: physical spaces for people to be *human* and create new ways of thinking and being and doing are more important than they've ever been.” —Leila Haille, director of Ori Gallery

Two summers ago, I went to an art show inside a pantyhose warehouse in Queens, NY. The artist Alex Tatarsky, who also performs as a (very good!) clown, had created a multi-part exhibition with their collaborator, Ming Lin, around the idea of counterfeiting. Their project is called Shanzhai Lyric, and it focuses on the accidental poetry created when the text on luxury knockoffs goes awry. The pair also created a fake organization to document their work, calling it Canal Street Research Association. As I sat on a wobbly stool on the concrete in the dark middle of the warehouse, enjoying the pair’s artist talk, I admired the layered ways that their work toyed with the concepts of authenticity and authority.

The word Shanzhai is known from the novel Outlaws of the Marsh, a Chinese Robin Hood story of “stealing from the empire and redistributing goods among people on the margins.”1 Shanzhai literally means something like mountain stronghold in Chinese, but in practice it signifies counterfeit.

Inside the warehouse, there was a poorly marked visual exhibition whose works were found by exploring the aisles, shelves, and ceilings of the space. It wasn’t always clear what was art. A fashion show inspired by counterfeit luxury goods also wound around piles of boxes. They served cans of seltzer and cheap beer in trash cans full of ice to keep us from expiring in the heat. After a time of undirected wandering, visitors were asked to gather for a short artist talk followed by a lecture on the history of industrial sabotage. Did I mention we had been driven there in an off-market shuttle bus?

It’s this same seditious spirit that animates the alternative galleries in Portland—the garages, studios, sheds, and yards of a post-gentrified city where affordable space becomes increasingly fugitive. These alternates, to their more monied and institutionally affiliated counterparts, are sites of the ongoing proletarian battle against private equity, venture capital, and real estate development. They also show great work, often selling it at prices working people can afford.

I don’t think gentrification or income equality are going to get better in my lifetime, but I do think artists are going to continue to undermine the hegemony of the market. Some will run their own galleries, some will create conceptual pieces that resist commodification (like Dieter Roth’s moldy fruits), and others will make work that mocks the art world’s morally dubious or outright absurd elements, sometimes with clown-like levity. Best of all is when the money, if there is any, stays with the artists themselves. The billionaire class and their henchmen are going to keep buying stuff and ruining it, and we’ll keep finding ways to go on. I am sick to death of this dynamic. Like a child, I often wish there was a reset button. Since there isn’t, I’ll busy myself with the art.

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Old Fashioned Garage Gallery

see also: hospitality, dads, giant roll of tape, regionality, time-sensitive

It was fruit falling season. The artist Jodie Cavalier was grilling a shit ton of vegetables out back. Alley, her partner, had a catering gig that day and the two were preparing. Jodie talked to me while I wandered around the gallery which is also the garage and, since it’s summer, the pergola and part of the yard.

The garage gallery cohered around the ideas of hospitality and curating people or experiences (as opposed to objects). Each opening includes food that Jodie and Alley cook to share with the art-lookers. They wanted this project—which has the support of their landlord— to echo old Portland, with its punk houses and its galleries in closets and parking spaces, what it was before Cascada and the regularity of multi-million dollar real estate transactions.

The gallery will close after the fall. It was always meant to last a year with four shows, one for each season, plus the grant money will run out. Learning this made me want to linger a little longer.

I really liked the work, especially one sculpture by Catie Hannigan called TRAILER PARK ILLUMINATION and another by Jordan DeLawder that was gloopy with a metal spiral inside it. Much of what shows at the garage is sculptural, even when it’s a painting or photo (Cavalier’s sculptures are themselves arresting, she had a show this year at PPSTMM gallery).

In the garage, the extension cords were visible. They’d hung white cloth to hide whatever was on the shelving. As I turned toward the door to say goodbye, an apple dropped with startling speed and bruised itself on the concrete.

SATOR and Dump Magazine

see also: print’s not dead, fallow fields, PNCA students go rogue, windows, poetry

SATOR projects is a migratory curatorial enterprise by Jess Nickel that hosts art events wherever it can find vacant space. Since 2021, they’ve curated shows at 1607 SE 3rd Ave. I find them excellent. I still think about the wet, fleshy paintings and clever merchandise from last year’s [ all de watermillion fr’um heabun ] by Christine Miller. In July, SATOR hosted DUMP Magazine’s Issue 3 exhibition: Correspondence, which featured a set of fabricated conical speakers playing music from a discman, large abstract works made from construction materials, and poems stuck to the windows.

DUMP is a self-funded, self-published magazine that platforms fine art students and emerging artists. Their biannual print issues always launch with a curated show spanning visual, sonic, and written work as well as performance. When I went to the closing, a drag queen greeted me at the door wearing a meticulously hand-jewelled dress with a matching mask. She told me she began making the masks because she worked late on weekends and had to take the bus home, leaving her with too little time to get ready before the shows started. The masks became her makeup, then they became her art practice. This was one of the best stories about art and labor that I’d heard in a long time.

Helen’s Costume

see also: near and far, go big, merch

Curator Steve Brown stopped reading Fear and Money by Isabelle Graw and got out of his hammock to greet me. The merch table had new sweatshirts and art books since I’d last visited. He gave me a seltzer and told me about the work that was up in the garage at his house (he prefers “domestic space” over “garage gallery”), which included furry, fake-nailed sculptures by Eleanor Randl and a series of surreal photos staged and shot by Chase Allgood.

Brown started this project in 2020 when the pandemic suddenly closed pretty much all the arts spaces and he perceived a more level playing field. “Galleries were posting, but not doing,” Steve said. It was time to bring art to the people.

Brown and his partner Sarah opened their kitchen as a gallery space. People entered through the sliding glass door of their duplex rental and lingered to chat in the yard. When the couple moved to their current house, one bonus was the detached garage-now-gallery, which faces a gravel alley. No more sliding glass art intruders!

