The Memory Place

THE MEMORY PLACE — "Hilarious, Touching, Revealing" — was written by and stars a six-member cast: SUSAN BANYAS, LEANNE GRABEL, STEVE SANDER, WENDY WESTERWELLE, GREG BIELEMEIER, AND ELIZABETH TSCHALAER.

What does it mean to remember? The ancient cartographers found that to represent the world in perspective, they had to draw it in the shape of a heart. I began to notice in working with people on the poetry of their stories that landscape shaped memory in particular ways, and in this sense, shaped the character of the person remembering. Like the land itself, autobiography is a living, breathing, moving, changing dance.

-- writes Susan Banyas, co-founder of Dreams Wells Studio and the eclectic theatre, SO&SO&SO&SO, Inc., in Portland.

The Nye Beach Writers’ Series welcomes the six performers in "THE MEMORY PLACE," a choreographed literary performance. The show is a combination of f storytelling, dance, comedy, song and drama performed in Portland this past winter to sold-out audiences.

THE MEMORY PLACE layers film, dance and monologue into 10 scenes of memories. Normally, the Nye Beach Writers’ Series hosts just two writers each month, but in this Special Performance, we are privileged to experience a collaborative foray into words and linked pieces expressing perception and memory where love and food and landscape play prominent roles. The result is a tight and meaningful wander through deep conceptual waters presented in a mix of storytelling, dance, comedy, song and drama.

Susan Banyas, a writer and the director of Dreams Well Studio, spent the past several years developing a method for helping performers turn their own personal histories into performing material. Her title piece, which begins the show, incorporates dance into two love stories evoking 1940s San Francisco.

Elizabeth Tschalaer, a movement artist, performs her bilingual passage from Switzerland to Portland in "Between Places," a haunting and sparse memory drama.

Gregg Bielemeier, dancer and choreographer, recalls a Catholic holy day of his childhood in the dance monologue "Pilgrimage to Crooked Finger," which is as much about the physical images of a story as it is about the story itself. He also provides smooth dance cameos with his signature quirkiness and intuitive awareness of how movement reads on the stage.

Wendy Westerwelle, master storyteller, shines like a diva, casually fanning herself as she recounts the flamboyant characters of Storefront Theatre’s glory days and of her childhood summers at a Jewish resort community.

Steve Sander reflects on discovering the world of sensuality through literature in "The Burrough of Queens," as he recounts his first experiences of erotic literature in a tale woven around family life.

Leanne Grabel shows a polished craft in the beat-poetry saga "The Family That Fate Ate" and paints her landscape — 1950s Stockton, California -- in hilarious detail as she searches for a Bohemia paradise.

Jeff Meyers

Jeff was born in Miami, Florida in 1965 but grew up in a small fishing village on Long Island where he was subjected to all the awfulness the 70’s could bestow upon a teenager. From the joy of gas-rationing (his father owned several gas stations) to the hell of Top 40 Radio, he managed to bury himself in books, acted in as much theater as possible and spent the summer of 1977 going to see Star Wars thirteen times.

He attended the University of Illinois-Urbana on a scholarship, transferring from the Theater Department to a major in Animal Science to a degree in Microbiology, thus losing his scholarship. In his final two years as a senior, he discovered the joys of writing and film... and picked up a Minor in Cinematography.

In 1988, Jeff moved to Chicago and began working at Northwestern University in Genetic Analysis. He started writing screenplays with his best friend and became loosely affiliated with the Neo-Futurists Theater Company. He also started experimenting with poetry because he wanted to impress women.

In 1993, he moved to Portland so his wife could start her residency in surgery. In February 1994, The Portland Poetry Slam was founded and since then Jeff lead five teams through national competition, organized the 1996 National Poetry Slam (which was made into the documentary, SlamNation), established The Great Northwest Salmon Slam (now in its fourth year) and started a monthly show. He won Seattle’s Bumbershoot Poetry Slam in 1997.

