SHARE 13

2011-12-14T10:03:00.000-08:00

12.12.11. prompt: LUCKY

Artists:
becca bernstein, painter
matt butler, musician
allison cobb, poet
brad cohen, writer
trey corkern, photographer
heather hawksford, photographer
kelsey snook, designer/strategist/storyteller

returning SHARE artists: shawn bowman, writer/maker; matty byloos, writer; christine calfas,
actor/dancer; holly goodman, writer; giuseppe lipari, painter/sculptor; daniela molnar, illustrator;
robyn tenenbaum, producer

See the full slideshow here

Read the rest of the story here

See the full slideshow here

More work coming soon...

Matty in Matchbook

2011-11-18T11:53:00.001-08:00

Matty Byloos' short story, "Some of Them Almost Grew Up in the Zoo," inspired by the SHARE 10 prompt UP, was just published by Matchbook. Congratulations, Matty!

SOME OF THEM ALMOST GREW UP IN THE ZOO

1)
They laid the squirming infant down on his belly in front of the television and within moments, two things always happened. He calmed, raising his head toward the square of flitting light, and next, the crows pecked their way haphazardly into the room, dancing like popcorn into the tufts of dirty carpet around the boy's slowing body. Read on...

SHARE 12

2011-10-22T10:34:00.000-07:00

10.17.11. prompt: VERSUS

Artists:
linda austin, dancer
ben darwish, musician
stephen o'donnell, artist/writer
leann o'rourke, photographer
diane ponti, writer
robyn tenenbaum, producer

returning SHARE artists: shawn bowman, interdisciplinary domestic artist; matty byloos,writer; courtenay hameister, essayist/screenwriter; gigi little, writer; giuseppe lipari,painter/sculptor; b. frayn masters, writer/performer; daniela molnar, illustrator; laurence sarazzin, designer; carrie seitzinger, poet; matt sipes, sculptor

more coming soon...

SHARE in Oregon Humanities Magazine

2011-10-21T19:28:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to Kathleen Holt for the lovely article about SHARE in the Summer 2011 Oregon Humanities quarterly magazine.

SHARE 11

2011-07-12T10:50:00.000-07:00

7.7.11. prompt: SWELL

Artists:
david ciminello, writer
giuseppe lipari, painter/sculptor
yvonne o'gara, fashion designer
liz prato, writer
olga sanchez, actor/director/writer
tiger house: billy scharmann, carl simpson, dustin mills, johnny krieger, musicians

returning SHARE artists: jackie avery, painter; shawn bowman, interdisciplinary domestic artist; christine calfas, actor/dancer/writer; lorna nakell, painter; kelly neidig, painter; laurence sarrazin, designer

A story by Lorna Nakell:

SHARE 10

2011-05-16T14:25:00.000-07:00

5.11.11. prompt: UP

Artists:
jackie avery, painter
matty byloos, writer
james harrison, artist/designer/sculptor
kathleen holt, writer
tim laBarge, photographer
kory quinn, musician

returning SHARE artists: dave benz, artist; shawn bowman, interdisciplinary domestic artist; daniela molnar, illustrator; mia nolting, illustrator; carrie seitzinger, poet; matt sipes, sculptor

SHARE 9

2011-03-12T22:59:00.000-08:00

3.8.11. prompt: HUNGRY

Artists:
christine calfas, actor/dancer
holly carpenter, writer
sara dolan & zoe mcguire, artists
b. frayn masters, writer/performer
jennifer mercede, painter
carmen papalia, artist/writer
laurence sarrazin, designer
jack vollert & steve hermans, musicians

returning SHARE artists: colin farstad, writer/photographer; lorna nakell, painter; nora robertson, writer/poet; carrie seitzinger, poet; matt sipes, sculptor

SHARE 8

2011-01-08T13:12:00.000-08:00

1.5.11. prompt: FORCE

Artists:
paul anders, illustrator/animator
christian canady, writer
jim brunberg, songwriter/producer
tim combs, artist
gabe flores, artist
nathan miller, musician
lena munday, A/V performance artist
nora robertson, writer/poet
mark russell, writer
mark saltveit, comedian/palindromist
gary wiseman, artist

returning SHARE artists: daniela molnar, illustrator; noah nakell, sculptor; alyson osborn, actor; hannah pass, writer; matt sipes, sculptor; kathleen lane, writer; margaret malone, writer

Gary Wiseman (left) and Gabe Flores.

Zoo

by Hannah Pass

Hannah: With the word prompt, FORCE, I immediately thought of all of us artists forced to create together in one room. All from different backgrounds with different mediums, etc. It reminded me somewhat of wild animals in a zoo.

There is a place where all the animals go from failed relationships. This place is not “his” or “hers,” but somewhere in between with no memories. If you were to force them all together in one room, they might begin to riot. They might begin to howl or cry. Or they might even laugh. This is because they are used to being tied on leashes. That secure, stylish band buckled underneath the rolls of their necks, symbolizing love. The dogs,they carry stories in their fur. A braid twisted by a twelve year-old who now lives with her dad. Lives with her dad in an apartment in the city with Grandparents who don't believe in Santa or divorce. The dogs are uncomfortable with the cats who are uncomfortable with the birds who are uncomfortable with the Guinea pigs whose mothers used to call Rats. Parakeets, they are good listeners. They are also the only animal that speaks like we speak. They have eyes deep and blunt like nail heads forced into wood. They squawk, “I don't understand.” They squawk, “So this is it?” They squawk for as long as they live. For as long as they live in this room of other animals who listen with their eyes and ears, but could not speak like us if they tried. Sometimes, it is quiet in this room. As quiet as the cats move. These cats who are used to walking on the inside of walls and between feet. Cats, who used to be held in arms. You could carry them everywhere against your chest. Then pass them to others like a baby. All these animals are babies. Lets not judge them for that. The iguanas just lie there for no reason. Lets not judge them for that either. Who could blame them? Who could blame these animals in a house where there is no need for running.

Our first palindromist! Mark Saltveit edits The Palindromist Magazine and is also a writer and comedian.

Mark's palindromes:

Ow! Trap! Golf? Never even flog. (Par two.)

(Never force your golf game.)

 Stiff! O, snot! Slag! Eva Green's sneer gave gals tons of fits.

(Kind of a mean girl, it sounds like.)

Gigolos, aloof Eva Green's sneer gave fool a solo gig.

(Someone tried to take her home and struck out.)

Pals, a booby trap! Eva Green's sneer gave party boob a slap.

Pals, tuna booby trap! Eva Green's sneer gave party boob a nut slap.

Murder, brawn, or iron?!? War bred rum.

(as in the song "I Bombed Korea" by Cake.)

Hell, or a noted ace? Both, sadder. Brawn or iron? War bred dash to be cadet on a roll, eh?

(A lot of palindromes are spoken by Canadians, for some reason.)

We, Latina demander, fret. Fast? Ah, no. Sexy? No. Di put stupid onyxes on hats after Fred named Anita "Lew."

In honor of the hostesses:

How I define Margaret to my Mom:

A Malone, Margaret: awe, water, a gramenola, Ma.

(a gramenola is either a gram + half the name of the plane that dropped the first atom bomb, or granola with men in it, which is much more Oregony.)

How I define Margaret to my Grandma:

Margaret "Nape" Malone: no lame Pantera, Gram.

Tony, K. Lane = zen alky? NOT.

Tim Comb’s "In the Center of it ALL the Crows Rochambeau over the Fate of the Folk."

Tim: One of the things that intrigues me about SHARE is the safety to create work outside my normal medium and outside my normal process. For the prompt, Force, I started thinking about the powerful and connected and how most people have Choice, but don't really have Control over the basic structure of our society. And though I do draw, I usually draw as a means, one of many steps in an involved process, rather than as an end. Unable to elaborate and edit and rethink the themes because of the two hour time constraint dictated spontaneity, and amazingly, led to unexpected allegory and a comfortable play with compositional elements.

A collaboration between writers Nora Robertson and Mark Russell

Nora: Our process was that we started from the idea about force as a rule or change forcing you to do something. Mark began to write satirical airport rules so I started to think of a narrative that would play off of the airport setting, and then we juxtaposed the two pieces without looking at what each other were writing.