Brown takes this curatorial project seriously—it’s not just a venue to show his friends but rather a true representation of contemporary art that compels him. They do four shows a year. Each one features one local and one visiting artist. This year, they’re attending Other Places, a fair in California also alternative in spirit.

SOCIETY and 7-11 Studios

see also: odd refreshments, dumpster diving for old TVs, groupthink (non-derogatory)

In August, I went to an open studios event at 7-11, above the new Mother Foucault's space on SE Grand Ave. According to some lanky interns I talked to downstairs over a bowl of whole cucumbers, the Central Eastside is the real Portland, what the rest of the city should still look like: musical, messy, and working-class. Above us, dozens of people milled around the artists’ workspaces, admiring drawings laid out on cluttered desks, paintings propped against the wall, and sculptures tacked up next to shelves cluttered with fabric scraps and old electronics. The vibe was fun and intimate. The art was technically excellent despite its casual presentation.

SOCIETY operates inside one of the studios in 7-11. Run by artist-curator Ido Radon, the small space currently hosts “Having no talent is not enough,” a body of conceptual objects by Christian Alborz Oldham. They include a replica designer sweater hand-knit by one of the artist’s friends that hangs in a vacuum sealed bag on the wall and a reproduction from one of China’s painting mills. SOCIETY also puts out a print magazine and runs heady, art-nerd events. It’s an alt gallery to watch.

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JAYDRA JOHNSON (b. 1988 Springfield, Oregon) is a writer, visual artist, and educator who splits her time between Portland, OR and NYC. Her writing has appeared in Oxford American, Epoch Review, Guernica, and Sedition magazines, among others, and she has shown her visual work in NYC, LA, Portland, and Columbus, OH. At Hunter College, she co-edited the journal Solar while earning her MFA in Creative Writing. She was also a grateful recipient of the 2022-23 Creatives Rebuild New York grant. Johnson is the author of Refuse Report, a bi-monthly newsletter exploring the tension between high and low art, currently hosted on Substack. You can find more of her work (or get in touch <3) at www.jaydrajohnson.com and on Instagram @jaydranicole.

Index and Other Galleries

Helen’s Costume: https://www.costumeintl.com/

Old Fashioned Garage: https://oldfashionedgaragegallery.wordpress.com/

Dump Magazine: https://dumpmagazine.com/

7-11 Studios/SOCIETY: https://societysocietysociety.com/

Ori: https://oriartgallery.org/

PPSTMM: https://www.instagram.com/ppstmm_203/

SE Cooper Contemporary: https://www.secoopercontemporary.com/

Happy Anyway: https://wearehappyanyway.com/

Elbow Room: https://www.elbowroompdx.org/

Hide & Seek: http://hideandseekgallery.com/

Virtua: https://virtua.gallery/

A Sometimes Gallery: https://asometimesgallery.com/

Congress Yard Projects https://www.instagram.com/congress.yard.projects/?hl=en (unclear if this is still active)

False Front: https://www.falsefrontstudio.com/

I asked Eileen Myles to talk with me in June of 2025 during Lit Fest in Denver, Colorado. (I didn’t even know what Lit Fest was, they wrote back, I didn’t know that was its name.)

At the festival I took their seminar titled “10 Photos and a Dog.” When they walked in, I noticed straightaway that Eileen had rolled their jeans into capris—a stylistic mark I’ve come to associate with them.

The seminar centered the word ecceity (or haecceity), a term from medieval philosophy that roughly translates to this-ness—in this case, the this-ness of photographs. Among others, two self-portraits were shared as examples.

One was a photo of a photo Eileen had taken from the toilet: a younger Eileen framed and hanging on the wall to the left of a browned banana peel slung over the sink’s edge. The other was a photograph of Eileen on the toilet. At the time, they had been teaching in Missoula, where a “homophobic non-fiction writer” had scorned them for having a younger girlfriend who, Eileen contests, was “deeply into her twenties.” In response, Eileen and the girlfriend staged a portrait juxtaposing Middle-Aged Men in Academia—“smoking a cigarette in their office, drinking whiskey, and dying,” as Eileen put it. The resulting photo is all glory and gayness, meant in total opposition.

In their teaching, the frame of a photograph is conceptual by nature. What’s held in and out of capture influences equally. Both impact the static image. So to post it, or to chew it over in a room of writers, is to “see it socially.” The writer’s role in all of this is to act as captioner, adding language to what informed the framing.

Eileen’s method is altruistic. Their relationship to art and image production and circulation is both composed and unselfconscious: they make things and they give them away. The poem is the poem—already right, already finished in its original form.

Embedded in their work is an invitation to sociality—an invitation easy to accept when paired with the ecceity of Eileen, an essence that exists in the realm of feeling, as witnessed in the this-ness their self-portraits epitomize. More or less, meaning cannot be imposed; Eileen makes a thing that is itself.

After the seminar, we took an Uber to their hotel where we had a conversation in the lobby. As a generous and professional associationist, Myles had a notable response for every question. We talked about archiving then and now, writing schools (ad infinitum), Alice Notley, fathers and imperialism, and last, but not least, sex and chakras.

(This conversation was edited for clarity and readability.)

Edy Guy: What's your take on print versus digital?

Eileen Myles: Oh, I mean, I realized that I've really started to lose track of where I'm publishing for the past ten years because it used to always be that you just pile up your journals or whatever, and I can keep track of where I've been and there was a record.

Now, I feel like there's starting to be a real lack of a record, unless you're really diligent about putting everything on your CV. I kind of don't even know where I'm publishing—for poems especially.

For you especially. And as we're thinking about people passing away, this honing together an archive, what is that going to look like when your work is all over the place? It's going to be quite a task.

I know, yeah, I know, it's weird.

I think a lot of times your writing is regarded as being self-referential, really involved with the “I,” but I was listening to you and Maggie Nelson talk about how you're negotiating that “I” within the conditions of what you're observing.

