One of our absolute favorite volunteers and First Person fans, Alice Ozma, is a memoir writer herself! Alice just released her debut memoir The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared, which tells a touching story about Alice’s single father, an elementary school librarian, who read to her every night, starting from when she was in the fourth grade until the day she left for college.

Alice Ozma will be reading from The Reading Promise tomorrow, Tuesday, July 19, at the Free Library! The event is FREE, so be sure to head on over to the library and check it out. You can find more information about the event here.

We caught up with Alice before her big event and asked her a couple of questions about how this journey with her father began, how her promise has inspired others, and what her father thinks of her book.

How did the reading promise start?
Originally, it was my father’s idea. He wanted to try for a hundred nights in a row, but when we met our goal, we found it very hard to stop. So we went for 1,000, and after that, we didn’t really look back. We read for 3,218 nights in a row.

What inspired you to write about it?
I wanted to write about it, in part, because we enjoyed our experience so much, I figured it was only a matter of telling people about it – once they knew, they’d start their own Streaks. So far that’s been pretty true!

Of the many books that you read with your father, is there a particular book that sticks out? Why?
Actually, no! I don’t have a kid, but I imagine that to be like choosing between your children. I can narrow it down to a top 30, maybe even a top 25, but from there, it becomes impossible. Dickens, Shakespeare, Poe – we read so many classics, I’d be really pressed to choose just one- or ten!

Have others reached out to you about their reading promises?
Tons of people have written me emails – I had six arrive in my inbox within the last hour! It’s crazy how many people feel really inspired to start their own Streaks. There are people who read my book when it first came out and are already over 50 nights in. That is so wonderful to hear. It makes everything about this entire publishing experience seem so completely worthwhile.

What does your father think about your book?
My father is actually never going to read my book! I asked him not to, and I totally believe him when he says he won’t. It’s way too mushy for him – it would  be like showing him my diary. I know it’s a bit unfair to ask him to not to, but he loves me, so he’ll keep his word.

Thanks to Alice for taking the time to answer our questions! Go see Alice tomorrow and pick up a copy of her book today!

- Laura Reeve

Beth and Alex Torra in Cankerblossom Garb. Photo by Jason Frank Rothenberg.

Whimsy exists in Beth Nixon’s world even when she’s washing dishes, chatting on the phone with a complete stranger. Such were the circumstances surrounding our interview on Wednesday, and yet we still entered a world with anteaters aboard buses, otherworldly childbirth and donkeys making tea.

Nixon, the 2008 First Person Arts Artist-in-Residence,* is the cardboard mastermind behind Pig Iron’s sell-out Live Arts show Cankerblossom. (Psst…they have released $15 Pillow Seats to the remaining shows. Only available at the door.) I caught up with Beth to find out a bit more about Cankerblossom, her history as a puppeteer, and how collaborating with Pig Iron has impacted her work. Along the way, she brought up an interesting tension between memoir influenced by the imaginary and memoir straight from real life.

On the origins of Cankerblossom…
Pig Iron invited me to participate in a think tank they were doing in December looking at the relationship between projections and live actors. It was based on an inquiry Geoff Sobelle had been heading up around stop motion animation and how that can be combined with live actors. Because I’d worked a bit with them in the past, they knew I made stuff and invited me to join them on their inquiry.

Beth and Alex workshopping at La Jolla Playhouse. From Le Pig Blog.

Dito [Van Reigersberg], Alex [Torra], and I created a small piece and presented that to the workshop and people got excited by the ultra low techness of the cardboard and the high tech world of the animation and we took it from there. Pig Iron invited me to team up with them for their residency at the La Jolla Playhouse in February and that was where Cankerblossom really began to hatch.

On Cankerblossom as puppet show…
It’s not a puppet show, not a clown show or a normal theater show. It’s not musical theater or children’s theater but it does exist in all these worlds, and others that I’m not sure I know the names for.

On how Cankerblossom fits into the Beth Nixon canon, elks and anteaters…
The ensemble element and point of entry of the project are new for me.

