Memo revisited- Sept 20th, 2009

Atop the Cascade Mountains, Lincoln, Oregon was founded as a sawmill settlement in the late 1920's on Highway 66 between Medford and Klamath Falls. The truth is most who have the opportunity to glance upon Lincoln are whizzing by on the "Green Springs Highway" atop huge, swaying logging trucks. If it happens this town catches you between blinks, you could see the remnants of the small sawmill community—a company store, a cookhouse, a bunkhouse, several little cabins and five homes. Now a newer sign reading The Oregon Extension, placed there in 1975, speaks to a different sort of work happening there. (oregonextension.org)

The Bark Burner, a massive structure made of rusted steel looms over the small pond and the meadow alive with horses. A cock calls while keeping watch over a group of chickens on their run. At first glance, it may seem that the pesky duckweed growing on Lincoln's little pond is the most productive thing in this sleepy little village.

Homes occupied by professors are shared with students each fall as re-imagined classrooms. There are no desks or chalk, only students holding cups of tea between two palms, sitting in circles to discuss literature and philosophy, poetry and theology. The company store and cookhouse now serve as library and computer lab, mailroom and chicken coop. The walls in each small cabin are covered with wood paneling or some horrible wallpaper, which serves as a backdrop for community. Here the academic is personal; students have an opportunity to let their personal ideas interact with their person. Students discuss Foucault while cutting wood for their cabin's wood burning stove, William Stringfellow
over dinner, Toni Morrison
while hiking amongst the tall black spine pines. Because community is an assembly of persons, here alchemy creates something much larger than sum of its parts. In the fall, a brown blanket of needles covers the ground. Hundreds of students have lived in the six small cabins and the bunkhouse apartments over the years and there is the buzz of change on the wind.

Julia and Gus are the OE's newest residents. The younger couple lives in one of two bedroom cabins with their dog, Fairny—a black and white ball of energy with tongue. Gus travels down the mountain each day to Pascal Vineyards, where he looks and touches, tastes grapes and taps on the outside of wooden barrels. Julia laughs and cries freely. She is always up for a walk along the wooded path to find the perfect log to sit on to discuss your heart's desire. Julia can keep and tell secrets-- she professes in the gentlest way.

Sam Alvord can seem grumpy. Sam has been at the OE since the start. A retiree, preoccupied and controlling, his days are tinkering with his projects and waxing nostalgic for the way we used to do things. Sam is the sometimes pastor of the tiny Lincoln Christian Church which is home to about 20 regular mountain folks. He has also travelled the country to serve as officiant in numerous OE alumni weddings. In his home each week, Sam hosts a small AA-type support group for former smokers and clandestine smokers-- who sneak off the Barkburner after meetings to stand in the dark in a circle with glowing embers illuminating their conversation. Sam's wife Patsy teaches second grade at the 4-room schoolhouse up Green Springs Highway, talks very little to folks taller than her shoulders. Their house is dark and warm, the light that comes from inside is golden. (Balmer)

A tiny creek trickles between the Alvord's glow and the Frank's house on the hill. Doug Frank is the world's best listener. At times, it occurs to the speaker that you may have spoken one of the world's most profound thoughts in his ear. His legs are crossed; he looks out over his glasses. His living room classroom has a large stone fireplace and large picture windows that look out over the bend in the road.

There, on the bend, is a home under a canopy of pines, which calls like a confessional. Its occupants, The Linton's are an interesting pair. Nancy has long straight black hair and when she sits, she is all limbs contorted. Disheveled, Jon always wears a brown hat and every few minutes he tugs his pants up from the middle belt loop in the back. He is the resident theologian. They are both feminists. The Linton home is open for candle lit communion of dark red wine and heavy nut filled wheat bread.

There is a field of the boring sort behind the Linton's, bordered with a grove of apple trees. The lightest breeze blows there. Cabin 6 has a wraparound porch that looks out onto this field. Its three picnic tables host all manner of things: meals, counseling sessions, poetry readings, guitar concerts.