When I read your work, it's a hyper-observation of the now, of the moment. So there's this relationship between the “I,” but also a dynamism between when you use the “I” and when you're not using the “I.”

Right, right.

I'm really interested in how your relationship with language is being affected right now, given that there is so much political turmoil going on. I think you're a writer that is really immersed with the political and the personal at once. I'm interested in what the affect on your language is.

On my language?

How it's moving through your body, how it's moving through your mind.

I just feel the political is something, obviously this is with us. I mean it's just—it's our condition. You know, I mean I think that... it's not a separate sphere. But I think we're living in a really alarming time.

I think there's probably no part of my life that won't be radically affected by some of the things that are happening in this country. And some of the things that this country is wreaking on the world, you know, specifically Gaza, for sure. And so it just winds up being, it's just like this kind of interesting offness about it, because I feel like I want my writing to reflect what I'm thinking and feeling and how it's affecting me, and yet I still kind of look at myself as a, relatively speaking, bourgeois American in that I've gotten myself to a place where I'm kind of comfortable. And so it's like, where do I put that information? So it's really become a big question in my writing and my poetry.

Sometimes it's something like Buddhism and a meditation practice, which I have, really helps because one of the structures of meditating is the way that it invites you to notice what you're thinking of when you're meditating. When you're supposedly not thinking, notice what you're thinking of and label it, you know. And so I found myself often having, I notice I'm thinking about Palestine, would just kind of come into poems in a very automatic way.

And just really, witnessing my existence seems like a more political thing because I just do my regular bullshit and then I look at my phone and there's completely shocking, horrifying information on it. And shuttling through those two spheres in a poem becomes a practice in itself. And yet, still, I'm an artist and I want my work to be new, so I'm always kind of looking for new ways to cite my exclamation.

So it's an immediate reaction? If you have the thought it's going to go into language on a page?

Ultimately, eventually, occasionally, intermittently, yeah. I mean I feel like I vacillate between that awareness and just my own cozy fraught state.

But the Buddhism component is the engagement with the thought and also like a stripping away of the language of the thought because you're thinking without thinking. That's just fascinating—a way in which to engage with what we see on our phones without being fully mediated.

I think I ask this question because I can sometimes feel like my ability for language is obliterated with the onslaught of stimulus of the news and the things that we're seeing.

I mean, I'm a first-person writer to a great extent, but it's not a first-person world.

Right. And with the first person—what's your relationship there? Often it’s perceived as “you.”

Yeah, and often it is, but I don't feel like, I think it's just people. People talk about taking pictures and is it handheld or is it on a tripod? You know, and sometimes I think the difference between first person and third person is that simple. You know, it's sort of like, I like the unsteady eye gaze, but what is Eileen Myles? The thing that's always weird is if that isn't interrogated. In a Buddhist way, it's just like, that's the question—what is it? I didn't give myself this name, I didn't request this existence to begin. I just happen to be here, in a way. So there's something that's so impersonal about the personal, too. So it's just like I think the first person continues to seem sturdy to me, you know, as a perspective.

And you know, and plenty of times, sure, I think there's an “I” in my work that definitely isn't me. But lots of times it is, but I just don't think that it still is only a way to look at something else, I think.

It also reminds me—you talked a lot about this in the seminar, which I was excited about—of the performative element of the language.

I was reading, I think it was your interview in The Believer… what really provoked me was that you had been edited out of your question marks and you had said that that was messing with the score, you know, and it's really not your intention to be blatantly asking a question or using that punctuation. And of course they kept in the periods instead of the question marks.

I was just thinking about the element of performativity and how your scores work. Is it a response to the line, like line by line are you orchestrating your score? Or is it that you are setting out for a tonal quality?

Oh, I think tonal because I think lines are artificial in a way. I think they're just managing pace and speed. I mean they're technical in that way, but you know they're just moving.

So the performance is in the moment.

The performance is each line, yeah. Because this is so big. At any moment, existence is so huge, so I think it's such a tiny gesture to be writing a poem. But it's sort of like, and yet, I have hundreds of these, hundreds and hundreds. [Referencing a notebook Myles has with them where poems are written.] It's what I do all the time.

It's like I'll be in the movie theater like [writes in the notebook].

I’m thinking about transcribing the reprint that’s coming out with Fonograf, A Fresh Young Voice From the Plains. When doing it, I was like space bar, space bar, space bar, space… it wasn't just like oh, perhaps there's an indentation here perhaps there's a line here.

You were transcribing it?

Yeah. We had to put it into a new Microsoft Word document from wherever it was printed last.

Yeah, yeah.

For the reprint.

But I mean, we, so you, but you said you did it?

Yes, I transcribed it for Fonograf.

Oh my God.

Did we know this?

I think I said this to you in the email, but...

I think I didn't quite take it in.

That's amazing.

I think that's what made me think of the performance and the score so much because it was... it wasn't a consistent pattern. It wasn't like you were replicating something over and over. There was an inconsistent propulsion per poem that required you to have different spacing. And I was very curious about that. I was like, at this time was Eileen writing on a typewriter, you know? And that would mean that you were also space bar, space bar, space bar…

Either by hand, you know, with a pen, or on a manual typewriter, absolutely. Plus, I was a young poet. I was new. And so, I was still changing what poems would look like a lot. You know, now they almost always simply look like this. [References notebook again.]

Even in A Fresh Young Voice From the Plains, that’s the exciting thing about the book is that it's publishing this long poem that nobody's seen. I read it one night at St. Mark's in 1980, you know, so that's really fun.

There was the manual typewriter on my desk, and I would write a couple of lines and then walk away for a few days and just like the poem just stayed there all summer and so it was just like, it was very whimsical where the carriage would stop on the page. And yet, then 50 years later, or 45 years later, I want it to be exact.

It's really funny, but it's true because that's the poem I wrote. It may have been instinctual or whimsical, but we want that to be totally reproduced. So it's really funny, those two things meeting each other.