The night before I went home to the US, Matt and I got to the Budapest airport completely out of cash. It was a boxy white space with high ceilings and concrete pillars and looked Communist. It looked like it would have rules. We had enough cash to stay in a hostel when we got to town but had decided it would be more fun to stay up all night drinking, so now we had to sleep in the airport. It’s the kind of thing you do when you’re not really getting along. Going out had been Matt’s idea but got no argument from me. If I held a plastic cup of red wine and coke in a dark cellar bar blasting the Pink Floyd, it was easier somehow to ignore the way his brown eyes never seemed to meet mine, the way he always seemed to be looking away from me.

On behalf of the Federal Aviation Administration, welcome to the United States. Please remove any metallic objects, belts, electronic devices, toiletries, shoes or prosthetic limbs and place them in the eight ounce cup provided to your left. Please note that as part of the new American Culture Preservation Initiative, a fine of forty-eight dollars will be assessed on anyone discussing the Broadway production of Spiderman, sporting a tribal armband tattoo or reading a Harry Potter book if you are over the age of thirteen. I mean, really people.

It was amazing to me that we had survived a year of living in Romania and stayed together and now that we were going home, things weren’t working out. Sometimes it’s like that. The little tragedies keep you together. The time we called Matt’s mom in Michigan to say hello and also ask if there was any way she could mail us some food and then the phone company announced a 150% retroactive rate hike. It’s like having something to overcome together gives you a project, and every relationship need a project. The 350% inflation after the Romanian government decided Ceacescu had been gone long enough and it was time to privatize the economy. One day I’d go to the store and bread would have doubled in price. The next week, the price would double again. Our Romanian friends didn’t seem too worried. They just made sure they laid in enough potatoes. They were used to the rules changing.

Anyone not wishing to submit to the full body scanners can demonstrate their fealty to our nation with their choice of trials by ordeal, including standing in a hole while engaging in combat with a child armed with a club, “torture eels” and the always popular Trial by 72 Ounce Steak.

Matt yanked his sleeping bag out of his blanket and laid it down on the bench. He was stocky and actually almost fit on the bench. My legs were probably going to dangle. I was a lot taller than him. We never did seem to fit as a couple, friends even told us we looked funny together. Me with the tall and curvy and blonde and him about to my shoulder and red-headed and built like a wrestler. Me with the worrying and the sharp tongue and miser and him with the charm and happy go luck. The easygoing. In the town on the way here, Szeged, he told me he was breaking up with me. We were staying in this older woman’s apartment that he had met at the train station and somehow gotten her to offer us her spare pile of blankets on the tiled kitchen floor, so we had to go into the garden to have our argument. “But I had always meant to break up with you,” I said.

Once you are past the security gate, passengers will be selected at random to be mauled by a man in a gorilla suit. This is done to test your agility and crisis response awareness. It is also done to see if you have any bananas. Should you make it past the gorilla, your in-flight movie will be Highlander 2: The Quickening. Your snack will either be a fruit cup with non-fat yogurt, or a poppyseed muffin with fair trade butter spread. But not both! There can be only one.

I leaned my pack against his bench and sat on the ground, hugging my knees. The ground was comforting. Now that we were talking about it, everything was different. I kept thinking about the trip into Romania on the way here, the way Matt came to get me from Budapest because he couldn’t stop thinking about me. The way at the time, getting upset about him spending his money on pizza and beer at the pub with our friends seemed really logical to me. I’m not sure why he came back with me instead of breaking up back in Romania. Maybe it was just what he was used to doing for me. Matt slid his solid butt down onto the ground next to me and put his arm around me. He fingered the cuff of my right coat arm. For right now, the warmth and cinnamon reek of his armpit was still familiar to me. Right at the end of the winter, I was lining up at the cashier’s window to get my pay which they counted out to you in cash. You lined up outside in the outdoor corridor of the stucco school building and the cashier office was like a little guard station with a carved wooden window. It was below zero and all us teachers were shivering with our hands in our armpits. I was thinking about buying some of that black caviar with the sour cream they had at the deli for a payday treat. The cashier ran her long red fingernail down the ledger and stopped. She looked up at me through thick black plastic glasses. “Nothing.” She said. “What?” I asked. “You have nothing this month,” she said. I looked up at the sky behind the willow tree in the courtyard and it was perfectly flat, no clouds on the horizon at all.

If you have any objections or concerns regarding the rules and standards of the Federal Aviation Administration, please direct them to the public relations desk at the end of Concourse C where we have assembled a team of lawyers, public officials and other moral relativists schooled in the art of making you feel stupid and inadequate. If questions persist, please refer them to the man in the gorilla suit.

The lovely work of illustrator Daniela Molnar.
Daniela: "Force" – the force of love, the force of hate. You might feel the impact. I let my unconscious rule this one, using collage as a means to undo some of the over-thinking.

A/V performance artist Lena Munday: My work is created in real time using the space around me as inspiration. Generally this in a live performance context that involves movement, sound and video components. For SHARE I ended up making a more formal "composition" from 4 pieces of audio: 3 bits that I recorded that night (including the "silence" of everyone working) and combined it with a sound collage I had made from field recordings in Madrid (and forgotten about until I found it when looking for something to sound check.) So it was pretty loose, and then I performed the mix that you've got here live for the gathered group. I'm really pleased with how it turned out. Fun stuff, and fun to focus on just one strand, sound, of my multi-disciplinary work.

Letters to Georgia O'Keeffe by Christian Canady

Dear Georgia,

Is being allowed to do what you want to the opposite of being forced to do something you don’t want to?
I know…I’m over thinking and you’re too old for this. You wish I would just go in the other room and get to work. You stopped teaching a long time ago. Humor me. These letters take time, they are work.

I miss you. I miss your Ghost Ranch. I miss the bones and wish I had brought them, even though it seemed sacrilege at the time to carry them off. I wish I had your resolve and your dedication to the work. I am so busy thinking.

Let me try a different question: Do we force ourselves to work, to create, and force them to accept it—or is it a matter of allowing the work to force us (and them)…and surrendering to it?

Ok, I’m done for now.

Tell Juan thank you for sending the photo of your last piece. I love it, of course. I’m so glad you started sculpting. Juan is right that it has helped you keep your “voice” even if you have lost your sight.

Yours,
Christian
***

Dear Georgia,

I worked yesterday. Here’s what I wrote. It took me all day.

If you force us, you do it with the patience of a river shaping a canyon. You are insistent steady eternal energy and all our choosing leads to one choice: stand still or surrender. So, with that in mind I give up. But I think there must be places in me that don’t move, places that I keep still, places that you must work around. I think we must hold some ground, demand that the river move around us. At the root of beauty is a holy struggle.

I know, it’s a little serious. But that at least I can count on you to understand.

I have to run, but I wanted you to see that I did something. I want you to be proud.

Yours,
Christian

The seed and the sun and Sunrise over the earth from the moon by returning artist Matt Sipes.

The seed and the sun

This little sculpture represents the power of growth and a singular need. The force of even the smallest organism pushes aside mans best laid foundations in its reach for the sun. Searching for a ray of the star that feeds us all it weaves through rock and earth and bone and will not be stopped.

Sunrise over the earth from the moon
This is a nod to gravity, that mysterious force keeping the planets dancing around the sun, the tides sloshing around the world, light bending around stars, us from flying off to infinity and marbles from rolling up hills.

Rachel Mara spring 2011: STOLEN

2010-11-03T15:06:00.000-07:00

Back in April, fashion designer Rachel Gorenstein participated in one of our events. The prompt was STOLEN.

After sharing the imagery boards she had created, she said "I think this is going to be my new spring line."

We all kind of chuckled and said how amazing that would be.

Well...

Full article here.

Rachel: I think what made SHARE so interesting and valuable to me as a creative experience was that it went far beyond the one evening and became the impetus for a body of work.

Congratulations, Rachel!

PNCA

2010-10-21T22:46:00.000-07:00

10.8.10. prompt: EXIT

Past SHARE participant Daniela Molnar asked us to speak to her PNCA students about SHARE and what we do and how it affects an artist's process.

We had a brief discussion in the classroom, explained what we do, showed off some artists' past work, and then we all walked down to the SHARE studio and had a mini-SHARE with the students, and the results were remarkable. The students blew us away with their creativity and fearlessness.

