Seventeen Compiled Interviews (update ongoing; last update 25 October 2009)

I.D. MAGAZINE INTERVIEW

Oregon’s Kathleen Bryson - Painter, Author & Filmmaker - Gets Prepared for Spaceships Over Corvallis
September 8, 2009


Kathleen Bryson brilliantly segues in between mediums without completely abandoning one for the other. As a painter, her work has been shown in Oregon, Washington and in her current home of London. She’s published two novels, most recently Girl on a Stick, and a number of short stories. And while donning her filmmaker hat has premiered the Viva Voce Virus here in Portland, a project 6 years in the making.

id. Magazine currently caught up with her to talk about her film the Viva Voce Virus, gay Hollywood and monsters. She is currently back living in London where she spent five years fighting immigration laws that prevented her from obtaining a visa and staying with her European born female partner…

id: You’re living in London again?

K.B: “I am back in London; but I still have family in Portland. It took me awhile to settle back in. I have a love/hate relationship with London really due to the immigration laws preventing me from traveling freely there for a time. I now have duel citizenship but it took five years. I think I was actually kicked out of the country a couple of times. But, I’m back, I always have some reservations but its nice to have hope. We have Civil Partnerships now. Firing is illegal based on sexual orientation, so…there’s hope.

id: How have things changed over the last couple of years?

K.B. Well, I have to say that Portland is the most progressive city I’ve ever lived in. But when you have that legality (Civil Partnership), it changes you. It’s the same in Canada, I don’t know if you’ve ever spend time walking around there but… it equalizes things, as a queer person, being there. You feel equal, it makes you feel different. People are acting more entitled. Even here (in London) now. Like when I was temping jobs; you know, I wouldn’t bother coming out over and over again. But now, I feel I can tell people and it won’t even raise an eyebrow. That’s a big difference.

id: Let’s talk about your latest film, the Viva Voce Virus (VVV). It premiered here in Portland last year, how was that experience for you?

K.B. It was cool to do it in Portland. That project took six years, and we had no budget, or rather a micro budget, but even with that, production went relatively smoothly. And then we hit post-production and for four years, it was on. It definitely had its moments of Spirit of the Blitz, you know people that have lasted through hell with you (laughs). You know, not that is was completely hell, but just that shared experience of like… working in a McDonald’s as a teenager or something. I mean, I got through high school in less time than it took to finish this movie! That (co-director) Kimmo Moykky and I are still close and willing to collaborate on another project in the future is wonderful.

id: I understand you recently attended the Berlin International Film Festival as a participant [in the Talent Campus].

K.B. Yes, that was amazing. It was actually VVV that allowed us to get in there and we got to screen a portion of the film which was great. The festival was like summer camp for filmmakers. There were fifty or so directors from all over the world; producers, composers, technicians. We had a free pass for all the movies of course; but there were also Master classes throughout the day, classes on post-production. There were editors that had worked on films like The Changeling and Letters from Iwo Jima. You know, it was really humbling. Here I am, just finishing work on this movie with such a shoestring budget and I get to put my hands on a ½ million dollar camera. It was wonderful.

id: Can you tell us a little about your next project? Spaceships over Corvallis? First off, why Corvallis? You’ve grew up in Alaska, lived in Seattle, Sweden, London. Why Corvallis?

K.B. (laughs) Corvallis was just one of the years of my life. I couldn’t get a job anywhere, I was pretty much on my own. I hated it. I did a lot of reading and I read about these UFO reports over St. Mary’s Peak and I thought about what it would be like if CIA agents went there to retire. The screenplay’s finished now and I’ll be coming to Medford in September for casting.

What’s so exciting about this project is that we have a fantastic producer and a proper budget, so I think I’ll find it less problematic than with VVV. We’ll start shooting early next year and should be done with it fairly quickly.

id: In both Viva Voce Virus and Spaceships Over Corvallis you use a dual narrative across two different time periods. Is there a reason for that?

K.B. That’s funny, I hadn’t really thought of that. But I’ve used that in my books as well. I don’t think it’s on purpose, it’s not conscious. Actually, in VVV we had three different time periods. I like stuff that has resonance to it. I like to have different journeys echoing. Maybe in the sense that the past is not so different from our future.

id: Both films also tease out the idea of cultural deception. In Viva [Voce Virus] it’s exposing the closet that’s still alive and well in Hollywood. Since you started that project six years ago, do you feel things have gotten any better?

K.B. Oh, worse I think. Much worse. You know, I’m not going to name any names; but I will say that I really do support and have so much respect for people like Wanda Sykes and Neil Patrick Harris that do come out.

And it makes me mad when I hear things like, ‘wow, that Neil Patrick Harris plays such a believable straight guy!’, you know, like playing straight is the ultimate test. And I don’t think it’s an exaggeration that 80% of Hollywood is gay, and I’m including the bisexuals in there. Someday, I would love to see all of Hollywood file a class action lawsuit for discrimination.

id: Why do you think things have gotten worse?

K.B. I just finished watching Watermelon Woman again, I haven’t seen it since ‘96 or so. And I just remember that time, back in ‘95 when I was living in Seattle, that things just seemed freer politically. I miss that sense of brash queerness. There’s this sense of being apologetic now about being queer. That everything has to be polished and safe. And I’m not talking about gay marriage, I’m not anti-marriage, I’m really not. I just would like to see more outrage, more anger about things.

id: Like the fact that suicide is still the number one cause of death among queer youth?

K.B. Yes, like there are government programs that purposely leave gay and lesbians out of suicide prevention programs and people aren’t more outraged about that.

id: Your next project talks about government deceptions and cover-up.