Why do you think that you've shifted to more simple line breaks?

Well just because, it's like there's no reason why you would in a notebook, mostly, I wouldn't bother to you know—why would you be doing all that thinking? It's not the nature of the instrument.

But if you were to transcribe it to a digital format, would you keep that form?

Which “it”?

The way you had written it in that notebook right there.

If I was transcribing it?

If you put it onto a Microsoft Word document for potential publication, or if someone wanted to publish this poem of yours, would you keep that form?

The one it has?

Yes.

Yeah! Cause what else would it be?

I think, well, there can be an editing or a refinement process that might move those things around, but I'm probably of a similar camp that that is the origin.

Yeah, this is the thing. So it's sort of like that would be like, it would mean something else. I mean, it used to be, when I was less known, if somebody got a poem with long skinny lines of mine, they might put it in three columns on a page.

And I was like, that's really…I mean, I was usually more interested in being published than fighting that, but it was really different. It wasn't what I meant.

So usually now, there's a few things. People invariably won't let me use the word cause. I don't spell C-O-S and I don't use the apostrophe C-A-U. I just do C-A-U-S-E. I think since I was in my 20s, I thought, why is this not just simply a new word? How long are we gonna hang on to this apostrophe?

It always feels like a little kid going, "cuz," when we just all say “cause.” It is just a contraction that people do conversationally in print. I can't tell you how many times I use it, and then they fix it. Even when I say don't fix those. You know, they can't. Somebody along the line will say oh!

The editing impulse is like...almost tyrannical.

Yeah, they’re like this is the way, this is correct.

Do you still not fight it or do you fight it?

Oh, I fight it. I fight it. Yeah but it's just like, I think everybody has agreed, so I'm safe, and then at the last minute some part I didn't I mean. It happens all the time, it's crazy.

The last proof…

Yeah, I feel like a crazy person.

I remember transcribing that very very very long poem of yours in A Fresh Young Voice From the Plains as well, and I'm thinking now about Alice Notley's work—that is someone I wanted to talk with you about. The poem Blinding the White Horse in Front of Me has been significant in my life and that is kind of an epic poem. Read out loud I think it's like 20ish minutes. And then, of course, on the page, you know, however long it takes you to read that poem. But, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, these people passing away…did you have any overlap with them?

I mean, they were both people who had deep personal relationships with, you know, different kinds, but I was close to Alice since 1975. And a member of the family, practically, when Ted was alive and Anselm and Eddie were kids, I just had an open invitation to dinner, so I just like was…

There.

Yeah, yeah. We were in the neighborhood and there was a way in which poets lived then. We were all loaning money to each other and sharing drugs and books and everything. I mean I was in Alice's workshop and Ted would do these kinds of workshops where he would kind of hold forth. So I knew Alice first as kind of a young fan but then when you did a magazine—I did a magazine then—and when you did a magazine one I did a magazine then, and when you did a magazine, one of the things you would do was you would just go to their house, and they would open the manuscript of new poems, and you would pick one for your magazine. You know what I mean?

Whoa, like shopping for a poem?

Yeah, here, take a look, that's what I've got.

Your portfolio was literal, tangible.

Yeah, so I went over to their house for that, and that was just the beginning of our friendship. And it was funny, because Alice always was like, you weren't my student.

Well, you're close in age, aren't you?

Five years.

But that's, you know, five years, generations of poets are different. In five years you could be, like Alice was already teaching—she was 30—at St. Mark's. She was teaching at St. Mark's and I was, you know, it was my former graduate school and I had just come to the city. I didn't know any poets. You know what I mean? Like, she had been on the scene. I mean, she went to Iowa so it's just like, again, Anne Waldman, same thing, was five years older than me but Anne grew up in New York, so she was going to readings when she was 18. We’re only talking about six years—I came to New York when I was 24. Six years. But when you're that young too those are big years.

Patti Smith was a teenager in New York, she was from New Jersey. You know, totally different. You know, those people. So it's like five years becomes ten years, but it feels like another generation because it always was: When did you come to New York?

I'm thinking now of you and Maggie Nelson, you know, and that's a more significant time difference. You wouldn't be in the same school of writing, would you?

No, we're in the same world of writing, I think. You know, and she was in my workshops a lot when I was doing that. But I feel, I mean, I suppose we're friends and peers at this moment.

The distinction of writing schools nowadays is way more elusive to me, but maybe it’s just I can look back and see how people were defining things historically. But now, do we have the New York School of poets? What are the poets today?

The New York School is so funny because people really… Alice loves to say I’m not in the New York School. People love to say she was second-generation, but for a very long time it was like Alice was not second-generation, she was later. Cause it was clear who people were. It was John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, those were the first ones and then people that were their students were the next ones and Alice was after that.

First of all, it’s silly, cutting it all up. It just all becomes an unconsidered second-generation New York School now. It just means anyone after Frank O’Hara. I think it just means anybody after Frank O'Hara, but see again, Alice would say, but I'm not. For some people, it's really important to them to say I'm not New York School. I don’t claim to be any more than I claim to be a language poet, which—nobody would say I'm a language poet, but the way I always feel is I'm not not a language poet. Those people are my peers who are reading all the same things, going to all the same readings. It's just that there was a bit of a club and I wasn't in that club, but they were my friends. There was different interests within the group.

I see.

And those were important to people.

Alice talked a lot about how it was like a boys’ club. No one had been doing what she was doing. And she had this huge archive because she believed that she was a first of her kind.

And I wonder if some of that resistance and the nuance, the differences between what people are doing, is to stand outside the boys’ club and to shine a light on faults in that.

But also just repurposing. I mean, I think that's something that Alice does and that I do. It's sort of like, certainly, totally influenced by these guys, and I’m close friends with many of them. And just taking that and repurposing it.

Like I don't need to ever say that I'm this or that. The brandings often seem sort of exclusive. Excluding people in ways. I'm more aware of that than my desire to be included, ya know?