[My own shows are] often on a much smaller scale, just me and maybe one or two other people, that’s it, no stage managers, and crew, not much infrastructure besides my own bones. I’ve worked previously in a low-tech world, maybe some sound effects: live music, alarm clocks, shoes clunking on a table. Working with sound designers, lighting designers, set designers who are amazing at their craft has been different and awesome for me. Working with Dan [Rothenberg], having a director, an outside eye, which [in the past] was just whichever friend of mine saw it first, is pretty amazing. It’s different, really freeing to work with a whole ensemble, all committed to an idea from the beginning, a team of people invested in the story feels wonderful and unifying, whereas I’m usually alone in my studio gnawing on things and wondering if what I’m thinking about will resonate with other people.

We also started from a different point of inquiry. Often times I make work in order to process … there is normally something going on in my life, or politically or something that’s happened to me or someone I’m close to, a question I’m struggling with. And through creating the show I process it. I animate the scenario that occurred on the bus and put in an elk or an anteater. It comes from a different place, thru building puppets and writing, I come to terms with whatever it was I was wondering about. With Cankerblossom it started from a question about technique and medium and what story do we want to tell with them. It’s different from starting with a personal or political query and wondering how you share it with an audience.

Beth and Friends

On her background, creatures and freaks…
I’ve always been building stuff, playing dress up. I was with a children’s theater as a kid and we built the sets, made everything. Creatures and beasts and animals and weird looking humanimals are what I like to draw and sculpt. It was when I had to do an internship in my supposed career field in college and I was panicking- I like to write, act, draw, build, so how can I choose which is my career? I saw an ad for the Red Moon Puppet Theater in Chicago and they listed the skills involved. I thought, that’s a nice mixed bag. I interned there and with Bread and Puppet and saw actual humans sort of making a living doing this thing. That’s when I started working with cardboard.

On the brilliance of cardboard…
Being broke and traveling around, cardboard is an accessible medium. Once I started working with it I was continually impressed by its accessibility, malleability. And if you made something ugly that sucked you could scrap it, without feeling like you wasted something. So it’s low stakes. And at the same time, it’s surprisingly versatile, and durable, and just plain magical stuff. Cardboard and I have been working together for the last 12 or so years.

On what she’s doing next…
I haven’t had a huge amount of time to think deeply about what I’m doing next cause this has been all consuming, working as a performer and creating the work and also designing and building the pieces. So grand plans for what happens next will start to brew September 19th. But one thing [that I’m] working on with The Rotunda is to develop a youth theater arts program for 5th -8th graders in West Philly. It starts in October. I’ll be the artistic director working with the kids and with teaching artists. Having grown up in a children’s theater, I’m excited to work on that from this perspective.

In terms of other pursuits- I’m excited to dig further into clown work; I’ve been nibbling around the edge of it for a while. A new show is rustling around inside its cocoon…Also, hoping to create another illustrated palindrome calendar…and indeed, hang out with my family. My kid, Ida is almost 1 and a half!

On First Person Arts…
I hosted two StorySlams and had a great time doing that. I know Dan [Gasiewski] from Puppet Uprising and was asked if I would be an artist fellow. So I went to meetings, ate pizza, performed at a Salon during the Festival. I presented a work-in-progress puppet show in which I gave birth to a series of strange objects, doubts and realizations. I was pregnant with my daughter and processing the horror and potential that can come out of you. I think it was called, “Canned Corn or Unicorn?”

On imagination and memoir…
I have a great appreciation for FPA. I’ve struggled some… because I work in how the imaginary realm tells my story. All of it comes from a place of personal experience but by the time it comes out into the world, it’s often in a place of make believe, metaphor and allegory. Thus far it’s been hard to navigate how that fits into the land of memoir that First Person Arts focuses on. I have a more loosey-goosey idea of what counts as memoir. I’m interested in a wider realm of what’s true and real with more room for the imagination than I felt like was FPA’s focus.

After the interview, I asked around the First Person office to see if Beth was right about that line between memoir presented more literally and the kind that takes a “loosey goosey” route. We kept coming back to the idea that if it tells your story, then it doesn’t matter how it’s told. Personally, I’ve always been enchanted by fantastical storytelling.