K.B. Yes, well, Spaceships over Corvallis, though not in the queer sense, is certainly unapologetic ally political. The Right Wing gets to write whatever they want to write and I wanted to do something equally bombastic from the left. I just think we get so starved for a sense of radical that when we do see it, because there’s such a paucity of it, it’s very freeing.

id: You seem to like vampires and zombies. Your short film Vox Aurora is based on your poem about zombie bakers, it’s funny.

K.B. Well, Percy Ingles is this horrible little chain bakery with the surliest people working the counter. I just hate it, but I would go in there for bread and once I just snapped. So I wrote this little poem and I actually went down there in the middle of the night and shoved it under the door. Which, maybe would be kind of creepy for them, I don’t know. But, there was this competition about zombie poems and I entered this short film. There were only two entries so we both won. I wouldn’t say that was representative of my work though, all this horrible stop-action animation.


id: No, of course not. But it is quirky and fun. So, what about monsters?

K.B. (Laughs) I really do like the concept of monsters, but I wouldn’t describe myself really as a sci-fi genre person, though my films certainly have that fantasy/sci fi feel to them. I like literary fiction and to assimilate fantasy. I like the witchy stuff. I desperately wanted to be a witch from the time I was four until around junior high. Anytime I saw anything remotely spelly in a book, I would write it down in a Book of Spells (laughs). I kept holding out that they would work. I like the metaphysical - I mean film making is magical isn’t it? I think that’s why I’m attracted to it.

You know, I’ve been working as an artist for nearly twenty years and I feel like I’ve hit a breakthrough for the first time. Berlin was a big part of that, a catalyst and I love it. A person should be able to enjoy the good parts. You should celebrate the good parts. If not, what’s the point?

[INTERVIEW ENDS]


"ARTS BOOK INTERVIEW/REVIEW: GIRL ON A STICK", THE SUN STAR
28 October (with Ashley Anklowitz)

“Girl On A Stick,” written by Kathleen Bryson, is a wonderful book with a captivating story line that draws you in from the first paragraph. It is the story of a college graduate student, Clementine, who is studying abroad in London. The book is funny and charming, full of twists and turns and a romance that will captivate you.

Bryson tells about her inspiration for the story: “I read a book called ‘The Serious Game,’ by Hjalmar Söderberg, about how a relationship can break down even when people love each other deeply. I had just had such a break-up and was trying to understand the process of power. But when I started writing about heterosexual relationships (I’m bisexual and have been both in long-term lesbian and long-term straight relationships), I realized that I was writing about power differentials, and that got me thinking about greater types of power differences—financial, national, religious. I also wanted to write about a kick-ass heroine.”

When asked if this book was based on any of her personal experiences, Bryson said, “As in most fiction books, there’s a mixture of both truth and fiction in ‘Girl on a Stick.’ I have had a relationship with a Scandinavian man, as Clem does, and I have been a grad-student American living in London, as she does. I have not been sexually abused, but a priest in my hometown (with whom my family and I were close friends) was harassed by the right wing of the Catholic Church for his politically progressive beliefs while he was alive, and also was accused after he died of abusing a young girl (I am still not sure what is true regarding that story, and can only offer my personal experience of him, which was of a really nice and intelligent guy who never sexually abused me or my sister). With fiction writing, anyone who starts out rooted in a real person eventually becomes an entirely fully fleshed different character in their own right. So I don’t think of Clem as myself—she is herself. And I don’t think of the characters Father Clifden or Father Deegan as representing my hometown priest, either.”

This book, with its raw feelings and jumbled thoughts, gives great insight into the working mind of most girls. It is great to see a writer put so much of herself into her work, and to some extent, you can come to feel as though you know her. The metaphors running through the book and the memorable life experiences of the main character make this book is a really good one to read. The book begins with a captivating description of a man named Per, whose “name makes me dream of Anjou Pears, too: sweet, sticky, lush, sexual pears.” With a description like that, almost any woman would want Per or hope to see him in her own love interest.

The sex scenes are hot, yet subdued by some modesty, although you still get a taste of the fire in Per’s and Clementine’s relationship that most look for in their own relationships. This relationship is the backbone to this book, bringing in all the emotional ups and downs in Clementine’s life. The joy he brings her makes you smile for her because you feel the joy of her life going right through all the downfalls in it.

This book bears a beautiful message: don’t follow the crowd, be yourself, and try and do your own things. With this message and the passion that runs through the heart of the story, it is truly a good read for anyone who enjoys a real-life romance in a setting that is as realistic as the story itself.

[INTERVIEW/REVIEW ENDS]

INTERVIEW WITH GAYDAR NATION
17 Oct 2008

Kathleen Bryson: Girl On A Stick

We spoke to Kathleen Bryson, the woman behind the blister-black comedy [Girl on a Stick], to find out more.


Girl on a Stick is your second novel – is it true what they say about how difficult a second novel is to write?

True to a certain extent. Your first novel tends to be the novel you've wanted to write your whole life growing up, and your second novel is often about your adult life, and that's daunting. My "true" first novel was a quintessential unpublished, and rightly so, novel-in-a-drawer called North Road Justice (which was the name of a so-called teenager "gang" in my Alaskan hometown, a name that I found both ridiculous and evocative).

I cannibalised parts of NRJ for both Mush and Girl on a Stick. I found Girl on a Stick much more painful as opposed to difficult to write - I knew what I wanted to say and exactly where I wanted to go; it just took me a while to get there in terms of putting words on paper. So yeah, it probably is true.


So what's Girl on a Stick about?