Like somebody who considered themselves a language poet would introduce me in a reading and say, Eileen is a New York School poet. And that's how it would be. And so I have no need to say I'm not that. I just notice the phenomena and how it operates. Whereas I think for some reason Alice, it was important for her to not be that, even though everybody will say that she's that.

So I was like, who cares? Gotta let them say what they say. But it was different. She felt differently.

And there are deep personal meanings in those distinctions for us.

But I think, one of the things I do think is that all these styles, whether it's New York School or Black Mountain or all these poetry styles that I read as a young person, I feel like I have definitely brought them to a kind of queer scene. Ya know what I mean? Like people like Michelle Tea and that whole world. They were younger than me. They were 20 years younger than me and they were influenced and affected. And even Maggie, I feel like I'm an importer of those influences to these people.

And so in a way you're pointing out the enmeshment that everyone is influencing each other or carrying on various lineages.

And also by the time there were like 1,600 or 2,000 or how many writing MFA programs in America and everybody is stirring the pot. And so all those schools, like how anything is taught and shared. I mean there's a difference in how people talk about things for sure, but it's all mixed up now.

That's good, but you can kind of, but you can kind of tell who is influenced by what and what, ya know, I mean like, there's, there's distinctions in the work, ya know, and how you learn to write and what you learn to write on.

Like there's people like, like somebody like Louise Glück is not important to me. I have never read—actually I've read one book of hers and that was because I was a judge for the National Book Award, so I had to read that book. And I didn't think she should have won, ya know.

Why is that?

Well it just wasn't a great book. I mean she won because all the other judges were like Louise.

She already had acclaim at this point?

Well they were like, Louise has never gotten a National Book Award.

So it’s time.

Yeah, and it was just like so what? So what? Fred but Fred Moten has never and Fanny Howe has never and these are ya know. I mean, it was such a politic to it. So there's so many people in the poetry world that it's like I'm friendly with them, but their work is not important to me. And look at who gets National Book Awards, and ya know, it's sort of like who gets Pulitzer Prizes. I mean, it's really, it's not, ya know, it's wonderful when it's Alice Notley or Rae Armantrout or something.

It's like looking at the work for its materiality and I think we have gotten to a hyper-referential and political state in publishing where it's like, who is this person? How long have they been doing it? Is it about time that they get this recognition?

Well, the awards are really weird. They're almost like marketing devices, sort of like, just the way people are introduced and all their awards.

Oh, I work in publicity, so I'm like so familiar, you know—you pay for some of these awards. It's a marketplace and so therefore there's corruption by capitalism steeped into it, and then we can go into what the author is paid and that's a whole conversation in itself.

This is completely shifting in focus…

Yeah, we don't care, we actually don't care about any of that…

I was thinking about how we're coming up on Father's Day and I was reading Ariana Reines’ book, Wave of Blood. Have you read that book?

Yeah.

I was so interested in the relationship between her and her father and how that inflicted into her political relationships.

Me and her father?

No, her. Her and her father.

There’s a focus in the book of this absent, or not loving necessarily, relationship with her own father and how that has really influenced her relationship with lovability, but this is also steeped in how she’s processing what's going on in Gaza and the violence that is also tied to homogeneous patriarchy and imperial power. As you're reading it you're correlating imperial power with this relationship with the father, or at least I was in my reading, and I was fascinated by this.

I'm interested in what you think about that, but then also, many, many years after losing your own father, how that relationship is playing out in your writing.

Well, I think my relationship with my father, I mean, my father was an alcoholic, but he was really great and really very generous. I had a really different relationship to my father than Ariana. It was weird and obsessive, but I had a very loving generous father that saw me in his way, ya know. And so I think it's funny… I don't know if it's so much about my work, but in therapy I have male therapists, always. Very little good experience of female therapists. And I think in the writing world, I anticipate men as being supportive of me. Not so much that I don't expect women to support me, but. So I don't know that I have such a hard time with the fathers. And I think my father would have been very supportive of my queerness and all of that. I mean, he was pretty queer himself. So really very different.

I mean, I love thinking about Ariana's relationship with her father. Well, being Jewish, it's sort of like having that kind of afflicted relationship with your father makes you not be as weighed down with the burden of Judaism as a patriarchal structure. You know, it's interesting.

Those were things that I think I could spend a lifetime thinking about.

But interestingly, Arianna is my father. That's our joke, is that I call her dad because she was born on the day my father died.

Oh, wow.

Not the same year, of course. But it's really funny when we discovered that. It was kind of ridiculous. I call her dad. It's one of our friendship markers. Very weird.

That is strangely serendipitous. I assumed you were in cahoots, but I didn’t know to that degree.

Right, right, right. I think what she discovered was that her family immigrated to America on the day that, on her birthday, maybe?

Right, that's in the book.

Yeah, so that day, October 24th, keeps coming up. I love things like that. I'm all for numerology.

Right, there's too much correlation for it to be random.

It's fun, it's haunting.

Absolutely.

I really believe there is this white patriarchal correlation that is, of course, inherent to imperialism and the violence that we see.

I found her book to be really guiding and clarifying in making that correlation a lot more than other works I had read. And I think some people sometimes can critique that conflation, like the personal should not be implicated in that way, but I severely disagree with that. I think that it was a way in which you can draw the web. And she was drawing the web and showing us how.

I don't even see how that is personal.

Just her relationship with her father.

Oh, right, right, right.

It's in the same way that so many queers have said that being gay or trans or what meant they were driven out of their family and that was the best thing that could have ever happened to them. So I think that for Ariana to have an afflicted relationship with her father maybe it was a personal sadness, but also just a total freedom. To get any woman to figure out how to get out from underneath that.

Does your father come through your writing still today?