Jeff is the co-founder of Theatre Vertigo and is a well-respected theatrical director in Portland and the author of two chapbooks, Come Over Here And Leave Me Alone and Half Empty. His latest screenplay, The Darkest Way is currently making the rounds in Hollywood.

His current projects include a play involving a religious cult, a manuscript of poetry based on the porno industry, moving his theater company into a new space and more screenwriting and directing. He makes his living as a molecular biologist.

www.theatrevertigo.org

Todd Davis

TODD STEVEN DAVIS was born at mid-century and grew up in a small Virginia mill town but has lived in the Northwest for twenty-five years and now resides in Seattle. He has an MA in Creative Writing, taught at the college level and has been writing and publishing since he was fifteen years old. He makes his living as a Registered Nurse specializing in spinal cord injury.

Todd says he writes poetry because he feels the compulsion to write, because it gives him great pleasure, and because he likes the adventure. He uses writing to organize his ideas and emotions. Often, he doesn’t know how he feels about something until he writes it down. Performing is the way he checks his editing. When he performs, he knows what he’s done by audience reaction.

Todd believes in poetry as an oral art. What people unconsciously love about language is rhythm, rhyme, repetition, word play, stress. The current generation of poets, he says, is lucky. After decades of academic verse, spoken word, Hip Hop poetry, and the sport of poetry slams has reached the forefront.

Todd is a regular performer in Seattle Slam and in 1995 was a member of the team that represented Seattle in the National Poetry Slam. He has toured nationally, performing in New York and Chicago and all over the west coast. He was the 1996 Grand Winner of the invitational Bumbershoot Poetry Slam.

He is also the author of three books:

• Sun & Moon Rendezvous
• Criminal Thawts
• Like Wings Of Birds.
  

He is also a singer for the band Eldorado Drive-Thru.

Carl Hanni

Featured on June 12th & 13th as part of Vaudvillianous Poets and April 17, 1999

April is NATIONAL POETRY MONTH, so tonight, for us, performance poet CARL HANNI will be the representative of all poet’s everywhere.

Carl is a vibrant, dramatic performer of poetry coast to coast in every conceivable situation, including headlining once at the Nuyorican Café in New York City and as a member of the Portland Slam team that went to the National Poetry Slam in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1995.

In 1994, his chapbook, Crash Worship was published and he produced the CD Talking Rain: Spoken Word and Music from the Pacific Northwest. Since then, his poetry has been featured on several CD and cassette compilations of spoken word. Carl also ran the Literary Arts Program at Portland’s Artquake Festival for three years.

His poetry appears regularly in innumerable literary journals, magazines and anthologies and it seems hardly a week goes by where the Portland papers don’t publicize his involvement at public poetry readings. His enthusiastic, appreciative audiences follow him from event to event. Carl’s first full collection of poetry, Night Shift, was published by Quiet Lion Press in 1996.

Mod Media is his one-man, independent publicity firm. Most of his clients are musicians or record labels, although he also works with writers, dancers, theater people, comics and filmmakers. He promotes their work locally, regionally and nationally.

Carl graduated from American University, in Washington, DC, in 1988 with a BA in Literature and a minor in Cinema Studies. He dreamt of going moving to Bisbee in 1999 and that's what he did and that's where he's been for the past three years.

www.modmediapublicity.com

Barbara Drake

Barbara Drake received a BA from the University of Oregon in 1961, an MFA in 1966. She taught at the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University from 1974 through 1983, was a visiting writer at Lewis & Clark College 1979-80 and 1982-83, and at Whitman College. She’s taught guest courses at Willamette University and Southern Oregon Community College, and since 1983 has been teaching writing and literature at Linfield College where she is a full professor in the English Department. Her teaching specialties include creative writing, Irish literature, American women writers, and environmental literature.

Her nonfiction book, Peace At Heart: An Oregon Country Life, was published by Oregon State University Press in 1998. Her books of poetry include Love At The Egyptian Theatre, Life In A Gothic Novel, What We Say To Strangers, Bees In Wet Weather, and Space Before A. She also wrote the textbook, Writing Poetry and is co-author of Concepts in Literature for grades 7-12.