It's about the imbalance of power. Male/female power, imperialist American power, capitalistic power, the power of religious fundamentalism. It's also about a young woman who starts seeing visions of the Virgin Mary on the No. 38 bus.

Are any parts of the book autobiographical in any way?

Yes and no.

Are there any particular scenes in the novel that resonate with you in a special way?

I feel happy where Clem describes experiencing love as like seeing the overside of clouds, which you only ever see when you're on a plane. The scene where Clem confronts her boyfriend always upsets me, even though I wrote it. Also upsetting is the scene where the group of drunk people are trapped together in the elevator, because I experienced something very similar myself under similar circumstances, which I guess is a more specific answer to the autobiographical question. See, I can be tricky that way.


Do you ever get nervous about the reactions you might receive from writing about controversial topics, such as religion?

Yes, I do. But I feel strongly about what I have to say, otherwise I wouldn't be writing about it. I am lucky enough to know that I am loved by my family, and sometimes understood by them, and loved and usually understood by my friends. That gives me an underlying security to risk and dare things.

I once had what was a pretty serious anthropological piece about bestiality published, wherein I wanted to make a point about how humans can't think of themselves as animals even though we are (the main gist of the piece, which was actually quite anti-bestiality in its entirety), but I started out all guns blazing by volunteering that I had once masturbated in the same room as a dog, and sarcastically asked the reader whether that counted as zoophilia. And I can actually think of at least one additional example of "controversial" writing in Girl on a Stick - which was finished four years ago - which makes me blush a little now re-reading it, an incident which also has to do with sex.

So there have been a few occasions when I have looked back at some essay or something I wrote and thought, "Whoa, I would never dare to be so bolshy or fearless now." Or perhaps: "Hmm, I don't know why I was quite so frank about that - maybe I was trying to be shocking after all." But then I get spiky in different ways at other times. Sometimes it's sex, sometimes it's politics, sometimes it's criminal injustice. And, sometimes, I really am attracted to rebellion because I like it and not for any worthy reason at all. I think South Park is written from a right-wing standpoint and I still snicker all the way though it, because it's just so baaaad and naughty.

You've certainly received a lot of praise for the book – how does that feel?

A little embarrassed and a little proud, because I did work hard on it.

So how did it all begin for you? Had you always wanted to be a writer?

According to one of the blank scrapbook dealies I filled out as a seven-year-old, I wanted to be an artist, a writer, a nun, an archaeologist and a magician. I used to make a lot of my own books when I was six or so, drawing the pictures and writing the stories. I would staple them together so they had a real "book" feel. I remember once trying unsuccessfully to make a pop-up book.

I would still like to make a pop-up book; I loved and love gimmicky books like pop-ups and choose-your-own-adventure and optical-illusion books and scratch-and-sniff. What these all have in common is an expanded experience - you're personalizing your reading experience in a way no one else can understand - I think the scientific term is "qualia". Because I wanted to be a lot of things when I grew up, I didn't end up studying two of my greatest loves, writing and painting, and so I had to teach myself to do both without having gone through the rigours of a creative writing programme or art school - and maybe that's a good thing.

Before I did a post-grad drama programme, I was forever envious of my friends who had studied professional acting - when we were in plays together, I wondered whether they knew some secrets that I didn't know. Then I did the course and realized that it's 90% bullshit and confidence and networking, and I suspect that the same goes for other disciplines. Sometimes I wish I had some of the "secret club" network personal contacts, though - who you know often and definitely does ease the way.

Are there any specific gay authors that you would say have influenced your writing?


There is a disproportionate number of my favourite writers that I didn't know were queer and found out after the fact: Geoff Ryman, Tove Jansson, Wittgenstein, Saki, Gregory Maguire, Mary Renault, Kathy Acker. And then there are a few that I knew were queer from the beginning: Jane Bowles, Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare. I have always been drawn towards a bisexual sensibility in literature rather than a straight or gay one, and I believe all these writers have that in common to a certain extent.

I remember the absolutely freeing experience of being 20 or so and reading Sarah Caudwell's mystery book Thus Was Adonis Murdered. In Caudwell's books, it's accepted as fact that everyone is happily shagging and attracted to and in love with everyone else. I like those type of books best and I like that quality in some of Virginia Woolf's work, too. Two life-changing and art-changing experiences were watching the plays Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill and - very obscure - En Uppstoppad Hund - literally, A Stuffed Dog - by the Swedish playwright Staffan Göthe, where this type of sexual freedom plays out. I love that quality in Six Feet Under as well.

What do you like to do when you're not working?

I like to go on really long, three-hour walks around whichever city I'm living in. I like reading about recent primatology studies and physical anthropology and origin-of-the-universe stuff. I like reading online Hollywood gossip forums. I love hanging out and having coffee with friends and being extremely lazy. I like to go to the movies and eat popcorn and watch artsy good films and trashy 3-D films.


What are your personal dos and don'ts in life?

I've never really tried any drug that could kill me, like cocaine or amphetamines or heroin. Even back in college, I stuck to hallucinogens. I don't do any drugs at all these days, except perhaps the occasional puff on someone else's joint. I try not to lie or be violent and I don't steal. I am nice to the anonymous people that I come across in my day, generally.

I work hard and try to keep my promises. Hmm. And every now and then I try to take the piss out of myself, and after re-reading that goody two-shoes litany I just typed out perhaps it's time again. As my high school chemistry teacher, Mr. Feldman - a lovely man - used to say to me: "Life's too mysterious. Don't take it serious."


What makes you happy?

Sunlight. Snow. Dancing. Gossip. Drinking sparkling wine with my girlfriend and best friends while we're cooking an amazing meal. Being in the woods on my own. Autumn and Halloween. Cuddling my two guinea pigs and my girlie. Playing with my nieces. Reading. Sex. Looking at the Milky Way with no city light.