He was just a great inspiration, just a foster of its existence. I mean, I knew my father wanted to be a writer. There's no evidence to support that he had any talent or even did anything, ya know. But it was his, somehow, it was a dream of his. And I think that in some ways, my valuing of writing and literature was in response to that. That that was a good thing, that was an important thing, that it would be very respected. I mean, I love that I'm a writer, and my dad would have loved it.

I want to ask you one more question, if you have time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This one's a bit weird.

I was watching an interview with you and Constance Debré. I think you were in Paris and there was a translator, so there was a glitch between your responses and their responses. I was laughing at this performance of translation, which is a side note.

Sex and fucking is an element of the narrative part of their work that I am interested in in regards to this part of the body that produces writing.

Part of the body that produces writing? You're thinking of sex as that or?

If we look at something like chakras…a life-force center would be the sacral chakra.

Oh, oh. Interesting, okay.

I'm just interested in how you think about the relationship between sex, fucking, and writing, beyond a thematic consideration.

Sex makes you want to write. There's no two ways about it. In periods where I'm not involved with anybody or I'm not fucking... I feel like I'm fine and I think that's definitely one of the differences of aging is you don't have the same jones, like I gotta get laid, ya know what I mean? It's like it goes to different places, it comes from different places, it's still important, but it's different.

Like when I was younger I would say it was the most important thing in my life. Just it was. And I don’t think that now, but I will say even this Spring my narrative was puppy and then, puppy changed things, puppy made me start writing poems in a different way. That’s interesting. And then soon after, my work just seemed to change. It seemed like I knew in a clearer way what a poem was again.

There’s this thing I’ve written about that is the bhav. Like the Bhakti Yogi, the person that comes into the room and moves the bhav up and down.

The bhav?

B-h-a-v. It’s sort of like about the quality of the room when there are people there. And and the Bhakti, B-h-a-k-t-i, Yogi comes into the room and moves the bhav up and down. That’s what they want to do through singing and storytelling. It’s so weird because it’s exactly what we do. It’s exactly what I just did for an hour with those people. And so I just think that a life has a bhav. And certain ones are more productive for work and writing and I think sex and love and intense relationship just makes it more charged.

Ya know, I like writing because it’s work I love to do. It’s not work to want to do it or be there. Sexuality just always changes it. And makes it a more charged process.

I have that experience. You have this line too—which got me thinking about it—in A Fresh Young Voice from the Plains, “I didn’t start fucking till quite late. / Exciting, romantic, / I am quite sure it is the one / thing I have invented.” And this idea of inventing correlated with fucking with sexuality—it’s all right there!

Right, right. I mean I think most of us are the same person all our lives in some ways. You make radical changes, but then you’re that person in this new guise, but you’re still that person.

Right, and then the relationship with another… what is that doing?

I know, I know. It’s a question! Is it an interruption? Is it an enhancement? Ya know? It’s always a different thing.

Do you have other practices? Do you do yoga?

Yeah, I do yoga, I meditate, and I go to the gym.

Any kundalini?

No, no, though I’ve often thought I would like that.

In kundalini—I’m not, for the record, a master by any means, but—there is a practice of rising the sexual serpent from the lowest chakra to the crown of the head as a way in which to ignite the higher chakras of imagination, to spiral energy through the body. Often people are wearing hats to reground that energy back down and so, again, I’m not an expert, but I do find it interesting.

Hats? Hats are sending the energy down?

Yeah, so that your prana isn’t exiting out too far beyond your head and you like float away…but, anyway… thank you so much. This was fantastic. I did have a few other questions, but I feel like we answered the questions that were the juiciest.

Okay, good, great.

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FRANCES BADALAMENTI holds a master’s degree in counseling psychology and practiced as a psychotherapist in both community mental health and private practice settings before writing her first book, I Don’t Blame You. That book began as a memoir about losing her mother a mere two months before becoming a mother, a means of working through the emotions of both grief and joy. In the end, she decided to publish that book as a novel to veil the narrative. That process of turning truth into fiction was the first phase of what would compel her towards the fictional devices that she found in her second book, Salad Days, a 90s coming-of-age story about a twenty-something, misguided bartender who works at an independent music venue on the Jersey side of the Hudson. It is the story of a very brief first marriage that brought her out to Portland, where that relationship quickly fell apart and a new one began. She considers Salad Days to be a work of autobiographical fiction.

In addition to her books, Frances continues to write and publish personal essays, short fiction, and interviews, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, The Believer Magazine, BOMB Magazine, Longreads, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Mutha Magazine, The Rumpus and Buckman Journal.

Frances lives in Portland, Oregon, where she mentors writers and teaches writing workshops with the local nonprofit, Literary Arts, and other organizations.

She is the author of Many Seasons published by Buckman Publishing in November 2024. Many Seasons acts like a skein, an elaborate tangle unraveling and being rewound. This story and the self inside it must get undone in order to be seen and reassembled. Just as personhood is non-linear, memory mingles with moment and matter-of-fact presents the formidable questions: Are attachments a reward or a burden? Ana, our protagonist, excavates generations of familial patterns and interrupts them in her own evolving family. She critiques motherhood while enacting it, discovers her gender as she observes it through her writing, and questions her relationships while staying in them. Many Seasons is really about being known; coming to terms with the fact that the richest part of us, one’s interior, may go unknown except to itself. And perhaps, in this case, to the page. By keeping her own narrative, Ana makes a record of renewal, recovery, domestic labor, and anxiety. She shows us that healing is a threshold and a path, that selfhood is a grand, nesting landscape, and that much like home, it is a shelter made by effort, devotion.

Read an essay by Frances Badalamenti on auto-fiction: A Woman’s Search for Meaning: On Motherhood and Writing the Self.