Nicolo Gentile's "Exi(s)t"

Nicolo: I would like to thank the dog on the park blocks for my inspiration.

Mikola Accuardi: From an early age I knew I wanted to be an artist. I went through phases of wanting to be a dancer, actress, singer, painter, illustrator, printer… and finally I discovered photography! I find joy in every click of the shutter. I want to create and find scenes of obscurity, to capture the uncultured, to find ordinary and make it extraordinary, to capture beauty, even in the ugly. I want to explore and interpret the world around me through my art. I'm easily inspired, and that's the most important aspect of my creative process. To be inspired by everyone and everything, and then to inspire in return.

I love art because it allows me to see the little details in life. It opens my eyes to beauty and allows me to create and mimic the sublime beauties, tragedies and dramas of the world. It provides to me a forum to love, learn, grow, and experience. It's a dream. It's a big playground for my imagination. I hope to portray this to others by taking photographs, maybe one day being published in magazines.

I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon and went to the Waldorf School for K-12. I was lucky enough to grow up in an art loving family, with a designer mother. Because of this, design heavily influences my work. I've always been drawn to simplicity over complexity, and I like to pay close attention to fine lines and intricate details. I am working toward my BFA and so far have attended the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California. and then transferred to PNCA in Portland, Oregon.

Artist: Maynor Sandoval

Artist: Sara Dolan

ReAna Fate Butler's "Between Life"

ReAna: I started drawing early, always hated what I did. I never thought it was good enough, but with my father by my side, art quickly became fascinating for me. My father has always been the artist in my family, oil painting, illustration, and sculpting everything that came to his mind. As a child I looked up to him and everything he created.

I became more into art, expressing all my emotions through my pieces. I had a rough childhood, never knowing if my family was going to stay together, or if I was going to wake up in a new place. This made me want to get away from everything as a kid. I always had a sketchbook or a piece of paper. Today I am still constantly observing my surroundings and fluently thinking of new ideas, new fantasies to create.

My eyes opened when I became more aware of the world. When I got into high school I became distant from my father and began living my own life. The further I was able to get away from my hometown, the more things came to me. With a pencil in hand and a paintbrush in my pocket I set out to observe my surroundings. I didn’t have the chance to travel the world, or even further than Oregon and Washington, but just sitting in my mothers backyard, my new home, for hours gave me a new perception of things. My artwork isn’t meant to impress people or offend them, it simply just is, therefore my art doesn’t consist of one object or another.

Powers of observation are everything. Call it vision, imagination, or seeing; it all comes down to the same thing: the ability to envision a final result in the mind’s eye, and then make it happen with the tools at hand. As an artist, I make the choice of what to include and what not to include. I intend to create an understanding of something that is greater the one’s self. Starting with whatever nature has placed in front of me, then turning it into art.

Artist: Jen Minor

Artist: Shea Ordahl

"An Introduction to the Library" by Robyn Ritchie

Robyn: Céleste, the narrator and character of the comic features in my works often. He's going to be the narrator for a longer comic I plan on doing in the future, called Journeymen. When I got the prompt, I immediately thought of exit signs in buildings, which then led me to Tobias's library, where most of Journeymen takes place. I was able to expand on the setting of the library and also the character of Tobias, even though he only appeared in the comic in name. I also got to develop Céleste's character as a passive observer-- a stronger accomplishment as he is more of an enigma to me than Tobias. With those achievements, along with the enjoyment of working with others in such a comfortable and focused place, I found the experience to be a very positive one. I would love to attend another SHARE event when my schedule allows it!

Artist: Maile Mildrexler

Artist: Aimee Flom

From left: Carter Pierce, Sara Dolan, ReAna Butler

Artist: Kevin Thomas

SHARE 1st Anniversary Show

2010-10-03T23:28:00.000-07:00

10.2.10. prompt: BETWEEN

Thank you to all who came out to create and celebrate with us.

Angela Gay

(right to left) Kelly Williams, Jennifer Mercede, Kendra Binney

Gary Wiseman & Gabe Flores

Luna Littleleaf

Jelly Helm

Robyn Williams

Chuck Bloom, Scott Chase

Gary Hirsch, Lorna Nakell

Courtney Sproule of din din catering

Chris Haberman

Scott Poole, Carrie Seitzinger

Tim Combs

Goat Tears

By Scott Poole

A bottle of goat tears

quivers on the counter.

Goats are nervous animals

and even their tears can't sit still.

I have no idea how I got that

goat to cry.

It's not easy hanging

out in a field waiting

for a goat to cry.

They tend to faint.

It’s kind of embarrassing.

Maybe goats will cry profusely

in the future and

this vial of goat tears

won't be so valuable then.

But's a between time.

It was cold day and

the aspen were doing

that crying leaves routine.

I wish I could cry that slow.

I think the goat

had paused to watch the falling colors.

This might be my chance.

I readied my clear little bottle,

I inched toward the goat.

It was the moment

right between fall

and winter, when the warmth

falls out of the crisp ring

of your breath

and that last flat football

in an Ohio backyard

frosts over for good.

I don't know about the goat,

but I cried several times,

right there in the wheat,

like Van Gogh,

but with my right ear intact

and without black crows.

Guiltily, I must admit

that I thought

I'd just put some of my own

tears in the bottle.

Nobody would know the difference.

I held the bottle

Against my right eye like a gun.

I thought how about my

doctor told me I

was between Obese

and Morbidly Obese.

Great, what’s next,

What’s between Morbidly Obese

and, and … what’s after Morbidly Obese?

Grimace? Super Zepplin?

I was ready to capture my tears.

They were coming.

Nobody would stop me.

I didn’t know what to do.

Don't you love these between times?

I still have no idea

how I got that damn goat to cry.

Jennifer Mercede's "between the cover lovers"

2010-09-07T21:32:00.000-07:00

Save the date for our one-year anniversary show!

(If you're a participating artist, more details are coming soon.)

SHARE 7

2010-08-21T22:29:00.000-07:00

8.17.10. prompt: ERASE

Artists:
brian lindstrom, filmmaker
anne furfey, dancer
daniella gleeson, photographer
robin romm, writer
stephanie schneiderman, musician

returning SHARE artists: a.m. o'malley, zinester; carrie seitzinger, poet; courtenay hameister, screenwriter; margaret malone, writer; kathleen lane, writer

Anne Furfey: my choreographic work tends not to be narrative, but more interpretive in nature. So, working off a word prompt was challenging. I decided to set up a 'score' based on words or phrases that came to mind as a result of the prompt: erase. I came up with the following: remove, eliminate, go back, blank, end to begin, go home. Then I created a gesture to represent my words/phrases. The result was 6 gestural phrases. I asked one of the other SHARE artists to call out the words/phrases in random order, thus designing an endless array of movement, linked together as phrases. I liked that as a result, there were endless movement phrase possibilities.

We got to listen to Stephanie Sneiderman working on her song in the hall.

A.M. O'Malley: Humans erase out of fear, they erase because they can. The fiercest of creatures are helpless against us.

ERASE

by Carrie Seitzinger

All the poets I know
are biting their cheeks.

Their tongues button down
in the slick bed between teeth.
Their eyes are a fourth of an inch deep,
and trying not to do anything.

Once we were blood everywhere,
the darkness at the end of the tunnel,
apocalypse coming down the aisle to read,
building a bonfire to heat the room,
once sparks flew out of our mouths
and we didn't call it spit,
once we read like every human heart
spoke a language universal as neon.

The poets I know write poems about their dreams,
walks to the market, or over a bridge.
They don't want to hear about Victoria's cancer making a black
chalkboard of her body, or the stillborn baby softly slipping
like a sausage out of the casing, or the birds
and fish wearing slickers of oil on the shuddering ocean,
or how the position of the sun makes you sadder than anything.

My church has divided.
The terrible wits, brain-wigs, are trying to wash off
the kind of paint that comes out of me.
What we tried to build between the heart and the mic
is a song being forgotten, a palimpsest of feeling.

Here:
I have a recurring dream
where my eyes won't open
more than just a tiny slit.

Daniella Gleeson: I was struck by the idea of erasing or removing traces of a thought, memory or feeling. The idea/fact that we can not remember every experience because there isn't room in our minds for every memory or experience we have in our life time. We actively choose to erase certain memories or experiences to make room for more. By doing this we allow ourselves to live in each new memory or experience. I went through my images that brought up recollections of details of memories I had erased. Mostly I was struck by the clouds and skyscapes that are constantly erasing and reforming.

