SPRING

MARCH 4TH: BRONWEN TATE AND MATTHEW HENRIKSEN

APRIL 1ST: NIK DE DOMINIC, AMANDA NADELBERG AND GEOFFREY G. O'BRIEN

MAY 6TH: ANOTHY MCCANN, ROBYN SCHIFF AND MATTHEW ROHRER

JUNE 3RD: SHARON ZETTER AND CHRISTINE HUME

Some video of Lynn Xu at Studio One's May 7th Reading

Hey Lucas thanks for taping this

Lynn Xu reads at Studio One from Lucas M. Rivera on Vimeo.

see more videos from L. Rivera here

Farrah Field Interviews Zachary Schomburg

Farrah Field: You write, paint, and have a knack for photography. (And film making). How do you balance and nurture all of your varied interests?

Zachary Schomburg: Thanks for noticing, and for assuming these interests are balanced. To me, they feel awfully messy, overlapping one another, getting in each other’s way. Poetry is the only thing I’ve formally studied, so the painting, photography and film-making are made out to be indulgences. I try my hardest to get book-making, editing Octopus, and translating in there somehow too. There are certainly waves of interests for only one thing—every few days I have a new aspiration. Every few days I’ve figured out I want to dedicate my life to film-making (for example)—so a lot of these other projects get back-burnered for a few months until I re-aspire.

For whatever reason, we’re under a lot of pressure to be and do one thing and do it well. I’d rather do a bunch of different things passionately. Though, really, these projects you mentioned are really born from the same impulse—they’re manifestations of the same need to make art. My paintings, photos and films are all saying the same things. Regardless, these projects are what keep me moving forward. Ye old carrots on a stick trick. I’m a donkey.


FF: Scary, No Scary begins with a prologue poem. Was this your publisher’s idea or did you intend for the book to be prefaced this way?

ZS: “Scary, No Scary” was the first poem I wrote for this manuscript. It is that world’s big bang, so it seemed natural to make it the book’s prologue (it was my idea—all mine!) It establishes something: the walk through the woods, the attempt to find Home, the night, the loneliness, the ambiguity, the choices.


FF: In Scary, No Scary, you work and re-work the idea of smallness (spiders, hummingbirds, eyelashes) and feeling small juxtaposed by gigantic things. I thought it was pretty funny to see this indexed at the back of the book, “Tiny, the idea of being (see also Gigantic.” Will you tell me more about the indexing process? Who’s idea was it and was there a different approach for both of your books?

ZS: Yeah, being gigantic and being very tiny is essentially the same thing. Both indexes were quite a blast to make. I stayed up late for this last one, after the page numbers had been set, and I went through poem by poem to catalogue all the repeating images, all the repeating concepts. Both times, I was surprised by some of the things I found had repeated. In the Suit, for example, I remember thinking, “I have a gorilla wearing people clothes twice?!” It is a great exercise for anyone completing a manuscript. You’re able to see your invisible crutches and then kick them out from under you. “Why are all my characters crying?” you’ll say. “What is wrong with me?” Or “why are all my characters miniature or gigantic?” you’ll say. “Why can’t things just be normal-sized?”

With the Suit, the approach felt much more accidental. I had indexed it for fun when I had a bad case of the Block one night. Janaka and I joked about including it. This second time around, I wrote more with a potential index in mind. I knew the hummingbirds were there. So whenever I needed a bird for a poem, I made it a hummingbird. In this world, all the birds are hummingbirds. It’s much simpler that way.


FF: The Pond and Abraham Lincoln’s Death Scene are longer poems/sections from both of your books as well as separate chapbooks. Did you write these two particular pieces before the rest of the manuscripts? How did you determine that they would make great separate pieces (both of them are beautiful chapbooks) and how do you feel about them now that they are folded into the whole of it all?

ZS: These are two poems I am really proud of. They were both written like any other poem in the manuscripts, right in the middle of the process. They are both firmly a part of the worlds of their respective books. In the chapbooks, they seemed a little lonely, a little out of place.