From Jim's kitchen window, you can hear the sounds of life coming from the cabins. Jim, Lincoln's widower, is the mountains ecologist and he believes God can be found in environmental stewardship. From him, this place provides comfort and daily reminders of his wife. He is dating a woman in town, they swing dance each week. Next to Jim are the Klings. The Klings are the support team. Allison takes care of the paperwork, serving as the campus' registrar. Phil is the maintenance man. Both are tall and skinny, their lanky kids are always jumping on the trampoline or waving sticks around with capes.

The Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail, stretching from Canada to Mexico, crosses just a few miles down the road. For most who visit the Oregon Extension, the only respite from this cloistered place is the weekly journey down the mountain to the town of Ashland. The small OE bus travels the one hour of white-knuckle curves and twists, down and up and down again, past views of endless mountain ranges—to Ashland, Oregon. Ashland is a small college town and provides for all the amenities that come from a congregation of academics- great pubs, and bookstores and a couple organic food co-ops.

Students are eager for the return trip up that winding path to those little cabins on the north side of the highway. Here, each year scholars are made while floating in the pond, the duckweed parting for them. And while staring straight up at the bright full moon framed by the peaks of trees, they allow their life to be their education.

For Ourselves : an interview with Torkwase Dyson

She picked me up a day late, but right on time. Torkwase Dyson looked younger than when we had last seen each other, lighter on her feet. This time she had more of a do for ourselves
attitude. I was prepared to talk with her about an event she is going to be a part of this Saturday – Atlantis- a house dance party with blackness and science fiction as its central theme with Octavia Butler's Wild Seed as inspiration. Her contribution is an underwater video piece of
fish off the coast of Panama, a dark, otherworldly abyssal piece. She was not interested in talking about this at all. She wanted to talk about relationships, women, about my writing, my family, and about sustainability and urban farming. We did spend time talking about her other work and our breakfast turned into a gallery visit, then lunch, and later coffee and much more than I had hoped for.

    Torkwase Dyson and I met at NYU in the
fall of 2004 at the Yari Yari Pamberi, a conference of Black Women Writers Dissenting Globalization. YYP was an amazing assembly of working writers and artists from all over the African Diaspora: Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Sapphire, Alexis DeVeaux, Octavia Butler, Nawal El Sadawai, Edwidge Danticat, Jewell Gomez -- all together with an ease that comes from camaraderie between peers.
It also provided safe space for a community of younger artists and writers to converge.

Torkwase Dyson grew up on Chicago's Southside. She got her MFA from Yale. After many years of traveling and temporary stopovers at academic sites across the country, she seems committed to stay in one spot. This day she was
moving her studio out of her small Prospect Park apartment across town to a small studio in the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn. Her walls had the grey outline of paintings that had long hung there. The last of many moves, this was the move to stay put.

To start, we had smoothies. Torkwase nervously cleaned as she cooked. She refused my offers to help, leaving me to observe her world. Her roommate's dogs were sleepy and fat. The larger one was brown and had a squarely shaved patch on his rear from a recent surgery. Every seven minutes, the quintessential rumble of the train blazed past her window. As she served us grits with eggs, hash browns, and biscuits, she explained that she just started teaching at American University in Washington, D.C. -- commuting there twice a week on the Bolt bus. "After assessing student interest, skills, backgrounds," she said, "I am hoping to create student think tanks and charge them with creating media works together."

We began by talking about the new show she is a part of which is opening in a few days at Five Myles Gallery in Brooklyn. The exhibition of seven young black women artists entitled "Fortune Tellers" will feature work she describes as "common objects replaced with uncommon imagery, the transfiguration of the common place." The show's artists work in many different media-- two-dimensional wall pieces, animation, collage, floor pieces, instillation. Torkwase's contribution to this show is from her larger body of work, an exploration of "the hyper urban landscape and its relationship to the natural." She said of her work, "I am looking at the intense imagery of nature on clothes: belt buckles, jeans, so called fancy shirts, sneakers. And using those visual objects- apparel stuff and manipulating it to resemble nature." She described a work entitled "Waiting for the Son to Rise" that features Jesus piece necklaces fashioned with tiny solar panels, a take on fake diamonds, on bling. We looked at her large wall pieces-- works that featured whales and swans and rhinos--
created using earring cards and something called bullet heads as well as large metal necklace charms. These images startle, the texture is reflective and tactile.