What do you hope readers take away with them after reading your book?

A sense of hope, and a feeling that you don't have to play the game to win the game, because the game is only that, a game. Someone's probably said that before me and said it better, because that sounds a leeetle too familiar. But you get what I mean.


What's next for you?

Sending my first feature film, The Viva Voce Virus - co-directed with Kimmo Moykky - off to festivals. After four years it is finally complete! A few already-finished books in the pipeline. A few unfinished books that I would love to complete, including my chimp Jurassic-Park-style novel Hybrid Vigor, plus a genie novel. Guiding my second feature film Spaceships Over Corvallis into production next spring. And acting in a friend's pirate film this coming winter.


What else would you like to say?

Thanks for the lovely interview questions - please feel free to check out my feature film The Viva Voce Virus at www.vivavocevirus.com/themovie.html and also visit me on my blog www.girlonastick.blogspot.com - I have lots of visitors, but no one ever comments! Oh, and if folks can buy Girl on a Stick directly from Suspect Thoughts or Libertas or some other independent bookstore, all the better.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]





FRICTION INTERVIEW (www.friction.org.uk)

Kathleen Bryson writer/co-director - Viva Voce Virus
October 13, 2008

Viva Voce Virus directed by Kathleen Bryson and Kimmo Moykky. Viva Voce Virus is a wild vivid surreal film sci film which deals with the history of queer actors in the cinema being terrified of being ‘outed’. The main story is of the actress Ronnie played by Deni Francis who thinks to be successful she needs to employ the well-worn tactic of having a “beard” boyfriend. Ironically she is playing part a lesbian vampire in the contemporary remake of a B-movie written by dyke director Gloria LaFonche in the 1950’s.

The film draws on the gossip of old Hollywood in a Kenneth Angerish adventure thorugh the history of the closet. Meanwhile the other narrative includes two space travellers who exist in a fantasy world where men can suddenly find their best friend attractive and keep coming back for the blue cocktails in Gay Andy’s.

You are a writer primarily, why now a move into filmmaking?

I don’t think of myself being primarily anything! The truth is I have always done three arts, not one. Writing, painting and filmmaking/acting. I came over to London to do a post-grad in acting originally in 1994, and in 1997 I was finishing up my MA in film theory right as I started to write my first novel, Mush. I actually began writing/developing The Viva Voce Virus the same year that Mush was published, 2001. I show my paintings every few years as well.

The reason it seems that filmmaking is a recent move is because feature-filmmaking by nature is sloooooooowww, and thats compounded when doing a micro-budget feature. I can whip up a short story in a matter of days: feature films - not so speedy!


What inspired you to make the Viva Voce Virus film?

Two things:

1. A dream I had in 1996 about a satirical movie where two “straight” men crash-landed into an all-gay resort where all the drag queens wore blue terrycloth bathrobes and stirred their blue cocktails with sparkly swizzlesticks. I pretty much dreamt the entire opening scene.

2. An audition I’d had in 2001 where I was one of the final 5 standing out of the original 90, and was on the third callback for a part for which I was eminently qualified. I’d already done the acting audition twice over, and this was just a verbal interview. I saw one of the casting director’s face change when I mentioned a girlfriend. It was kind of horrifically amazing as he struggled to compose himself. You wouldn’t think that type of prejudice exists among liberal people in theatre or film until you experience it first hand. The rule I broke wasn’t being queer - obviously, that’s very common - the rule I broke was talking openly about it.


You co-directed the Viva Voce Virus with Kimmo Moykky - what were the challenges of working collaboratively?

I am fiery yang to his more peaceful yin, which turned out to be complementary when working together. We have spookily similar artistic taste when it comes to films, literature, themes and aesthetics. If we had different opinions about how a shot should be set up, for example, we would both listen to the other person’s reasoning. If we could give a good justification and wanted it more, then the other
person would acquiesce. We kind of kept an unofficial tally: “Hey, you got your way last time, so it’s my turn now.” It balanced!

In six years we only had one 5-minute real argument, and that was the last week of production when we were probably missing like 50 hours of sleep. The real challenge was communicating long-distance during the post-production period once I had moved back to the United States. But we weathered that. We’ll definitely work together again and are actually in development with a second feature together, a futuristic horror piece in the 21 Days Later mode. We’ve been through some very trying situations and it’s great to know that you can be dear friends on the other side of that.


One of the themes about the Viva Voce Virus is the homosexual closet. Why do you think female actresses still stay in the closet more than male actors?

There are a lot of actresses who come out as bisexual, and I believe they truly are. But then what happens is you only ever hear about their boyfriends, and the media colludes with their publicists when they’re dating women to play that aspect down. Two good examples there are Drew Barrymore and Angelina Jolie. The media has no interest either in promoting sexual fluidity - that is just too threatening to consider, because that means any straight person could be the next to come out. Secondly, the almighty cock trumps all. You have men who have made a point of acknowledging their bisexuality like Alan Cumming or Gore Vidal being labeled as “gay” while women who call themselves bisexual who have had established relationships with other women being called “straight”. See the pattern? It always defaults to the male member.

With actresses, you’re already working inside this sexist system, and I reckon often it just becomes too much to deal with when compounded with homophobia. There’s a heartbreaking quote from the actress Tammy Lynn Michaels from an interview she did with Television Without Pity, where she says, “My managers and all my agents would be like [frantically], “Don’t tell them you’re gay! You’ll be ruined! You’ll never work again! You’ll be working at McDonald’s in a month!” I was so terrified.” There is incredible pressure to be conventionally attractive in a typically “feminine” mode - and to be perceived as straight.