CHELSEA BIEKER is the California Book Award-winning author of three books, most recently the national bestselling novel, Madwoman, a Book of the Month club pick the New York Times calls “brilliant in its depiction of the long shadows cast by domestic violence.” Named a best book of the year by NPR, Oprah, Elle, and longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her first novel, Godshot, was longlisted for The Center For Fiction’s First Novel Prize and named a Barnes & Noble Pick of the Month. Her story collection, Heartbroke won the California Book Award and was a New York Times Best Book of the year. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Marie Claire UK, People, The Cut, Wall Street Journal, No Tokens, and others. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award and an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship, as well as residencies from MacDowell and Tin House.

Raised in Hawai’i and California, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children where she is the co-creator of The Fountain with the writer Kimberly King Parsons, writes about creative practice at her Substack, Make Up Your Life, and is at work on a new novel.

Read Chelsea’s responses to Cheryl Strayed’s questions on her Substack Dear Sugar:

Cheryl Strayed's Dear Sugar

Chelsea Bieker Tells Us

Hello friends…

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2 years ago · 375 likes · 31 comments · Cheryl Strayed

FRANCESCA CAPONE is a materials designer, visual artist, writer, and educator. Her work is primarily concerned with the creation of materials and a poetic consideration of their meaning. She is interested in how tactile forms simultaneously serve as functional surfaces for daily life and as a mode of communication or symbol within the cultural paradigm.

Her interdisciplinary practice takes the shape of visual art exhibitions, readings/performances, and books. Her books Woven Places (Some Other Books, 2018), Text means Tissue (2017), and Weaving Language (Self-Published, 2015) focus on textile poetics. They are in the collections at the MoMA Library and the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery in London, LUMA/Westbau in Switzerland, Textile Arts Center in NYC, and 99¢ Plus Gallery in Brooklyn. She has been an artist in residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Andrea Zittel's A-Z West. Her academic work includes lectures and workshops at Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, Reed College, University of Washington, and Alberta College of Art and Design, among others. She joined Nationale as a represented artist in 2018.

“A Mother’s Discourse open[ed] April 13, 2024 and combines Capone’s trademark use of fabric, language, and research to expand on the complicated topic of motherhood. The weavings displayed in the front gallery and the bookshop favor soft gradients, hints of domestic patterns, and sharp truisms that together brave a poignant dialogue. A first-time mother observing a post Roe v. Wade reality, Capone became concerned by the rapidly devolving lack of social resources available to new families in the United States. A linguist at heart, her focus turned toward books in search of comfort. As she read, she found a kindred community in literature narrating deeply personal experiences of child-rearing.

This exhibition presents as an abstracted metaphor for the maternal in four sections: a range of colormap weavings; gridded composites of heirloom fabric; a cento poem; and an archive library, now spanning 35 books. Each framed textile piece reveals a quote embroidered on its surface and sourced from one of the longform written works Capone has collected over the past few years. Luminous, pulsing, strange (Cusk) and The picture is not all rosy (Suleiman) are two examples of earlier weavings. Here, the tonal gradients appearing with each pass of the shuttle could be interpreted as a soft parallel to the transitions Capone experienced as her child passed through early infancy. The inclusion of a penned phrase outside of its original context invites an immediate interaction from the viewer to decipher its unique intention.

As her son became more mobile, Capone too expanded more fully into her practice. She began by hand-weaving strips of maternal fabric scraps to form new canvases addressing her pressing concerns. These textiles were passed down from her multigenerational family of Sicilian-American fashion industry workers. Pieces such as A moment of quiet (Clayton) and To love and protect (Emecheta) are smaller records of a similar intention, akin to promises whispered to a loved one. These embroidered lines span across the gallery walls in quiet reverence for the weight of the written word. Mantras such as “a visitation from angels” and “the future for you” read as gentle stitches in time that capture the varied nuances of early motherhood. Twined together they make up the complete poem A Mother’s Discourse: Cento, which hangs printed on translucent, silk chiffon. For viewers eager to engage the texts in full, the archive of books accompanies this collection, spines dusted in gradual hues of pink.

In its entirety, A Mother’s Discourse intimately enmeshes text and textile to give voice to an emotionally complex and shared experience. Capone has capably created a soft protest to the current landscape for mothers and new families, imbuing every stage with a warm familiarity for maker and viewer alike.” —Luiza Lukova, Press Release via Nationale

Photos by Mario Gallucci, courtesy of Nationale.

ANYA ROBERTS-TONEY’s oil paintings and works on paper explore feminine power and desire for connection with a feminine-charged landscape. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Portland Art Museum and Soho House, has been presented on Platform (a David Zwirner Project), and has been exhibited locally and nationally at locations including Disjecta Contemporary Art Center (now Oregon Contemporary), Nationale, Dust to Dust Projects, La Loma Projects, The Portland Pataphysical Society, the Office at Russo Lee, Somos Gallery, and Stephanie Chefas Projects. She is a winner of the Hopper Prize, a recipient of both a Photography Documentation Grant and a Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission (with additional funding from the Ford Family Foundation), and a recipient of the Stumptown Artist Fellowship. Roberts-Toney received her BA in Studio Art from Brown University and her MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art. Originally from Seattle, WA, she lives and works in Portland, OR, where she is represented by Nationale. Her current show The Echoing Green is on display through May 10th.

“The title of the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery alludes to William Blake’s poem by the same name, which recounts and intertwines memories of the outdoors and youthful exuberance. At the poem’s close, the green has shifted from echoing to darkening as the sun sets—a visceral allusion to the passage of time. The twenty paintings on display in the Front Gallery and Project Room emulate these feelings on mortality and the future, and reference the artist's ongoing inquiry into feminine power, motherhood, and the natural world. Lush blues, purples, and greens give way to Roberts-Toney’s distinctive motifs of portals, archways, and pools of water. These repeated images present as opaque and mysterious yet ever-present across the work, marrying the anxiety of the unknown with an enduring sense of perseverance and strength.