Courtenay Hameister, Robin Romm and Brian Lindstrom read Courtenay's screenplay.

MORE WORK COMING SOON...

SHARE 6

2010-06-20T11:39:00.000-07:00

6.15.10. prompt: SPLIT

Artists:
carrie seitzinger, poet
chris haberman, artist
daniella molnar, illustrator
hannah pass, writer
gary hirsch, improviser/artist
shelley darcy, improviser

returning SHARE artists: greg day, filmmaker; sara guest, poet; dave benz, artist; margaret malone, writer; kathleen lane, writer

Daniela Molnar: "Split" made me think of splitting – leaving abruptly and without a trace. This brought me back to a topic I've been exploring visually for a while, that of colony collapse disorder, or the sudden and unexplained disappearance of honeybees. Essentially, entire hives just vanish. A more thorough explanation can be found here, but don't expect answers -- nobody really knows why this is happening, what's causing it, or how exactly to make it stop. Some theories point convincingly to pesticide use, but overall it seems that the bees may be reacting against the aggregate insanity of big agribusiness rather than one easily identifiable solution.

Thinking about the bees led me to thinking about the vast, arcane movement of animals in general, how migratory animals seem to disappear, then (hopefully) reappear each year. Pictured here is a Laysan Albatross skull. Laysan albatrosses are big, stately, graceful birds and powerful long-range flyers. They are nearing extinction due to a variety of factors, most notably the ingestion of lead in lead-based paint chips from abandoned Navy buildings on one of their main nesting sites. They are also regular victims of fatally ingesting the huge amount of trash floating in the ocean. So these birds, too, are in danger of disappearing permanently.

With a background in scientific illustration, I often appropriate methods and materials used in traditional technical illustration in order to simultaneously uphold and question the objectivity of science.

Built To Split by artist Chris Haberman

Chris: I collected two random pieces of office furniture and random paints, pens and material before I arrived at SHARE. At the workshop, I fused the two desk tops together, almost like a table with a sheaf, which created a seam between the pieces, or a "split". When I first got the word from SHARE, a theme began to develop which inevitably would deal with relationships and the split that happens between people. I quickly painted a thick background with house paint, wiping paint so it would dry faster and then sketching out main figures. I continued to layer paint until the figures began to emerge, as well as textual elements, including SPLIT, SPILT, LOVE, etc. The play on words of course then began to pour out: MS. STRESS (mistress), SEEM (seam), etc., which then began a dialogue between the male and female figures. Often in my work the characters are motionless, but the world around them is alive with text and backstory. I filled in the top of the work with elements of weather (clouds, rain, bits of sunshine) to show a changing pattern around them, while the bottom become a puzzle and scene of their former life together. The "lovers" (titled "Mom Me" and "Pa Pa") are undoubtedly parents, surrounded by their friends, children and physical manifestations of their life together - items that hang in the balance, or were the cause/effect of the SPLIT. A bro/ken home is referenced as well as coping mechanisms of alcohol bottles, etc. Although the painting may seem sad, I feel that both characters are trying to reverse the SPLIT and be together, which is supported by the secondary characters, but perhaps too much has happened in the past to bring them together.

Split

by Hannah pass

Hannah: When I first received the prompt split, I thought of the verb as a catalyst that causes some form of tension between two things. So in this beginning, you have the 'split' of two people desperately trying to have a baby, but also another object – the spit tree – that divides their attention.

After the lightening hit, the tree looks like a split end. A broken brown hair sticking up out of the earth, amongst dandelions. Two white lawn chairs.

It was a sad sound. The crack. Then the rip that ran though its entire body. A limb torn off like peeled wallpaper and thrown on to the floor.

Tim takes a sip of his coffee. We are sitting at our kitchen table and staring out at the the fallen tree limb blocking our walkway, one end flattening a bush, the other digging into the lawn. Our new collection of dispersed leaves. From the window it looks almost as long as five of our bodies, but more ribbed. Aggressively naked.

I imagine how heavy it will be to move the limb and then I remember how I can hardly lift a small dog.

“Well?” Tim says.

The night before, we tried to made a baby for the eleventh time. I finally let Tim skip the foreplay.

“Maybe it's my egg,” I say. “Maybe it's just stubborn.”

“What?” he says. “Why would you say that?” He pokes at his breakfast. I watch the yoke drain out onto his plate, how the bread unwillingly has to suck it up. We are looking around the room, trying to avoid each others' eyes.

The afternoon, neighbor kids sprout from our lawn. They skin bark off the limb. Wrap it around their tiny heads, into hats. Into crowns. They hollar in that high voice that kids make which makes me feel both happy and irritated at the same time. Without permission, they declare the fallen tree limb their ship and our lawn their sea.

“Hey!” I yell out the window. “Leave it alone,” I say. With my arms, I charade how I am fed up. A sort of flapping. The children fill their arms with sticks and leaves, then scatter back to their homes.

I follow Tim in living room where he is watching sports on TV. It could be anything for him. As long as there are bodies colliding.

“What are we going to do?” I say.

“About what?” Tim says. “The tree?”

“No. Well, yes.” I say.

“The tree then?” he says.

"Yeah," I say. "The tree.'

“Or the baby?” he says.

A week passes and the limb in still on our lawn. Now, with a layer of beetles. Moss. Neighbors leave angry notes on our doors. The tree looks skinnier now, wrinkled.

One morning when Tim is at work, I watch a squirrel run across a branch. His cheeks round with nuts. The tree branch cracks like a wishbone – the squirrel tumbles - and I feel the snap deep in the pit of my belly. I rub my stomach and try to feel cells exploding or dividing or doing whatever cells are suppose to do. Splitting to make a person. I think about rolling the tree limb into the road and totaling a car.

Dave Benz' Split

Dave: This is a self-portrait as a rabbit. In the past few years I've been through several life-changing transformational experiences. I am definitely still in transition. This may be what it looks like from the inside.

Two by poet Sara Guest:

Chartres. You sew up the part you once split. Hooves uproot butter in painful sweeps. The rubber eats every first flame. I drink holes into myself so you can fill them. Tie safer and safer knots. A weather vein unloads the darker waves. Anonymity for the retelling. This wedge to wash away everything you told me you needed. And night’s slovenly whine.

Osiris. Lands we knew belong to someone else. Spires crouching in wait. Slugs like raisins along the fabulous split. We buy the dock a new pinwheel and heave forward. Small roads loveless in hell’s noxious pitch. Sweet baring down on the marmalade. I take a mortgage on the bed you broke with your spout. Put more acid on it. Tow away toward a liquid sky. Re-canyon what you refused to blow out.

Gary Hirsch: I am interested in stories. Incomplete and co-created stories in my illustrations, paintings and as an improviser. Shelley and I wanted to try something that combined both art and improv. It was really all about constraints. With Share, artists get 2 hours to make something, but improvisers don't need 2 hours , they get a prompt and create something instantly, so we asked what is the offer of the 2 hours ( how could we use it?) I decided to make some images inspired by the prompt of Split for the two hours of making time.These would have empty dialogue bubbles. We would then improvise a scene ( in this case a scene about a date between a teacher and 17 year old student) and throughout the scene we would hold up a drawing, the audience would fill in the dialogue inspired by the image, and we would then use it immediately in the scene....confused? We were too, but it was really fun to play with, and we found a story about a couple of people that can only feel truly liberated by inflicting themselves with things they hate (cloves, cat, etc). Now you're really confused...

SHARE 5

2010-04-24T22:22:00.000-07:00

4.20.10. prompt: STOLEN

Artists:
mia nolting, illustrator
scott poole, poet
rachel gorenstein, fashion designer
colin farstad, photographer/writer
ameena lacey & john jenne, musicians/songwriters
michael sage ricci, interdisciplinary artist
cheryl strayed, writer
greg day, filmmaker/poet

returning SHARE artists: lorna nakell, painter; margaret malone, writer; kathleen lane, writer

Mia Nolting's Secrets, a book inspired by the idea of stolen glances.

The Butter Knife Fist

Scott Poole

I want to sculpt Stolen,

so I can hold onto it for awhile.