FF: Tell me more about your poem-films. How did you come by way of the footage? Which arrangement do you prefer for the poems to be read by a speaker in the film or by the viewer alone? When did you begin making these and what was your goal for adding images and music to the poems? How did you pick the poems you made poem-films for?

ZS: I traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, during the summer of 2008 and started taking a bunch of footage on my new little pocket camera. I didn’t have any idea how I would use that footage, but it felt important that I record something. I had this vague notion that I would make some sort of documentary. After Russia, I continued to collect footage of patterns, things moving, during my walks around Portland. Once, I was on the internet-less train between Portland and Seattle. I was a bit bored so I clicked on that iMovie app at the bottom of my laptop and I freaked out a little. I clicked on all the buttons to see what they would do. I made that one about the airplane first, in about 45 minutes (can you tell?). I didn’t write a new poem for about two months after that, but I made about 12 poem-films on iMovie.

The footage is all mine. This steers which previously written poems will be used—they need to somehow marry the footage. I don’t take footage to accommodate a poem.

Also, I just got a new camera. I’m going to get pretty serious this year.


FF: On your blog you often write about the film classes you teach. What is your approach to teaching these classes? Does the school tell you they need a such-and-such class to be taught and you come up with a syllabus or do you come up with a class based on some films you’d like to teach? Furthermore, what is it like to experience the text together with your students, watching a film together, versus discussing assigned reading with which students have engaged prior to class?

ZS: I love teaching film. The department at Portland State gives me the freedom to design my own classes how I see fit. I’ve taught 1950’s Cold War Hysteria films, Feminist Film Theory, some Introduction courses, and now, The Outsider in Independent Cinema. For the most part, I build a class around a group of films I’d like to teach—a group of films that somehow speak to one another.

These classes really don’t operate any differently than a lit course. We watch great films each week and then discuss the socio-cultural implications (in Intro, we discuss the film’s cinematic devices). In some ways, I suppose, film in the later half of 20th century is like the novel of the 19th century. It is quite easy, through film, to set the appropriate groundwork for a historical conversation about who were then, and who we are now. Regardless, whatever we encounter in my classes, we ask “how does that make you feel/think?” and then “so what?”

Most of my students have no idea that I write poetry. Though, when watching some experimental films last term, we watched the surrealist films of Buñuel, and Maya Deren, and then some Brakhage and Lynch. I said that we’d been watching novels all term long, and now it was time to watch some poetry. I had them all write poems instead of taking notes. I think there is a pretty natural bridge between the two art forms. In a poetry class, I’d like to show some films.


FF: The last time we spoke we both reminisced about our elementary schools in Omaha. Last summer I revisited mine and thought it was really weird to not see it during winter, as most of my memories are of walking to school in snow and playing on the ice outside in the school parking lot. Have you been back to your elementary school? Furthermore, how has Omaha changed or how is it different now that you’ve left it?

ZS: You did? Which school was it again? I went back in December while visiting my family. Lewis Central. My dad is the swim coach, and he let me in to the pool with his keys to do some swimming. I think I was afraid I was going to put on some blubber while back in Omaha, eating chicken wings all day long. I took a few pictures of the locker room.


Everything is so small. The urinals are so low. I was pretty much just peeing on the ground. I remember getting in my first and only fight in that locker room. Nathan Okerbloom was saying some mean things about a friend of mine and I had just about had it, so I pushed him and he fell over one of those benches. He hit his head on the other bench and it looked like it hurt pretty bad. I was shocked at the violence I had caused. It scared me. So I ran out of the locker room and tried to reason with Nathan once he caught up with me.

Omaha is still the same, but I have changed. I have so much nostalgia for that place. I love it. My relationship to Omaha feels like Alexander Payne’s relationship to it. I’m drawn to it endlessly. My heart is from there. It is a place that is so simultaneously strange and comforting, lost and familiar. My heart, then, is born from that dichotomy.