Barbara Drake’s poetry and prose has appeared in numerous anthologies including the Prescott Street Reader, The Plain Truth of Things, O Poetry! and The Sumac Reader. Her articles, poetry, fiction and reviews appeared in Northwest Magazine, North American Review, Northwest Review, Centennial Review, Western Humanities Review, Green House, and Wormwood Review.

Barbara was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Graduation Award in 1966, a Northwest Arts Foundation grant to study British poetry in England during the summer of 1985, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1986, and the Edith Green Distinguished Professor Award from Linfield College in 1993.

She lives on a small farm in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range with her husband. They raise wine grapes and Romney sheep. She has eight adult children and six grandchildren. Her interests include photography, travel, hiking and art.

Dmea Roberts

Dmae Roberts is an Amerasian playwright, actress and radio producer. Her first Drammy-nominated full-length play was the autobiographical Mei Mei: A Daughter’s Song. Other plays include Breaking Glass, produced in 1995, Janie Bigo, The Journey of Lady Buddha, her multimedia play about Kuan Yin, and Picasso in the Back Seat, which received the Portland Drama Critics Circle award for Best Original Play in 1996, an Oregon Book Award in playwriting.

Dmae has also written and produced more than three hundred features, audio arts pieces and documentaries for National Public Radio, MonitorRadio, the Osgood Files, and Public Radio International.

Her honors include the George Foster Peabody award for her radio docu-play Mei Mei, an Oregon Institute of Literary Arts award, and grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission and New Langton Arts.

Her 13-part radio series LEGACIES: Tales From America was hosted by James DePreist and broadcast on National Public Radio to more than one hundred stations. She just completed three one-hour radio documentaries distributed on National Public Radio called LEGACIES: Faith, Hope and Peace, winner of the Heart of America award for Best in Radio.

Dmae has also acted extensively on Portland stages as Mary Ann in ESCAPE FROM HAPPINESS, as Lizzie Borden in BLOOD RELATIONS, as Lady Macbeth in MACBETH, as Hortensio in TAMING OF THE SHREW (for which she received a Drammy nomination), and as Mistress Ford in MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, for which she received a Drama Critics Circle award.

As the executive producer of MEDIARITES, a non-profit organization dedicated to multicultural arts production in radio, theatre and literature, she continues her personal mission to create works that bring diverse communities together.

www.mediarites.org

Scott Rosin

Scott Rosin began writing shortly after heading into the woods in 1971. "I've worked in nearly every capacity of forest labor over the last 28 years: fire-fighter, smokejumper, tree planter, pre-commercial thinner, timber-faller, logger. If it involved blood, sweat and lower back pain, I've done it."

Scott's poetry has been published in numerous woodland, firefighting, surfing, and literary magazines. He was featured as the world's foremost surfing poet in The Glide: Renaissance of Long-Board Surfing, a history and commentary about contemporary long-board surfing by Chris Bystrom, published in Australia every year since 1999. He has also written a novel about D.B. Cooper the legendary Northwest hijacker, a full-length children's book The Chronicles of Humbleton, is working on a collection of poems about surfing, and a novel The Secret Spot, which is near completion.

Scott began writing plays in 1984. The first three were one-act comedies about love-relationships collectively called "Problems in Natural Selection." His musical adaptation of O. Henry's "Gift of the Magi" transformed the original two-character short story into a stage performance with a cast of 59. In 1988, "O Dragon" was performed at the Next Wave Youth Theatre in Newport where he played the lead role. "The Stolen Hours," performed at the Newport Performing Arts Center in November 1996, was Scott's sixth play staged in Newport.

Scott is a competitive surfer, on the Board for the Oregon Coast Council for the Arts, and host of the Nye Beach Writers' Series.