I think Stolen would have to look something like a hand

a hand holding a steely knife,

I mean it's Stolen.

You got to have a little hint of violence

but not too much,

perhaps just a dull butter knife

with some chunks out of the handle

like it was used to pry open an elevator door,

but not held by a young fist

belonging to a miscreant in his early twenties

but an old wizened fist

like that of your Grandma,

because she knows how to get shit done.

I think a couple of the knuckles on the hand

have to be bleeding.

That seems required.

Anyone who would go into a fight with a butter knife

would be infinitely scarier than someone

who would go into a fight with a razor sharp blade of death, don’t you think?

I'm way more scared of someone with nothing but a butter knife

coming after me

especially if it's someone's incensed

grandma wearing a scowl and a floral print dress.

I think the hand should be gold,

the butter knife silver.

The juxtaposition would be nice don't you think?

Let's put some diamonds in the knuckles.

Do people do that, embed diamonds in their knuckles?

Is that a statement of fashion?

And I feel I want to draw feathers at this point

but I'm not sure where I should put those.

Anyone who would attack you with a feather in one hand

and a butter knife in the other,

anyone with bloody bedazzled knuckles of diamond

that's a scary motherfucker

especially when you look at the mark it made on your forehead

and you realize the diamonds were actually sequins,

but still diamonds

diamonds shaped as sequins.

That is scary.

But wait, there's more.

What if the fore knuckles of the fist

contained a video screen, a video screen divided upon

three of the fingers and upon the video screen

was a shot of your reaction as you were getting punched

you're very idea of safety being stolen from you forever?

But don't worry, it's a statue, so instead if would just be

a shot of you looking at the fist

like how you look up at the top of your head

that view you never get anywhere else

when you walk through the door at Walgreens.

You wouldn't look scared, just stupid.

So once you steal this amazing fist I just

made up, I just chalked onto the curved folds

of your forehead,

once you have this golden treasure

in your meaty possession,

what the hell are you going to do with it?

How do you sell a stolen fist?

I suppose you have to buy a booth at the Saturday Market.

I think that costs like 600 dollars a day.

And you can't just have the fist,

the booth would looks so bare

and you need some cheaper items for the casual shopper

so you macramé some owls and some monster faces

and some teddy bears and some hello kitties

you know for the kids

and wouldn't you know it

macramé is fun.

You stop going to work,

you start missing meals

you are determined that you're going to bring macramé

into the realm of serious art

just because Picasso didn't macramé' doesn't mean

you can't.

You start doing spontaneous street macramé'

involving 50 strangers. It actually takes choreography

and a musical score. That means you need to learn music

and opera and directing. So you do that,

but you do it in a macramé' way.

In fact, that becomes your motto, the macramé' way.

You macramé yourself a t-shirt that proudly announces your saying to the world.

You think this possibly could be the first macramé' t-shirt.

You hope to God you didn't steal that idea.

You start making your own yarns, learning dyes,

you take several trips around the world to learn more about yarn

you are almost killed in Calcutta trying to witness the ultimate sienna.

You think that if you could macramé' a woman

you would marry her. So you do that.

But then decide you are not ready for marriage.

Then one day, when you haven't eaten in three days

and you're wild eyed and pushing macramé to its ultimate destiny,

and you are drooling and swearing uncontrollably

wearing only a macramé' condom and macramé moccasins

blood dripping from your overworked fingers

you think Macramé' Food! Yes. The pretzel. Such a simple idea.

The braided donut, a delightful tease.

Why not feed the world with giant Macramé' food? That's brilliant!

So one Saturday morning after a good rest

you decide to macramé yourself

with pretzel dough

and invite all your friends over for dinner

so when they come over that night

and you answer the door in the world's first pretzel cocoon

your genius will rush out upon the world

when you break from your doughy chrysalises

and do a ballet of your devising

with a baguette extended from each palm

like a Pillsbury helicopter

and announce your plans for a bakery that

will change the course of human history.

All goes well until you rest by the window

to take a breather and rise too much in the morning sun

and suffocate in your sleep from yeast asphyxiation.

Later, your friends clutch each other in grief

in the apartment as the paramedics carry you away.

As you pass by, quietly, your friends steal some

of the bread off your body and pause not sure

if they should eat from your body.

As luck would have it,

that's when the most beautiful man or woman in the world

walks from the kitchen like an angel

with a tub of butter in one hand

and the butter knife fist in the other.

Stolen Glamour, Rachel Gorenstein

Rachel: Ahead of time, I had decided that I would use the prompt word (whatever it may be) as an opportunity to inspire my Spring 2011 collection.

I quickly made the connection to films that feature high styled beautiful protagonists that were jewelry thieves, cat burglars and bank robbers. Thomas Crown Affair, Bonnie and Clyde, To Catch a Thief.

I came to SHARE with film stills, scissors, sketch pad and fabric swatches.

Once there I created a mood/inspiration boards. I then matched fabrics to the stills and began to sketch. It was an incredible burst of focused creativity that will now guide me through the next 4 months of the design process.

Ameena: Participating in SHARE was a wonderful experience for us, and a welcomed challenge. The first thing thatcame to my mind off the prompt of Stolen was the loss of innocence, of time. The song went on to become an homage to one’s first love, and the resulting nostalgia as time passes.

Stolen
words by Ameena Lacey, music by John Jenne

You stole my days

My time away

A loss, an innocence

A youth, it's gone

Those days

They're gone

Stolen Away

There were days

I cried

I thought I'd never

Make it through

Those days

They're gone

Stolen Away

We took that time

We spent it wise

Though we never

Realized

A loss of innocence

A youth, it's gone

A day is over

Our time is done

Transformation of Persistant Memory, a work in progress by Lorna Nakell

Lorna: Based on the prompt, Stolen, it is inspired by the idea behind the "persistance of memory" (a concept made famous in the art world by Salvador Dali). Persistance of memory is like when you have a memory from your childhood that you are always able to play back on call - rewind and play back. But, new scientific research (listen to Radiolab's episode, "Memory and Forgetting" or read In Search of Memory by Eric R. Kandel) proves that each time you recall that memory it becomes altered because your brain actually has to recreate the memory. So, things from the memory change and can become totally different.

The idea of stolen memories reminded me of my grandmother who ended up having alzheimers toward the end of her life. For the project, I used a family photo of my grandmother, mother and me - when I was a baby - and created a series of paintings as imagined from my grandmother's perspective. The memory starts with all three of us focused on a flower, then my grandma becomes my mother and her image fades away, then the whole memory is reduced to just her and the flower. The writing in the background is how I imagine she would recall the memory.

Places We've Never Been

Cheryl Strayed

Author’s Note: I’ve been working off and on for the past year on a very long personal essay called “Places We’ve Never Been,” which chronicles a trip I took in the American Southwest when I was twenty-four. I went there on a writing grant to do research about US atomic history and communities that live downwind of the bombs that were tested at the Nevada Test Site and at what’s now the White Sands Missile Range. I planned to write a novel using my research, but I never did. Instead, I’m finally writing an essay about this material and the extraordinary experiences I had on that trip. When I got the prompt “stolen,” from the SHARE organizers, I knew I wanted to I write a new section of the essay. This is an excerpt of what I wrote during those two hours.

Before long other people arrive. Other people who are against the testing of nuclear bombs. We crowd into a conference room and sit in a circle and someone strums a guitar and sings about peace and then there is a long moment of silence and an Indian chief arrives, the leader of the Western Shoshone Nation. He is the reason we have gathered. He’s a big man with a dark braid, dressed in feathers and leather and beads. He burns sage and says a prayer with his eyes clenched shut in a language I don’t understand then he opens his eyes and speaks in English in a mighty voice. Your people stole our land, he thunders, but you are my friends.

I cannot help but let the tears fall down my face. I cannot help but bow my head.

When he is done speaking, he comes to us one by one and gives us each a piece of paper that he has personally signed. They are certificates from the Western Shoshone Nation, granting us permission to walk into the desert at the Nevada Test Site on the land the US government claims to own, but doesn’t because they stole it from the Western Shoshone. He tells me to walk upright. He tells me to walk proud. He tells me there is no such thing as the Nevada Test Site and to remember that when I go. To remember it is Western Shoshone Nation land.