It reminds me who I am and who I am not. It is the place I can go to see myself in a mirror. We’re starting to get at the heart of SNS.

What is your Omaha like?

FF: Thanks for asking--I went to Golden Hills. My family lived less than a block away from school, so we always ended up spending most of our time there with all the neighborhood kids. The playground equipment was made from large tractor tires and my sister taught me how to ride a bike in the schoolyard. When I went back last summer, there was a kid sitting on the playground, bored and lonely looking. He climbed to the top of a fence in front of a kickball field surrounded by a great expanse of land. He slouched. I wanted to ask him where all the other kids were and how come the hill leading up to the school looked so small, why the neighborhood looked so run down. When I drove away, he was lying on top of a table where teacher-smokers used to sit during recess.

So, you and I are in our thirties. What’s something that you’d like to do that you’ve never tried in/with/on your poems and what’s something that you hope would never happen?

ZS: I’m almost 33. Are you around there too? I’m writing a very very long poem, and I would like to finish it while I am still in my 30s. It is called Asteroid. I’m writing it alongside two other manuscripts, but I’m in no hurry to finish it. It is currently about 50 pages long, but it is in its infancy. I’ve never tried anything like this before. It sprawls and seeks out new pockets of light. I’m trying to let go of my need for tight narrative, trying let go of my need to get out of a poem in some strange way. I’m trying to teach myself to stay in the poem, to look around and hold my breath.

I hope I keep writing things that surprise me, instead of falling into the trap of recreating old surprises.


Zachary Schomburg is the author of The Man Suit (Black Ocean 2007), Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean 2009), and several chapbooks including three forthcoming collaborative chapbooks with Emily Kendal Frey: Team Sad (Cinematheque Press 2010), Feelings Using Wolves (Small Fires Press 2010) and Ok Goodnight (Futuretense 2010). He co-edits Octopus Books and Octopus Magazine. He lives in Portland, OR.

Farrah Field's poems have appeared in many publications including the Mississippi Review, Typo, Harp & Altar, La Petite Zine, Eklesographia, Effing Magazine, and Ploughshares and are forthcoming in Mantis and Cannibal. Rising, her first book of poems, won Four Way Books' 2007 Levis Prize. She lives in Brooklyn and blogs at adultish.blogspot.com.

Reader Report

Brandon let me know of Suzanne Stein's thoughtful reader report at LWC/LWK

We are a hard spot to find and I liked how Stein mentions the long walk up to the front door, which always seems to build an impression. Rolling lawns.

Sometimes I think finding Studio One is like finding the ever elusive party but then when you finally do all the nervousness about getting lost was totally worth it because the place is raging fun.

Also, there is a parking lot in the back of the building allowing you to park super close to the Hall where we hold the readings. You just have to find that little driveway that winds you back around the place. :)

MAY DAY

First Friday at Studio One is May 1st

First Friday @ Studio One!



Brandon Brown is a poet from Kansas City, Missouri. His friends published the chapbooks Memoirs Of My Nervous Illness (Cy Press, 2006), 908-1078 (Transmission Press, 2006), Camels! (TAXT, 2008) and the forthcoming Wondrous Things I Have Seen (Mitzvah, 2009). He co-curates the (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand and wears pink socks.


n a t h a n a e l f . t r i m b o l i is a multi-talented artist, musician and videographer. Trimboli, a former Chief Designer with PBS, has made his mark by examining life through the lens of his community. As a professional editor, the South Bend Regional Museum of Art hired him to teach classes on expanding abstract thought through video. His art installations have been incorporated as set-design for fashion shows as well as traditionally viewed multi-media graphic documentary, and are always backed by community causes. Recently Nate has landed in Oakland, a new community with new artistic challenges and a multitude of exciting possibilities. Nate is currently filming a documentary for the Community Coalition for Haiti.