What do you think about Lyndsay Lohan coming out? What difference will it make?

Lindsay Lohan and Sam Ronson are interesting, because in a way they’re just going ahead with their relationship without make a big to-do about it. They’re behaving as if it is already an ideal-world situation where everyone accepts lesbian couples on par with straight ones, and more power to them for that.

It’s not as if Hollywood isn’t predominately gay already, so I doubt they’re shunned. Also there are many gay and lesbian couples who are well known in Hollywood that go under the mainstream radar, most of whom who have straight “lovers”-cum-beards for public consumption.

From what I understand, Sam is not the first woman with whom Lindsay has had a relationship - just the first that the general public has picked up on. This wasn’t helped, of course, by Lindsay’s publicists or whoever was working overtime over the last few years to emphasize just how heterosexual she was. This plan really backfired, may I say, as Lindsay started to be seen as slutty and also, perhaps not coincidentally, begin to show signs of emotional strain. My hunch is there are several other public starlets with very well-known breakdowns who have been having lesbian affairs. It must be difficult to deal with the cognitive dissonance of lying to the public and sometimes to oneself.


Your film is very multicultural, was that a conscious choice?

Both Kimmo and myself talked about it at the beginning and decided that we wanted so-called colour-blind casting, and agreed we didn’t conceive of any characters as being African-Caribbean, or Caucasian, or Asian, and we decided that we would cast instead according to gut instinct (with the exception of the lead Deni Francis, whom I actually had in mind while writing the script).

When I wrote the main character Ronnie’s girlfriend, Madeleine, for example, I had a vision in my head of her being blonde and white and perhaps somewhat snotty - I loosely based her on some of the women I’d met working in publishing. But then when we had Semsem Kuheri read for the part, all of a sudden there was a new way of conceptualising the character of Madeleine. There are sometimes good arguments for ethnic-specific casting, but often there aren’t and I think white directors/casting agents/producers have a responsibility to examine their pre-conceived character casting notions.

Something I really love about Mike Figgis films is that he has a variety of people from different backgrounds and they’re not there as tokens or meant to represent something, but are present as true characters. And recently you get TV series like Gray’s Anatomy and Dexter, where the same thing is going on in terms of casting, and that’s just bloody refreshing.

On a semi-related note, at one point in the middle of production, Kimmo and I looked at each other and realized that all of the villains in The Viva Voce Virus were white, which was interesting. That wasn’t a conscious choice, either. I am not sure how that happened, but it seemed fitting that the evil people who had the most power in the film would also be operating from a more powerful angle of relational dynamics when it came to race. They were also all closet cases as well, of course.

There are men and women, straights and gays in a queer film which rocks, why did you go against the grain?

Because that’s what makes up my personal world. Gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and straight people. Although if you look carefully, there are actually allusions to every single character being to some extent queer, including Ronnie’s straight male best friend. Not all of them are closeted, either, just sexually fluid. And come on, people, not all of us exist in a sexually segregated world. If that makes it harder to label The Viva Voce Virus as a “gay film” or a “lesbian film”, then so be it. You can’t argue with the fact that it’s a queer film, though; it just happened to be a queer film for men, women, straights, gays, lesbians and bisexuals… and others.

When do you plan to show the Viva Voce Virus in the UK?

We just finished the final cut in June and are starting to send it off to festivals this month, so once we’re accepted to a festival in the UK, you better believe we’ll be there, with bells on. Perhaps wearing blue terrycloth bathrobes and brandishing sparkly swizzlesticks.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]


RAINBOWNETWORK INTERVIEW (with Charlotte Cooper)
12 Sep 2008

My Things: Kathleen Bryson


The phenomenally talented and go-gettin' Kathleen Bryson is not the kind of woman to let her life stagnate. At any one time she has a handful of exciting projects on the go, including novels like Girl On A Stick and He's Lucid, painting, acting and singing. Now she's about to release The Viva Voce Virus, a grand film project that has taken years to complete. Watch out for it on the festival circuit and find out what else makes this extraordinary woman tick.


Where do you live and why?

I live in Portland, Oregon. I moved here after 13 years in Europe because I missed trees and thought it would be nice to be closer to home (Alaska) for a while.

Do you live alone or with someone else?

I live with my girlfriend.

Do you have any pets and what are they called?

I’m allergic to cats and my girlfriend’s allergic to dogs, so we recently welcomed two very lovely male guinea pigs into our home: Machu (Pigchu) and Julio (Piglesias).

What’s your must-see TV programme?

Battlestar Galactica.

What’s your favourite gadget?

A Japanese watch I ordered back in 1999. It transforms into a little silver robot and it also sends you random messages in both English and Japanese (purportedly Zen messages, but so far they been like “UFOs UFOs” and “Are you hungry?”).

AWAY


Where was the last place you went on holiday?

I went back to London for the cast and crew screening of the feature film I co-directed, The Viva Voce Virus, at the Dalston Rio. We’ve been working on it for four years, so we were ecstatic to have it finished! See it soon on the festival circuit!

What is your favourite city?

Barcelona.


Where is your favourite place in the world?

In a canoe floating in the middle of Stormy Lake in Nikiski, Alaska, eating M&Ms and reading.


Where was your most memorable holiday?

A recent trip to South Korea for my youngest brother’s wedding. He married a Korean woman in a traditional shamanist ceremony complete with (non)sacrificial hen and rooster. My entire immediate family (6 people plus 1 fiancée) slept on the floor in one small room for 10 days. It was memorable: both wonderful and stressful.