"I am concentrating on basic gestures," she tells me, "and on the underbelly of communities on lockdown." There is a real thread of ecology in the body of work as well, when I ask her about this she says, "Yes, yes, with the cyclical threads in fashion, the speed with which subculture is adopting new items of significance, things like earring cards get disregarded. We hear about water bottles, but the greens don't address all the plastic that our merchandise comes attached to." With this work she is "reimagining- reuse."

"The urban environment is in many ways an environment of trash," Torkwase said, "I travel to get these apparel items, I travel to Houston, Memphis, Atlanta, New Orleans and it's a piece of this system of global trade, of Asian wholesalers and African immigrants making a dollar. "

We discussed the future-- the future of the earth, our individual work, the movement, art. She plans to take her work in a new direction. "That's my next project," she said, "I want to follow fabric- apparel production routes: dyes, fabrics, accessories, wholesale. A meditation on access to information, working through the façade of the global cycles of desire, for merchandise produced for black urban poor spaces."

"I am going to create these kiosks, mobile units with solar panels-- enough to create like 60 watts of electricity and bring them up to 125^th street, where there are still guys selling merchandise in an independent way and see how they are received." She finished by saying that in her opinion "the idea of blackness is shifting; the idea of hip hop culture is shifting."

We moved together from her apartment to the Five Myles Gallery where the Fortune Tellers show is to open next week. Our time there was pensive, hands on hips, arms crossed. Passing and pausing. The floor was tacky with new paint.

The gallery visit was an experience in politics. Torkwase was mentoring the show's young curator--
who felt uncomfortable with the title
and liked organizer
better. She studied Kwase to try to read an opinion there in her guarded glances. The owner, an older woman with a thick German accent, looked over the top of her glasses, gestured wildly to get the attention of her construction assistant to request that he move the platform for the projector a few inches to the right. The lighting was harsh and spotlights blazed haphazardly waiting for their position. The walls were that new gallery grey with a touch of ocean or purple. The conflict lie in which wall would best suit Kwase's digital piece and which would suit her larger wall piece in relationship to other works in the show. Slight changes were made and made again.

Kwase was diplomatic, yet later in the car she spoke of the need for Black women run spaces. Spaces where there wouldn't be the hovering, older, how it's done opinion. "Power is in ownership." Later as we drove, she pointed out several vacant buildings suitable to fill this need. "Look, you could have a studio on the first floor."

We ended the interview
at her other home-- a small, black lesbian owned café called Pillow. The space was comfortable and her friends were quick to joke, quick to laugh.
The patio out back was bright with light flickering as the breeze pushed branches and leaves gently. I was grateful to end our time together here, with her family and the inspiration of a community of women creating spaces for themselves.

 

Dyson, Torkwase.  Interview.  Brooklyn, New York.  September 9, 2009.

stand

I grew up at the bottom of a hill, on an oak tree lined street in the Highland Park neighborhood of St. Paul. We lived in the corner house, the exact place where the median age changed from 80 to young families, from Jewish grandmothers to Catholic schoolgirls with scraped knees and a ring of sticky red juice around their mouths. Our family was different. I was a little black/white girl, too chubby and too tall.

Mom helped me drag the coffee table down to the end of the driveway next to the full lilac bush. I spent an hour carefully bubbling letters onto the page with bold colored Crayola markers: "Koolaid, 15 cents a glass." I waited patiently. The iced melted. Josh, from across the street, passed on his skateboard. My stepdad watched this agony for an hour, then placed two coins in my 3 year old brother's hand.