But what do other folks think? Does the imaginary have a place in non-fiction? Or should real life be presented exclusively in a real way? What’s “real” anyway? Ponder that in the comments, won’t you?

- Karina Kacala

*The residency program no longer exists.

So next month the First Person Salon Series presents Queer Memoir: Sticks and Stones where some of the richest, funniest, most touching stories about queer experiences will be shared by artists, storytellers and writers from Philly and New York City. But July 20th is a long ways from now. What to do if you need your queer storytelling fix?


The solution?


How about documentary shorts, a Q&A with local LGBT leaders, light refreshments and giveaways…for free! Check out “LGBT Stories” Event: A Local Documentary Screening Wednesday, June 16 from 6:00 to 8:30 p.m at William Way Community Center on 1315 Spruce St. The event is a special screening of new, locally-produced, 5-minute documentaries featuring the unique LGBT stories in our local community.


For more info or to RSVP contact Kim Kunda at kkunda@mindtv.org or 215-483-3900 ext. 209. You can also RSVP by heading on over to Facebook.


-Tiffany Thwaites

Phawker’s got a nice excerpt of some memoir writing from 19 year-old Colleen Reese, a barista at the Starbucks in Montgomery Mall.  It’s called “How I got to Starbucks: A Teenage Memoir of Midlife Crisis”

BY COLLEEN REESE By the time it was over, high school finally made sense to me: Clean lines were drawn between the extraordinaires bound for leafy private colleges and the Joe Regulars headed to state schools; between the part-timers headed to community college and the free spirit do-gooders who would travel the world and eventually settle down for a little missionary work in Uganda or whatnot; and let us not forget the sons of working class shlubs doomed to endless summer apprenticeships with their neighbor’s landscaping companies. And, as predicted, they all moved on in logical directions.

…

Read the rest at Phawker.

Mathematically speaking, it’s true, a 19 year-old’s midlife crisis would be about age 9.  Keep your chin up Colleen.  Some of us make it out of Starbucks alive.

The world’s a-frenzy as the pool gives way to the track at the Beijing Olympics. Maybe that’s what drew my attention to the Telegraph’s review of novelist Haruki Murakami’s new memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running has a satisfyingly elliptical structure. Its central strand concerns Murakami’s preparations for the 2005 New York City Marathon. Around this he weaves accounts of earlier races – marathons, ultramarathons and triathlons – as well as the story of his beginnings as a novelist and runner.

From his epiphany at a baseball game on April Fool’s Day 1978 – ‘the crack of bat meeting ball right on the sweet spot echoed through the stadium… And it was at that exact moment that a thought struck me: You know what? I could try writing a novel’ – there is a movement between everyday, prosaic detail and more philosophical possibilities.

By turns, running is presented as simply a means of combating the newly sedentary novelist’s tendency to put on weight, and as a kind of healthful yang to the decadent yin of the writerly imagination.

Ultimately, he suggests, it provides the physical and mental stamina necessary to sustain life as a creative artist over the span of a lengthy career. Running becomes both a metaphor for the focus and endurance needed by the writer and a means by which they can be achieved.

Read the rest here.  What are you doing to “sustain life as a creative artist”?

Chances are you’ve already seen the work of artist Eric Okdeh dozens of times, although you may not have realized it. Okdeh, a South Philadelphia native, is the creative force behind many of the city’s most beautiful murals.

On August 13th, Okdeh will join us to discuss his current project with the Mural Arts Program: a work dedicated to overcoming the stigma of mental illness through recovery. The mural, located at 4040 Market Street, represents a collaboration with over 150 community members, who contributed poetry, paintings, and glass and mosaic work. Okdeh will offer a behind the scenes look at this unique creative process. Don’t miss it!

You can see more of Okdeh’s work here.

FIRST PERSON SALON: Wednesday August 13th, 7-9pm, at the Gershman Y
An evening of innovative art and conversation. Featuring…

•Filmmaker ANDREW DAVID WATSON
•Muralist ERIC OKDEH
•Storyteller JULIET WAYNE
•Multi-media artist MATTHEW BORGEN

$5-10 sliding scale admission. Beer (made possible by Flying Dog) and refreshments available for donation. All ages welcome. 401 South Broad Street.