Farrah Field's poems have appeared in many publications including the Mississippi Review, Pool, Typo, Harp & Altar, 42Opus, La Petite Zine, Pebble Lake Review, and Fulcrum, among others. Rising won Four Way Books' 2007 Levis Prize and is her first book of poetry. She lives in Brooklyn and blogs at adultish.blogspot.com.

Doors open @ 7
readings start by 730

your donations are appreciated for entry and wines! Many thank yous to all the people who donate dollars every month to keep the series free for others.

Tonight!

Studio One gets legal

Hi!

The reading series (that's us) at Studio One was told we needed to purchase a booze permit. Without this permit, we would not be able to partake in libations while listening to pomes and jams. The permit was $100, which pretty much bankrupts the series. If you would like to donate monies to us to help out with the permit punch and purchase of these libations, we will happily accept!



Now you can rest, knowing that you are in a legal state when you partake in permitted wine and donate toward its purchase!

Also, don't miss tomorrow night's reading with Stephanie Young, music from Meklit Hadero & K. Silem Mohammad.

April 3rd

First Friday @ Studio One!


Stephanie Young lives and works in Oakland. Her books of poetry are Picture Palace (in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, 2008) and Telling the Future Off (Tougher Disguises, 2005). She edited Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006) and her most recent editorial project is Deep Oakland, co-curated with David Horton.




Meklit Hadero is a singer, musician, cultural activist and Resident Artist at the Red Poppy Art House. Born in Ethiopia, Meklit has lived in twelve cities and on three continents. Meklit has received commissions from the San Francisco Foundation Fund For Artists (for the ensemble Nefasha Ayer), the Brava Theater (for music for the world premier theater production, "Over the Mountain"), and Bay Area Friends of the Congo. This June, Meklit will be a de Young Museum Resident Artist, commissioned by the museum's Cultural Encounters Program. She is the recipient of a 2008 Individual Grant from the Belle Foundation for Arts and Culture. Currently, she is organizing a group of Ethiopian Diaspora artists from across North America to return to Ethiopia for a festival of traditional music at the end of this year. In December of 2007, Meklit released her first recording, titled "Eight Songs.



K. Silem Mohammad is the author of Breathalyzer (Edge Books, 2008), A Thousand Devils (Combo Books, 2004), and Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003). He edits the poetry magazine Abraham Lincoln and teaches literature and creative writing at Southern Oregon University. His blog is Lime Tree
















Doors open @ 7
readings start by 730


your donations are appreciated!
At the last reading William and Aimee donated a lovely bottle of wine! Yay Billy and Aimee.
And many thank yous to all the people who donate dollars every month to keep the series free for others.

March 6th

See you there!



Jared Stanley was born in Arizona, grew up in the East Bay, and lives in the San Joaquin Valley. He's written a chapbook, The Outer Bay (Trafficker Press, 2008). His first full-length book, Book Made of Forest, will be published by Salt Publishing in April. With Lauren Levin and Catherine Meng, he edits the magazine Mrs. Maybe.


Joseph Massey was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, and has lived in Humboldt County, California for the last eight years. His chapbooks include Minima St. (Range: 2003), Eureka Slough (Effing Press: 2005), Bramble (Hot Whiskey: 2005), Property Line (Fewer & Further Press: 2006), November Graph (Longhouse: 2007), Within Hours (The Fault Line Press: 2008), and Out of Light (Kitchen Press: 2008). Another chapbook, The Lack Of, will be published this winter by Nasturtium Press. His first full-length collection, Areas of Fog, will be published by Shearsman Books in the spring of 2009. His work has also appeared in American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, The Nation, Abraham Lincoln, and Northwest Review, among various other journals and magazines.


Thomas Busch, Atticus Culver-Reese, and Conor Allen have been collaborating on comedy skits for two years. These comedy projects are a part of an on going series that premieres on getoutofmydojo.com. The ‘Gullible’ skit is the latest in that series.