STYLE

Speedos or shorts, bikini or swimsuit?

Shorts, swimsuit.

What’s your favourite item in your wardrobe?

I have a fuschia ski-type jacket that I adore, and a pair of teetering heels that look like Prada (they aren’t), but then if you look very closely they appear to have motorcycle detailing. They’re pretty kick-ass.


Do you prefer to be smart or casual?

I prefer to be funky messy.


What was the last item of clothing you brought?

A pair of purple fishnets and a pair of teal tights from Topshop.

What are your extravagances?


Books, Vietnamese food, good coffee, arthouse films on DVD, costume jewellery.


What’s your favourite aftershave/perfume?

Hypnotic Poison and also Karma.

SOUL


What are your inspirations?

I’m inspired by rebellious people. People who speak out even when they’re very much the minority (Stephen Colbert, Moomintrolls). I love satire and humour in art (Angela Carter’s books, Guy Maddin’s films). I also love just plain idiosyncratic work that may have nothing to do with rebellion, but which is so totally the artist’s own: painters like Chagall and Anselm Kiefer. I love kindness and gentleness. Trees. I also love dance-pop music with clever lyrics. I love dancing. I love being alive. Drawing breath is pretty inspiring.

What is your favourite cause?

Equality in its many equally important forms – social democracy, racial equality, women’s liberation, gay rights, animal rights. Environmental issues feed straight into many of these.

What is your favourite recent discovery?

That scientists think that time must go backwards as well as forwards, closely followed by the ‘hobbits’ of Borneo, the newly discovered giant gorillas in the Congo and the isolated human tribe in the Amazonian rainforest that is still uncontacted by modern culture. I think about these things a lot.

What is your philosophy of life?

Every human is born with bisexual potential, like most other mammals. We are animals like any other organism on this planet. We are an amazing species among countless other amazing species. Although I’d like to have a kid myself, there are many other ways of contributing to our society without giving birth and those should be celebrated just as much. We’re social animals. There is no way of knowing what originally started the Big Bang and created the stars and planets and all of creation, but I have a good feeling about it. When I think about it too much I feel wonder and delight. I think everyone ought to slow down a bit and smell the roses.

Who would you most like to meet for dinner?

Ken Livingstone, Angela Carter (if she were still alive), Alan Cumming, my girlfriend, all my good friends, my family, people with good senses of humour (I always thought that Ken and Angela and Alan seemed like they would have great senses of humour), all having a delicious dinner together.


A Night Out

When did you come out?

I assumed I was generally heterosexual from birth to 19, when I suspected that I might be bisexual (I was in a straight relationship at the time, so it would have been difficult to explore, and besides I was in love and didn’t particularly want to explore my lesbian feelings), began to deal with the fact that I was bisexual when I was 22, decided I was a lesbian for a few months when I was 25, and then had to re-deal with the fact that I truly was bisexual when I was around 26. Most of this took place in the early/mid-1990s. There’s a nice simple answer for you.

What does your gay utopia look like?

My gay utopia looks like a bisexual utopia, where people are free to choose either or all genders as partners and it doesn’t mean a thing more than that. Where kids get to read fairy tales about princesses falling in love with each other, and where same-sex couples get absolute parity with opposite-sex couples in every advertising, film, radio or television medium. Where everyone on earth might date a man, and then a woman, and then a man, and then a man, and then a woman.

What does Pride mean to you?

I think it is enormously important politically, and I think it should be free, fun and highly politicised – even a little bit of anger wouldn’t go amiss. Queer people have become so fucking timid and reluctant to rock the boat.

Who do you currently have a secret crush on?

President Laura Roslin from Battlestar Galactica. Maybe Felix as well. I’m a big geek.

When and where was the last gay bar/club you went to?

Sluts ’n’ Squares in Portland, Oregon. But seriously, the whole city is gay here. It’s not just assimilation, it’s a complete colonisation of the straight venues (mwah-ha-ha – my evil bi-topia plans have just begun!).

[INTERVIEW ENDS]


LIBERTAS MAGAZINE INTERVIEW
January 2007

Kathleen Bryson: Breaking Up and Breaking Away

Kathleen spills the beans on power, masochism and having an Alaskan soul.

Lucia Pajon: You wrote your first novel, Mush in 2001. Girl on a Stick was only published last month. A time span of five years. Why the long hiatus? Did you feel like you needed to explore other creative formats (which you did, with painting, exhibitions and film projects) that took over in the end or did you just need a break?

Kathleen Bryson: And I worked full-time too. My day job was as a books editor at Diva Books. Girl on a Stick was started in early 2000 and finished it in 2003. In this period, I wrote two additional novels, and nearly finished two more. I also wrote, co-produced and co-directed my first feature film. I acted in four short films. and I had three art exhibitions. I moved continents after 10 years abroad and left my close friends behind. I was functioning on 4 hours of sleep a night for about half a year. (No, I don’t take cocaine. In fact, I wasn’t even drinking coffee at one point.)

But in 2005 my health failed – I developed panic attacks, pneumonia and coeliac disease. Before that I felt like Wonderwoman – look, I can do this, and I can do this too! I lived my life on pure adrenaline. I’ve always been like that, someone who wants to paint as well as write, etc. And I still have all that energy and desire, but so I don’t get pneumonia again or drive my long-suffering girlfriend and friends crazy, I am learning the benefits of trying to pace myself.