The rich pigment of emerald green plays a crucial role in the color palette of this exhibition and creates a thoughtful through-line amongst the pieces. While nontraditional as landscapes, these paintings create their own natural world wherein green becomes embodied as a harbinger of vitality. Works such as Hope in the Dark and The Pearl strategically employ light to hint at the possibility of transformation within each painting. A bright orb casts soft shadows across the water’s surface in Midnight Sun, bringing a refuge from the surrounding murky and dark background. In other instances, light breaks through clouds or serves as a central focal point drawing the viewer in. The presence of fountains serves as an endless source of life, their free-flowing water a symbol of perseverance. In this way, the paintings on display present reverently in the space of the gallery. Hope abounds within The Echoing Green if we so choose to look for it.” —Luiza Lukova, Press Release via Nationale

Photos by Mario Gallucci, courtesy of Nationale.

Event details

Conceptualizing Mothers in Art & Writing is a panel discussion that brings together Portland authors Frances Badalamenti, Chelsea Bieker, and visual artists Francesca Capone, and Anya Roberts-Toney to share how they conceive of mothering in their work through both written and visual means.

This generative conversation (moderated by Emmi Greer, Editor of Buckman Journal) will dive deep into the opportunities and challenges of making creative work about motherhood while also living as one. We will collaboratively discuss mothering as a concept, an archetype, a generational practice, and an ongoing discourse.

There will be light snacks, tea, and time for a Q&A. It’s a no-shoe joint, so wear your best socks. Purchase tickets here.

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There is no easy way to get to the Columbia Children’s Arboretum without a car. Located between truck yards and private country clubs, the area looks more like the desolate sprawl of a southwestern desert than what you’d expect to find in the PNW. No trees, no sidewalks, just a dirt path along a busy road. From the bus I spot a roadside flea market and consider getting off a few stops early, but decide the walk is too treacherous. Instead I get off where maps tells me to, endure catcalls from truckers leaning out their windows, and walk with confidence toward where I think my destination may be. 

Portland prides itself on being walkable and easy to get around, and after 10ish years of living here without a car, I find that to be generally true. Most places I go are an easy walk through an idyllic neighborhood, with plenty of trees for shade and a bus stop on every block for longer journeys. The sidewalks could use some work, but ultimately I feel safe. Of course, every city has its pockets: unfamiliar streets, areas that aren’t as densely populated or thoughtfully cared for, people you aren’t sure you can trust. . .but I know what to expect and am usually not bothered by much.

Up here, where the Columbia River separates Portland from Vancouver, I have no idea what to expect. The lack of trees makes me feel more exposed. The lack of people, like a target. Then finally, I reach a small residential neighborhood. Online, the area is described as a neighborhood “in transition.” I continue through to the entrance, fortunate to have a greener place to go. The park is a welcome escape from the traffic. I focus my attention on the trickling stream, the unruly wildflowers. I am pleased to find there are kids running around with their families and friends hanging out at picnic tables. . .that folks in the neighborhood have this oasis. I rest in the shade, wander down random paths for some time, then exit the park on the opposite side from which I entered. 

I’m surprised to find that on this side of the park, the houses are bigger. There are more trees and safer paths to walk—still I imagine the folks living here go straight from house to car-in-garage to closest Olive Garden. Everything is spread out, there is more room to breathe, and of course there is a spectacular view of the surrounding Country Clubs/Yacht Clubs/Golf Courses, where lines of trees provide a natural barrier. The paved sidewalk swiftly turns to gravel as I reach the end of the houses. A subdivision where no one has to meaningfully engage with anyone outside their same economic status. Nearly impossible to get to by foot or bus, stunted by the promise of progress.  

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I continue my trek toward the river, and find myself profoundly frustrated at the lack of through streets. Again, maps directs me down busy roads without sidewalks. I backtrack to find a safer route, do my best to navigate RV parks and boat wash stations. Then finally, the water. And even more thrilling, a convenience store.

I purchase popcorn, a snickers, gatorade, get harassed by two bikers on my way out the door, then run across the busy road. Out by the dock, there are riverside condos decorated with “private property” signs to keep out the riff raff. I find myself on a footpath surrounded by wildflowers, take a breath of fresh air, eat my snacks. I think about how secure I feel passing the signs, knowing I’m not the riff raff these folks are concerned about over here. How I could just play dumb if anyone questioned me. Playing dumb is my best defense.

Eventually, the path leads away from the river and up toward an intersection of bridges and highways. I know Delta Park is on the other side, within reasonable walking distance if it weren’t for the obstacles of car-centric infrastructure. I make it across to another green space lacking access. The vacancy feels like a threat, so I don’t stay long. Instead, I bus over to Hayden Island to the stop between abandoned strip malls. I’m the only one getting off, the rest of the riders continue through to Vancouver.

To get to the strip mall that’s still operational, I have to cross under another bridge. Another place only accessible by car. I try to imagine the amusement park that once occupied the space with its few signs left behind, the glamour of all the lights, the inexplicable allure of a carousel. I go back further to envision the island devoid of concrete and shopping centers. Still two separate landmasses lush with cottonwood and ash trees.

There are small beaches on the east side of Hayden Island (also known as Tomahawk Island). I’d been scolded there before, while cutting through a private park to go paddle boarding. That’s the side with the floating houses and marinas. But on maps, the west half the island is unmarked, and either curiosity or hope drives me to explore more. I follow concrete to a metal fence, the view blocked by a railroad overgrown with weeds. Two cars parked at the edge of the lot have branches growing through the windows. In the future this is how most of earth will look: relics overtaken by the natural world.

When I hike in the forest, I take a trash bag and pick up a few water bottles left behind, a sandwich wrapper, a beer can. But on the edge of the city, trash takes the form of neglected buildings, a car with four flat tires, empty concrete parking lots, fences, public dumping. Things too big to carry in spaces we pass through but don’t really look at or look after.

I’m left with the feeling, it doesn’t have to be this way.

I take a different route back to the bus stop, cut through a community of mobile homes with potted plants outside each door and lots of good house cats taking in the sunshine. Someone stops to ask if I’m lost, and it’s the only friendly encounter of the day.

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