In the morning I rise at dawn and drive sixty miles from Las Vegas. The Nevada Test Site begins as a small building near the side of the road and this is where I park my truck. Behind it, is a barbed wire fence with DO NOT TRESPASS BY ORDER OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT signs posted every several hundred yards and behind that miles and miles of barren desert land where they test the bombs.

I get out of my truck and walk along the barbed wire fence. The wind is so fierce I have to push my body against it, my long hair blowing behind me in a mad swirl. I come to a small gathering of people sitting in a circle who are also preparing to enter the test site—three old women wearing actual bonnets that tie under the chin and a man and his teenage son. The teenage son has Down Syndrome.

“Join us,” says the man, in a prayerful voice and I do. I sit in the dirt and think.

“We come in peace,” says the man, looking skyward. “We come in love.”

The wind is spectacular. It is a great, relentless force.

“Stop!” the teenage boy shrieks and throws himself face down onto the dirt and pounds it with his fists. “No more bombs!” he sobs and his father rubs his back and then he sobs louder. He sobs louder than anyone I have ever witnessed sob. He sobs harder than my mom did when she understood she was going to die. Watching him is like watching an animal being skinned alive.

I look away. I stand up. I walk to the barbed wire fence and squat and push my way onto the stolen desert land.

SHARE 4

2010-03-02T08:16:00.000-08:00

2.24.10. prompt: ORGAN

Artists:
rudy speerschneider, mostlandian chef
arthur bradford, writer
dave benz, artist
a.m. o'malley, zinester
northwest dance project:
sarah slipper, artistic director
lindsey matheis, company dancer
lloyd eugene winter IV, graphic designer/illustrator
sara guest, poet
corrina rep, musician
lynn yarne, artist

returning SHARE artists: gigi little, writer; sarah nordbye, graphic artist; noah nakell, sculptor; matt sipes, sculptor; margaret malone, writer; kathleen lane, writer

7:00, work begins. From left: Matt Sipes, Dave Benz, Noah Nakell, a.m. o'malley

Mostlandian chef Rudy Speerschneider's organ-inspired meal.

Dave Benz' They Watch the Organ of Flight Escape

Dave: When I got the prompt, I built the box and the light mechanism in a whirlwind. The mechanism was built with a tiny motor and disks to form a shutter that would open and close to reveal a light over and over. The resulting mechanism generated a slowly pulsing light, which I associated with how organs are often cyclical in nature. To me, the mechanism ended up being a man-made organ, and the box was like a body.

We all like our organs, but I think that each of our organs has become strongly identified with its function and most basic symbolic meaning. I was thinking about how wings are the organ of flight, and I wanted to add a new layer of abstraction or mythology to that. I was thinking that inside the box, I would place a visual representation of a wing, a man-made organ, and a symbolic representation of a group of cells. Viewed in my mind's eye, the cells made me think of coptic jars, which are what the ancient Egyptians would use to store the organs they removed from a mummy. I liked the resulting pile-up of meanings. Organs and cells can be vessels. Organs can store cells. Organs are made of cells. Coptic jars are vessels made to store organs. Inside the box, the mechanism would shine a slowly pulsing light on the wing and the cells/vessels. I hoped that it would be visually interesting.

So the night of Share, I built the wing, and the vessels. Thinking of coptic jars, I gave the vessels legs and put ancient Egyptian headdresses on them. I gave one a crown. The wing looked great inside the box, but the vessels ended up needing more space, so I put them on top of the box instead. Placed there, they looked like a chorus in a play, and I felt that they needed some tragedy or drama to witness. So I built a final figure with wings, and arranged them all as if it was the last act of a play, and as if the winged one was different, or had been caught in the act of transformation.

a.m. O'Malley's zine she titled Heartbeat Breathlung

a.m.: sometimes, when I feel like giving up, I think of my heart and how hard she works for me--the size of two fists, the fierceness of a thousand.

Northwest Dance Project company dancer Lindsey Matheis performs a dance she choreographed with artistic director Sarah Slipper. Their music choice: Inuit throat singer Tagaq.

Lloyd Eugene Winter IV's An instrument only horror can wield,

a work in progress inspired by the work of Garek Druss – in particular, this piece.

Two works by poet Sara Guest

Courtship

Health-wise I have a big pulse and hands like 31 flavors.

I eat tuna sandwiches in the bunkered garden too hot for other transcribers.

All of us fist our food and some of these sweeties come in at 8am still smelling of margarita.

You don’t have to be pretty or sure of yourself—you are the keyboard’s sweaty prisoner.

That jocular tech taps me today and I follow, brushing up against the orangey-lemony beakers.

He could swallow me, you know.

But he holds it up to the light—a tiny body removed an hour or so before.

Measure the nail on your ring finger: this body is smaller than that.

It’s got a blue eye solid as the sound of glass.

“That eye is like it’s looking at you,” he says.

“I know it,” I say.

This is where we start in on forever:

with our aborted jettisoned baby

in the basement of St. Joseph’s

where gross-techs meet high-school dropout transcriptionists

bring them flesh-toned baubles better than any ring.

Inside

You don’t see a capillary in a thousand sugary dawns because viscous puce-colored highways send you through one doorway and another and at 845 millimeters sentries pop up bloody as matchsticks and the Health Beat hollows your vision while the drumbeat gives you a push and at 790 you’re shot through, blue and goggle-eyed, as an angry heart cuts you into rough meat and at 600 a Salton Sea sits you down to Sunday supper of lamb and peas and chips and you don’t notice the ooze from the “walls” until dessert wine falls into jewel-toned mini-goblets and at 450 there it is again: the rough-cut liver like a pickled fin swimming in a pool of wantons and by 325 you’re singing your eyelashes away to interior Led Zeppelin because veins really know how to “get the Led out” and at 215 you’re a pelvis of bone-dried bobble-heads gummed with witch-hazel and something fried and/or fluted swishes by but you soldier down to 97 where everything narrows and bunk by bunk you make it heel to heel with 41 where the big reveal is a maze of rainbow roots the ends of which you’re sure you’ll never see until there they are white and empty and you begin to lament this trail like Oscar the Grouch laments the can feeling like stillness after sex has dragged you the final 5 because you’re flat-headed and fire-breathing and a filthy fluttery shade of toenail pink sailing through Neverland until you’re there.

Musician Corrina Repp based her song on the memory of swimming in the ocean, and the idea of "organs having memories of experiences of their owners"

Lynn Yarne's The Soft and Sometimes Silent "E"

Also by Lynn: Heart in Oregon and untitled sketch.

Sculptor Noah Nakell used paper, cardboard tubes and masking tape to create Experimental Organ.

SHARE 3 artist Matt Sipes' copper wire creations Eye Love You and Lady Parts.

SHARE 3

2010-01-14T23:12:00.000-08:00

1.12.10. prompt: HOODWINK

Artists:
andrew dickson, performer
kelly neidig, painter
marie murphy, songwriter
emily chenoweth, writer
patrick long, illustrator
alyson osborn, actor
michael stone, actor
matt sipes, sculptor

returning SHARE artists: shawn bowman, interdisciplinary domestic artist; courtenay hameister, essayist/screenwriter; russ hoffman, illustrator; margaret malone, writer; kathleen lane, writer

Reflections of a hoodwinked hoodwinker by performance artist Andrew Dickson.

Kelly Neidig's "Chem-trail or Con-trail?"

Kelly: "they" are adding chemicals to our atmosphere via airplane and passing them off as con-trails. Conspiracy theory? Let the viewer decide.

"Hoodwink: The Opposite of a Love Story," written and performed by Marie Murphy

Hoodwink upon hoodwink, rendered by illustrator Patrick Long.

HOODWINK: a four-part interpretation, by Alyson Osborn and Michael Stone

I. Alphabetical – a brief look at one of the ways we trick children into growing up expecting the world to be fair.

II. Compassionate Collusion – When deception between a caregiver and a person with Alzheimer's is a necessary kindness in order for both to win.

III. A literal hoodwink on lover's lane between two vehicles.

IV. A serendipitous, true story, which took place at 4:50 pm on 12 January, 2010.

"Your heart of hearts" by sculptor Matt Sipes. Materials: copper wire and knife.

Matt: This sculpture is about being deceived by a girl. A very bad girl. A girl who I thought was good but wasn't. She was bad. I loved her very much.