LP: Going back to Mush briefly, it is a very atmospheric tale where the Alaskan wilderness takes almost a primordial role. (I thought of books like Surfacing by Margaret Atwood and even Life After God by Douglas Coupland, they are of course on very different levels, but the wilderness is always there) It doesn’t feel like just a background for the story of Nicky, Carol and Helen but more like a mirror where you can see the strong pull of the characters on one another and also their dark side, which pushes them apart. Here we have Nature acting like a dreamscape, the bucolic on one hand and the Gothic terror on the other. There’s always tension. Do you agree with this or am I just going nuts?

KB: No, I totally agree with you (and thank you for the extremely flattering comparisons). Except it’s not a dreamscape or exotic for me, of course, it’s just describing what it was like and felt like growing up. I was born and raised there; I lived there half of my life. The smells, the way it looks – I miss it terribly. I am an Alaskan through and through. At the same time, Alaska currently has one of the most fucked-up political and social environments for anyone progressive, gentle, queer. I can’t live there as an adult, but the lo-fi nature of Washington, Oregon makes me want to scream “Don’t you want to see real wildness from time to time?” I am a little feral and sometimes feel like I’m caged by society, stalking back and forth. That may account for some of the tension you’re picking up on in Mush. Kind of a social cabin fever.


LP: Girl on a Stick is a 360 degrees journey from Mush. The comings and goings of a heterosexual couple in a very urban set (London) versus a lesbian threesome with lots of Alaskan forest to think of (and a bit of Seattle too). Was this intentional? And did the thought of a wider market have any consideration at all or was this done from a purely bisexual perspective?

KB: I lived in Stockholm for three years. In 1992, I read a book by Hjalmar Söderberg whose title would be translated as The Serious Game. Basically it is about the breakdown of a relationship from a man’s point of view, set in and written in the early 1900s. Many years later, there was a feminist novel written in response called For Lydia from the woman’s point of view. It made me think that I too wanted to explore how a relationship can move from genuine love to a break-up. Why? What are the power dynamics, particularly in a man-woman relationship? At the time, I had just had my own breakdown of a long-term (heterosexual) relationship, and I was trying to understand that breakdown, so obviously I had a vested interest. In a way, Mush and Girl on a Stick are sister novels, a dichotomy (and I hate dichotomies!) where one is the forest and one is the city; one is gay and one is straight. So yes, maybe it is a purely bisexual and bi-environmental perspective: I am both the forest and the city; I am both gay and straight.

There wasn’t any calculation in terms of market– I would have written something far more mainstream than Girl on a Stick if I wanted to be calculating!

LP: Sex and the Catholic Church are very much present in your book. Clementine, an American student in a relationship with hunk Norwegian Per keeps on having these religious visions in the most unlikely places; on the bus going home or when grabbing a carton of milk from the fridge; it doesn’t really matter whether it’s before or after having sex with Per. Bible references sit together with pretty explicit sex scenes. It actually shows the hypocrisy of any religious institution very well. Did you have this in mind from the beginning?

KB: Sex is weird, it can be one of the most intimate and most detached things you can do with another human being, and sometimes both at once. I consciously juxtaposed sections from the Catholic prayer book and the Examination of Conscience (a fine example of masochism) with moments in the relationship (which sometimes included sex), but never because that moment had to do with sex; it was only because it had to do with the greater relationship. Yes, this did have to do with the subject of general religious hypocrisy, and also to highlight what are ridiculously considered “sins” (fortune-telling, giving credence to dreams etc.) by the Catholic church.

LP: Clementine was molested by the priest of her local parish in Kripton, her hometown when she was a child. Why did you choose this incident to fill up your main character’s background? It wouldn’t necessarily justify her reactions not just toward the Church but in her relationship as well or would it?

KB: Something that makes me more furious than anything is the way the Catholic Church has covered up their child sexual abuse scandals. That has to do with power and hierarchy, and that is one of the key elements (and plots) in Girl on a Stick.

Women and children have limited power in our society: there is a skewed dynamic present within adult-child relationships of any kind, and sometimes within adult heterosexual romantic relationships. I do think if you have experienced powerlessness of any sort, it makes you prone to exhibiting the same reactions that you did previously, if you’re not on guard. In context, all of those reactions are reasonable – fear, masochism, defensiveness, bullying, anger, strength-through-abidance, numbness, purposeful ignorance – and some are even healthy reactions. They all come from a place of self protection. In the book, Clementine, quite powerful in her own right, repeats her reactions (I don’t want to use the word “mistakes”, because clearly the mistakes were not hers). She initially lacks the tools to change things comprehensively. She has awareness, but little self-belief.

Girl on a Stick is about power and how it is misused, particularly against the left-wing of the church (represented by Father Clifden), and also against the character of Clementine by the "evil" priest Father Deegan. It's also about other types of power – institutional (the greater Catholic church), economic (McDonalds, the U.S.), international (the U.S. and the Bush junta), masochism (socially enforced self-sabotage) and sexism ( Clementine's relationship with her boyfriend ).


LP: Per cheats on her repeatedly but she ponders on the cause and the cure for far too long. Did you do this to take the potential glamour off that masochistic streak that seems to creep up in people at times? Did you want to say that playing damaged for too long is not that sexy after all?

KB: Absolutely. Not that sexy, and not that healthy.

LP: There are plenty of word games and riddles in this book. Some were posed by Father Deegan as a form of psychological abuse, some were made by Clementine in her own head, part of her own stream of consciousness. Do you like riddles and are you good at them?

KB: If you mean medieval-era and Old Norse type of poem-riddles, I am good at them. I love mysteries. I am not particularly good at newspaper puzzles because I have very little patience, though I am surprisingly capable at Sudoku. I like games based on logic and intuitive thinking, like Riven. When I was 13, I was the first in my junior high to solve out the early problem-solving computer adventure game The Wizard and the Princess, and it made me feel very smug to beat all the computer-geek boys (it never occurred to me that I was a computer-geek girl). I also figured out a rather slow method of solving the Rubik’s cube on my own.