Greg Kleiner

Greg Kleiner’s first novel, Where River Turns To Sky, is the story of an eighty-year-old man who promises his lifelong friend, now confined to a nursing home, that he will not die alone. He visits every day for two years until the one weekend when he escapes to go fly-fishing. The friend dies while he’s gone. Vowing to allow no other person to die alone, he buys a rundown mansion in the Oregon town of Lookingglass and paints the house a shocking red lipstick colorl. He then invites a handful of elders move in with him. The book shows that death is not necessarily an end, rather a lesson in living.

The Chicago Tribune called Gregg’s novel, "a lovingly told story of aging, the betrayal of our bodies and minds, and death….you’ll leave this book with a deeper understanding of what it’s like to be old and how quickly human contact can redeem the loneliest among us."

Where River Turns to Sky was a finalist for both the 1997 Paterson Fiction prize and the 1997 Oregon Book Award.

Gregg is a third-generation Oregonian, a graduate of the University of Oregon with degrees in Journalism and German literature. At age 16, he spent a year as an American Foreign Exchange Student in the mountains of northern Thailand. For a month of that year, he lived at a Buddhist monastery as a novice under the tutelage of an aged monk. He’s worked as a dairy goat farmer, hotel concierge in Switzerland, freelance journalist, wildlife biologist, carpenter, and technical writer. He makes his living now writing and teaching. Gregg lives in Corvallis, with his wife, Lori, and two small children, Eli and Sophia.

Anita Feng

ANITA FENG received an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University. She won several awards including the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, an Illinois Council award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Most recently, she received the Andrés Berger-Kiss Award for non-fiction.

Her first poetry collection, Internal Strategies, is a book that tells the story of her husband, Xiao Ge Feng, growing up through the turmoil of communist China. The book follows the course of his life from severe childhood illness to forced labor in Manchuria, through factory work, education, immigration to the United States and marriage.

Anita lives in Issaquah, Washington with her husband and three children where she maintains a studio as a professional potter specializing in ocarinas, musical instruments made from clay.

Ocarinas are an ancient folk instrument that originated in Central and South America where it was used by native tribes. Each tribe had its own "tuning" and could be identified at a distance from the music played. The tone of an ocarina is haunting, rich, unique. The word "ocarina" means "little goose egg" in Italian. Later, in America, it became known as the "sweet potato." According to the webpage information, Anita has been designing and creating ocarinas since 1974.

www.scn.org/bg599

Sharon Doubiago

Sharon Doubiago is a native of Los Angeles, has a Master’s Degree in English from California State University at Los Angeles and considers home anywhere along the Pacific Coast.

She teaches workshops and has been a resident instructor in numerous writing programs throughout the country, including at the Ph.D. program at the University of Denver, the Masters Poetics Program at the Naropa Institute, the Napa Poetry Festival, Warren Wilson College, The University of California at Santa Cruz Writers’ Pool, the University of Minnesota’s Split Rock Arts Program, France’s Loire Valley Writers’ Retreat, Ashland Oregon’s Writers Conference, the Art Institute of Antigua, Guatemala, and at the University of Wyoming. She has been leading "The Autobiography of the Soul," her signature writing workshop, throughout the Northwest and world for the past fourteen years.

Sharon’s most recent published book is The Husband Arcane. The Arcane of O, from Gorda Press, a book length poem and interview provoked by the issues of gender, race, domestic violence, poetics and America raised during the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Other published works include two epic poems: Hard Country (1982) which will be reprinted in 1999 by East End Press, and South American Mi Hija (University of Pittsburgh, 1992). Her two collections of short stories are El Nino, published by Lost Roads in 1989, and The Book of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, published by Graywolf in 1988, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards. Her collection of poems, Psyche Drives the Coast, won the Hazel Hall Oregon Book Award in 1991.

Sharon received two Pushcart Awards for both poetry and fiction. She also won the Woman Writer Genius Award, Gloria Steinem’s Woman Writer Award and the Oregon Book Award. Sharon recently returned to the Oregon coast after a stint as Visiting Writer for the University of Wyoming. On November 13 she will begin teaching "Creative Writing/Voice of the Soul" at a week long Writing Workshop in Guatemala. She will read tonight from her newest poetry manuscript Body and Soul.