Trickery, by Emily Chenoweth

Of the numerous skills a person must develop in order to crisscross the country in a Winnebago with her grandparents, one of the most important is a capacity—a talent, even—for low-grade deception. As in, “No, Grandpa, you’ve never told me about that time Hank Buckalew got so drunk he fell off his roof and landed on his Great Dane,” or “Yes, Grandma, Air Supply is totally the greatest band ever.”

But that stuff is easy—you just have to nod and smile when you talk to them. Their hearing aids can’t pick up sarcasm.

What is slightly more difficult is to feign excitement at yet another campground that resembles not the leafy, rocky campgrounds of my youth, but rather a Wal-Mart parking lot. “You gotta go to the ones with the full-on hookups,” my grandpa says. “What’s the point of driving a rig with a toilet in it if you can’t use it?”

Or to pretend that I’m not homesick, which I am, despite the knowledge that my parents are currently dismantling the home I have known and loved, my father as he moves his possessions into an apartment two towns over and my mother as she goes from room to room painting the walls in pinks, mauves, and lavenders, colors she claims are healing to the spirit.

But what seems most difficult of all—right now, anyway—is to fool the boy I briefly met at a campground in Arizona and expect to see here in Utah at any moment into thinking that I am a) seventeen and b) significantly cooler and more experienced than I actually am.

The campground is silent, and above my grandparents’ RV the sky is like a great black bowl. There are so many stars that they look like snowflakes just stuck there, suspended in the air forever.

I step outside and stand beneath the lighted window of the kitchenette area. My grandparents have fallen asleep in front of CSI again, and even Buddy, God curse his soul, is snoring softly on his doggie bed, paws twitching in whatever nefarious terrier dream he’s having.

Graham will be coming soon. That’s what I tell myself, over and over again, like one of my mother’s mantras, but it doesn’t calm me. How could it? I’ll faint if he comes and I’ll die if he doesn’t—that’s what it feels like.

I reach into my pocket for the cigarette that’s in there and pull it out, slightly softened and crumpled. It looks harmless, even a little sad, the way it’s bent. I straighten it and then put it in my mouth. It hangs there, unlit, while I wait to see if Graham will materialize out of the darkness to light it for me.

When he doesn’t, I do it myself, though clumsily. I’ve never smoked a cigarette before and I suppose it shows. But it does succeed in making me feel… well, I would have hoped for older or glamorous, but different is the word that comes to mind. I’d wanted to look like a femme fatale or something, but I’m afraid I just look like one of those hoodlums who hang around the edge of school property when they’re supposed to be in gym.

I tap my foot against the ground, waiting. Graham had better come and find me soon because I only have one cigarette to impress him with.

“You’re not inhaling,” says a voice. Graham’s suddenly five feet away from me, wearing a pair of cut-offs and a faded t-shirt that says Virginia is for Lovers.

“I was before,” I say, pretending that my heart isn’t pounding in my chest. “I was just taking a break from it.”

He steps into the square of light from the window and holds out his hand. “Let me see it.”

I marvel at how we talk as if we’re neighbors, as if it weren’t exquisitely strange that we have met here in the darkness, and that I am trying to get him and his family to follow me and my grandparents around on our winter peregrinations.

I don’t seem to have any feeling in my extremities.

I hand him the cigarette. “It’s a Benson & Hedges,” he said. “Only old ladies smoke these.”

Well, I think, I did steal it from my grandma.

“I’m very mature for my age,” I answer. He laughs at this, but not very convincingly.

Graham and his younger sister are homeschooled by his itinerant parents, who fancy themselves modern-day troubadours or upper-middle-class gypsies, or some similarly ridiculous thing. Since Graham has never been to a real high school, he doesn’t behave like the rest of us. He’s calmer and quieter, and he’s completely ignorant of the fads that help teenagers distinguish the cool kids from the lame ones.

Hence my chance to impress him. He just doesn’t know any better.

“Who do you like more,” I ask him, “the Replacements or the Ramones?” I had decided that this question would make me some knowledgeable, edgy.

“I don’t like the Ramones’ politics,” he says, giving me back my cigarette.

I pause, contemplate taking another non-inhale, and then shake my head. “Um, me either.” Thinking, Joey Ramone had politics? I should have read more about him.

The problem with deception and trickery is that it needs a willing dupe to work. My grandma wants desperately for me to validate her love of Air Supply, for example, so she wills herself not to see me sticking my fingers down my throat whenever that song comes on, the one that goes, “the beating of my hear is a drum and it’s lost and it’s looking for a rhythm like you….”

Or take my parents. For the seventeen long years of their now-failed marriage, my mother pretended she was the one person on God’s green earth who didn’t ever pass gas, and my father let her get away with it. “A miracle of digestion, that woman,” he’d say.

And as far as my grandparents go? Well, they’re really too old to trick each other, but they still try to. My grandma sneaks her cigarettes and my Grandpa claims that Buddy is truly housebroken, when in fact he routinely pisses on Grandma’s side of the bed.

So where does this understanding leave me? In the dark, with a boy I like, who is not yet at all impressed with me, and who has no natural inclination to be.

“I got into the Replacements a couple of years ago, when I was 15,” I say, trying again.

Graham nods. “Do they let you drive this thing?” he asks, tapping the side of the Winnebago.

I laugh. “Please. Do your parents let you?”

“When they’re drunk enough,” he says.

I sigh. So far, everything he’s told me about his life makes it sounds incredibly glamorous. His sister’s name is Peony, by the way. She wants to be a trapeze artist with the Cirque de Soleil.

“It’s okay, you know,” Graham says. The stark shadows on his face make it look like he has deep hollows where his eyes should be.

“What?”

“I know you’re not seventeen. I can tell. But I don’t care.”

I let myself slouch down against the cool metal siding of the RV. “Oh,” I say.

I could just hear my history teacher, Mr. Sanfillipo, who was my crush before this infuriating Graham person, chuckling to himself. “Trickery and treachery are the practices of fools that have not the wits enough to be honest,” he’d say, which would be some Founding Father quote or something. He was full of those, and could rattle them off like baseball stats.

“I have an incurable disease,” I tell him.

“No you don’t,” he says.

“I’m an orphan,” I say.

“Try again.”

“I’m actually albino.”

“Nope,” he says.

“I’m the youngest of seventeen children. Those are my parents, not my grandparents.”

“Please.”

I stare up at the sky and then down at my feet. And that’s when I see a dark shape slithering across the sandy ground—a king snake, by the looks of it, up way past his bedtime. “I’m not afraid of snakes,” I say.

And something in my voice tells him I’m not lying this time, and he turns around, and then he sees it, this hissing shadow sliding past him, barely visible in the dim starlight.

“Holy fucking shit,” he shrieks, and leaps toward the Winnebago, landing on the bottom step and scrabbling madly at the door handle.

“Be quiet,” I say, “You’ll wake the old people.”

“I hate snakes,” he whispers, as if this weren’t patently obvious.

“That one’s harmless,” I assure him, watching it vanish into the darkness.

“It’s the whole no-legs thing,” he says, loosening his grip on the door handle. “It’s just not natural.”

“But it’s nature,” I say. And then I hold up my hand to him, as if he might need my help climbing down. For a moment he looks at my upturned palm as if he isn’t sure what to do with it, and then he grabs my hand and squeezes it.

It feels as if all the blood in my body rushes to those fingertips. He didn’t believe a word I said, and still, he’s holding my hand.

I smile up at him. “I’ll be sixteen in December,” I say.

“That’s cool,” he says, almost as if it really is.
SHARE 2 artist Russ Hoffman's "Mindgames"

OppositeDay.C.Hameister

SHARE 2

2009-11-23T12:26:00.000-08:00

11.17.09. prompt: TEMPORARY

Artists:

shawn bowman, interdisciplinary domestic artist

noah nakell, sculptor

stacy bolt, essayist

chad crouch, musician

russ hoffman, illustrator

gigi little, writer

dan williams, artist

From SHARE 1: lorna nakell, painter; margaret malone, writer; sarah nordbye, graphic artist/screen printer; kathleen lane, writer

Dan Williams: THIS SITE IS TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE

Before we start, interdisciplinary domestic artist Shawn Bowman passes out temporary pets

Chad Crouch's temporariness

http://podingtonbear.com/Temporariness.mp3

Noah Nakell's puddle, inspired by the ever-changing puddles he bikes through on his ride to work

Russ Hoffman's "just before disaster" illustration

Temporary by Gigi Little

Touch of sun on the bedspread. Angling down from the window to turn a perfect tea-saucer-sized spot of burgundy quilt to pink.
I put my hand in it. Let it warm my palm.