Donna de la Perrière is the author of True Crime (Talisman House, 2009) and the recipient of a 2009 Fund for Poetry award. Her work has appeared in Agni, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Five Fingers Review, The New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, New American Writing, Volt, and other journals. She teaches in the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs at California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University, co-curates the Bay Area Poetry Marathon reading series, and lives near downtown Oakland with the poet Joseph Lease and the cat Little Sister.


365 45 st
wine starts at 7pm
out of the door around 930
your donations are appreciated

Feb 6th, first Friday at Studio One

First Friday at Studio One Art Center is expanding in 2009. In addition to the poetry reading and live music, visual art is mounted all about the 2 floors of this beautiful gem of a building. Also, photo journalist and spoken word artist Jennifer Inez Ward, will give a talk on her new photo series in the theater (more info below), and in the ceramics studio, a studio instructor be doing demos, showing how clay takes shape on a wheel.


For the Reading Series: We start after 7pm, in the "Great Hall." Come hang out and listen to ...

LISA GSCHWANDTNER has attended writing workshops at The Writer's Center, in Bethesda, Maryland, and The Juniper Summer Writing Institute at The University of Massachusetts. She was an artist-in-residence at The Atlantic Center for the Arts, where she studied with George Garrett. She is currently getting her MFA in fiction writing at St. Mary's College of California, in Moraga. She lives in Berkeley.


Music from PAIGE HEIMSOTH...About Paige: born in Slidell, Louisiana and currently living in San Francisco, California in a tiny studio on a busy street. Recorded 3 albums so far at Hyde St. Studios in San Francisco. The first is self titled, the second is titled 'Whiskey Was The Medicine', and the third is titled 'Under Chandeliers'.. to be released soon. I sing back up vocals for the amazing blues singer/songwriter Chris Cotton. You can hear his new album, 'The Big Sea' @ www.myspace.com/cottonchris I am the singer, performer and co creator for the multi-media performance, 'Tango La Melodia'. A performance involving live Gypsy Jazz, Tango, and Blues music, silent films, cabaret and tango dancers all wrapped up in finger waves, gowns, and the 1920's. www.tangolamelodia.com I am the drummer for Hello Handsome. www.myspace.com/hellohandsome l plan on recording and performing music, album after album, until I'm old and gray

RICHARD MEIER is the author of Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar and Terrain Vague, both available from Wave Books. He lives in Chicago and is writer-in-residence at Carthage College in Kenosha, WI and plays guitar in James Fishman-Morren's band The Ja Na.



The reading series is donation based and is thankful for your generosity.

In the theater at Studio One for first Friday Oakland photographer JENNIFER INEZ WARD will be presenting her new urban photography and spoken essay project, "Outside In: A New Oakland View". The last few years have been one of hope, turbulence, pain, and frustration for the city. From the changing downtown landscape, to the Dellums administration, Chauncy's assassination, the garbage strikes and restaurant hold ups, Ward explores the nuances of Oakland. 7:30 TO 8:00PM

NEW ART WILL BE FEATURED ALL OVER STUDIO WALLS BY Visual Guest Artists Pam Fingado, Eva Greenstein, Lisa Greenstein, Susan Harvest, Malka Helfman, Shirley Parini, Anne Shulenberger, and Studio One Art Instructors / Lab Volunteers Darren Cockrell, José Constantino, Janet Hiebert, Jim Hornback, Moses LaSabra, Reddy Lieb, Shauna Rosenblum, Jennifer I. Ward, Mira M. White, whose art " Fluid Mastery Part 2", will remain in place through Fri. Feb. 27. Meet some of the artists who be hanging out from 6:30 to 9:00pm Also, a live ceramics demo will take place during this time.

Spring at Studio One

Feb 6th with Rick Meier and Lisa Gschwandtner. Music from Paige Heimsoth

March 6th with Donna de la Perriere, Joseph Massey & Jared Stanley. Music from Diana McCullough

April 3rd with Stephanie Young and K. Silem Mohammad. Music from Meklit Hadero

May 1st with Brandon Brown, Farrah Field & Stan Apps


All readings are donation based and start sometime after 7pm
come hang out!