Sun on your palm in the eight-o’clock-Sunday-morning chill is so lovely you’d think you could fold it up in your hand and squish it through your fingers.

I quick lay back on the bed. Pulled my shirt up to let the spot of sun sit on my stomach.

Nice.

But not good enough.

The comfy of my jeans and the rumpled up t-shirt across my chest – these were warm too, in their own boring way, and that was too much of a distraction. I wanted to feel it pure. One spot of heat and nothing else.

Hurry – before the clouds take it. Drag that t-shirt over your head. Press the jeans down, kick them away. Bra, panties, all of it, get rid of it.

I sent it all off the side of the bed and onto the floor. And finally, unfettered, stretched myself out – arms and legs wide – and let the spot of sun warm my middle like a grand gulp of wine.

Perfect for a moment. Until a cloud took it.

Sarah Nordbye's manipulated photo of taxidermy

Essay by Stacy Bolt

1996

The hardest thing I ever had to write was my father’s eulogy. And I insisted on doing it, not because I thought I’d do a better job than anyone else, but because it was something to do. A way to be useful and to pass the time that was moving so ridiculously slow. As eulogies go, it was fairly trite. It had its moments, some funny stuff in the middle and a real tearjerker at the end. But still, pretty amateur. He would have liked it, though.

Of course, he would have tried to make me stay home, to avoid the pain of going to my own father’s funeral. I was the youngest and he was always trying to shield me from painful things. He even tried to kick me out of the hospital when he was dying. He didn’t want me to be upset.

Writing the eulogy helped, but only for a little while. Grief, it turned out, was a long, insufferable slog through enemy territory. And it only got better when I paid someone to listen to me moan about it.

“This is just temporary, feeling like this. Life will get back to normal soon, right?” I asked my therapist.

“This is your life now,” she told me. “This is your reality.”

God I hated her.

2002

I’ve been planning this fucking wedding forever. And in one day (one day!) it’s over. And because I was too cheap to hire a videographer, I don’t remember anything about it. I walked down an aisle. I stood at an altar. I punched my new husband in the stomach because I thought he was laughing when in fact he was crying. And then there were some toasts. And some dancing. And my friends got spectacularly drunk. And then it was over.

2003

This is it. Tonight, I am going to get pregnant. It is a sure thing because, for the first time in my life, I am having sex without birth control. And if my mother and my 9^th grade sex ed teacher are to be believed, that means I am absolutely 100 percent going to get pregnant. I might also be getting an incurable STD and a lonely life as a used-up hussy. But whatever. I’ll get pregnant. And then, I can get on with my life.

2004

“Jesus Christ, do you have to do it so hard?” My husband had just stabbed me in the ass with a syringe full of very expensive fertility drugs. We were at the end of the cycle and both of us were cranky. Our lives had been consumed with sperm counts and FSH levels and there was a goddamn medical waste container on our kitchen counter. Right next to the coffee maker and the pink Kitchen Aid stand mixer. Can we just get this over with, please? So we can get on with our lives?

2006

“She changed her mind,” Faye told me over the phone. “I’m so sorry.” It was two days before Christmas. There was an infant car seat waiting by the front door and a bag packed with diapers and impossibly tiny clothes. And the birthmother of the child we were about to adopt had just changed her mind.

We were going to go to my Mom’s house on Christmas day with our son. We were going to start our new lives as parents. That was the life we were supposed to be living. Later that day, the doorbell rang. It was a friend bearing gin and pie. It’s good to have friends who know you well.

2007

“Faye, we quit.”

I told my caseworker this as I sat on the couch in my pajamas at 1:00 on a Saturday afternoon. We had just decided not to adopt a baby whose mother had taken every kind of drug known to man and a few that had yet to be discovered. There were people who were qualified to care for kids with the kinds of needs he was going to have. We were not those people. For the record, that was four adoptions that had fallen through and we were done. If the universe was giving out signs, we’d gotten the message. After I hung up, I commenced an epic wallow that included, but was not limited to, flannel apparel, a Lifetime movie marathon and many, many butter based foods.

Four hours later, in the middle of a gripping thriller called, I kid you not, “Baby Monitor: Sound of Fear” the phone rang. It was Faye.

“You’re not going to believe this,” she said. And I didn’t.

An hour later, Dave and I were speeding down I-205 toward Willamette Falls Hospital where a baby boy had just been born.

2008

“That swelling is totally normal,” the nurse told me. “It’ll be gone in a day or so.”

My 2 year old son looked like the Elephant Man. No. Make that the Elephant Toddler. The entire right side of his face was swelled up. Bad. He couldn’t even open his eye.

“Dora,” he said. “Wanna watch Dora.”

Of course. Why should a little thing like brain surgery stop him from watching the most annoying show ever created?

I put the DVD on and left the room. My husband and sister were there to watch over him and I needed to stretch my legs. Walking around the circular PICU was a tricky thing. The key was to keep your eyes on your feet. Do not look into the rooms. Because in those rooms are things you don’t want to see. Kids. Babies. Someone’s sweet little peanut hooked up to a million wires and tubes and machines. That sweet little peanut wasn’t going home. This was his life now. This was his reality.

In three days, my son was going to be released. He was going home to his bed and his toys and his life. This was only temporary.

Painting by Lorna Nakell

SHARE 1

2009-11-19T10:29:00.000-08:00

10.14.09. prompt: CHICKEN

Artists:
Brian Padian, screenwriter
Lorna Nakell, painter
Sarah Nordbye, graphic artist/screenprinter
Robin Rosenberg, writer/food artist
Margaret Malone, writer
Courtenay Hameister, essayist
Kathleen Lane, writer

Courtenay Hameister, Brian padian and Margaret Malone perform Courtenay's screenplay

Chicken.Hameister

Sarah Nordbye designed a chicken card, which she screenprinted and mailed to us

Painting by Lorna Nakell

Text:
The Curry family once lived up the street from me. Their 12 became 10 after two kids drowned in the pond out back.
Mama Curry cooked biscuits with lard from the pigs they slaughtered. Her daughter, Ruby, and I were best friends. We played in the wild strawberry fields, caught tadpoles in the pond, and made her little brother eat mud pies.
On the door to their back porch hung twenty or so chicken feet - remnants of dinners past

Robin Rosenberg wrote stories to vintage recipe cards

Excerpt from Memories of a Chicken by Kathleen Lane

The so called chicken sat on the table with potatoes around it to hide the fact that it wasn’t.
That’s a bunny, Joan said. Isn’t it?
It’s dinner, my mother said.
Yeah but it’s a bunny right? I’m not eating it if it’s a bunny.
In our backyard there was a fence that divided our property from Mr. Whitey’s. Mr. Whitey was a sweaty man who wore undershirts so thin and tight we knew all about his belly button. It was an inny, wide around as a door knob. And all around it was stomach hair, smashed into swirls the shape of smoke.
There was a knot in one of the pickets of the fence and we could look through it into the bunny cages lined up on Mr. Whitey’s side.
In spring the babies came and the mothers jumped around when they heard us near the fence. We couldn’t ever see the babies because they were tucked inside the fur nest the mothers made for them. But we found one in the grass once. The little neighbor girl found it and came screaming into our yard with the news.
I found a baby eyore! I found a baby eyore!

It was lying in the grass and we squatted around it, matting down the grass with our hands so we could see it. It was gray and bald and tail-less.

We showed it to our mom, and then to Mr. Whitey, and it turned out baby eyore wasn’t of the eyore species after all. Turned out he was a baby bunny.

Mr. Whitey said it was probably a cat got it.

Mr. Whitey said give him here and we knew by how he said it that he wasn’t going to hold him the same way Joan held him.

It’s still alive, I said. Look, it’s breathing.

Can’t go back in the cage, Mr. Whitey said, the mother won’t take care of it anymore. And this information was new and frightening. We didn’t yet know that some mothers don’t take care of their babies.