LP: Clementine’s visions are very colourful and they are my favourite part of the book. When did the apparitions of the Virgin Mary come into place in this book? What was first, Clem and Per or the Virgin Mary?

KB: Clem and Per were first. I am not sure when the Virgin showed up. She just kind of appeared, like an apparition itself.

LP: Clementine is in London at a time when the world witness America’s September 11th and the Iraq war. Many authors have chosen to refer to these events in their books in more or less explicit ways. A recent queer example is Michelle Tea’s Rose of No Man’s Land. Did you also feel the need to do this?

KB: No. I started writing the novel in early 2000. I knew the novel’s timeline would cover 3-4 years. Some pretty big shit happened while I was writing Girl on a Stick, to put it mildly. An election was stolen, a city was attacked, and two wars were started. Right after September 11th, I quit writing Girl on a Stick for about half a year. I couldn’t see how I could write about what was going on without seeming prurient and self-serving, and besides, like many other world citizens, I was still reeling and sick with anger at George Bush, religious fundamentalists of all ilks and all the “writerly” responses to September 11th that appeared afterwards. But I knew I needed to pick up the book again and finish it. I could hardly ignore what was going on and set Girl on a Stick in a Utopian world where the attacks on New York and the aftermath had never happened. That would have been even ickier. So less desire, more necessity.


LP: War is unfortunately a universal issue; did you think of its effects this way and decided to use the current events in your book to build up Clementine’s head or was it more of a natural reaction from an American citizen’s point of view?

KB: As it happened, because I was writing about power imbalances, cultural imperialism, and codes that you can never crack, my subjects segued straight in with the world around me in the years 2000-2003. So yes, once I started again after the New York and Afghanistan attacks I did use the current events to build up what was happening to Clementine. I don’t think this is an immoral thing for a writer to do. I believe in political art. I was writing to deplore the Bush administration and religious fundamentalism. On the other hand, I was so immersed in the character and the plot, that I am not sure whether it was just the character reacting to the events. Clementine’s reactions have a lot to do with how I was seeing the world at the time – impossible, cruel, and fixed. I think I remained true to what Clementine’s views would have been, and if they happen to dovetail with my own, then that’s because we have some stuff in common.

LP: As an American student living in London, Clementine shows us the ever present stereotyping of US citizens by others (British in this case). There is irony and at times anger. What’s the stereotype you find most annoying?

KB: I’ve lived 19 years in Alaska and 13 years overseas, and only lived in the continental U.S. for a little over 5 years. So I’ve put up with a bit of shit since I’m a constant ex-pat. I guess I find the assumption that many Americans aren’t critical thinkers the most annoying. Jesus Christ, the most critical thinkers (and the people I know who are the most critical of the Bush administration) are all American. I’ve attended secondary school, undergraduate and graduate school in both Europe and the U.S. and generally the quality of education (and propensity to challenge the instructors) was higher in the U.S. And the whole U.S. Labor movement, alongside the Civil Rights, women’s and queer movements, was completely astute and political and passionate. So the “dumb, politically oblivious American” thing bugs the fuck out of me.

LP: Your character lives in London and you have too for several years. Tell us something you really like about London and something you would definitely send to Room 101.

KB: It’s Hackney I miss most. I miss getting hummous and olives and halloumi from the Turkish grocery round the corner. I miss London’s pace. I miss the diversity. I miss my lovely friends.

I would send to Room 101 the black dirty soul-consuming fury and hate for the world and yourself that takes place when you are sitting on a 253 bus from Camden to Hackney with no mp3 player or book, an hour delayed in back-to-back traffic looking out the windows at the night rain, wondering why your life is going by like this.

LP: I like the black and white illustrations in the book. They are quirky. What’s behind them, why in Girl on a Stick?

KB: They are part of the greater codes in Clementine’s life, and each one of them links to the greater story – whether it’s the snake-and-egg motif, the young-woman-in-an-old-woman’s-body, or just an explanation of how Father Deegan set up his rebus puzzles. Behind all of this is the idea that power – political power, religious, corporate, the heterosexual male - has codes, sometimes impermeable to decryption.

LP: Writing, painting and filming: which one gives you more pleasure and which one is the most painful?


KB: Writing gives me the most pleasure. Filmmaking/acting is the most painful. I have a suspicion that filmmaking will turn out to be the most pleasurable, too, it’s just that we’ve been in post production for so long, we haven’t got to the fun part yet – the festivals, the screenings, the joy.

LP: Have you got a favourite author?

KB: I like surrealism, cleverness, satire and heart. Angela Carter. Haruki Murakami. Douglas Adams. Charles Addams. Randall Kenan. Geoff Ryman. Ali Smith. Jane Bowles. Mikhail Bulgakov. Toni Morrison. John Irving. Saki. Tove Jansson. Margaret Atwood. Mabel Maney, John Steinbeck.

LP: What are you reading at the moment?

KB: Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link, Titus Groan by Marvyn Peake.

LP: What projects have you got in mind for the future?

KB: These aren’t really future projects, because they’re more or less completed, but they’re in the pipeline: in 2007, my feature film The Viva Voce Virus – which we’ve been working on since 2002 – will be finished. My next novel, He’s Lucid, set in global-warming Alaska 100 years in the future will be released in early 2008. And my mainstream (but still quirky) fairy-tale novel The Matchbox, completed last year, will hopefully be sold by my agent.

Future projects, on the other hand, include: Crafty, a documentary on craft makers in London’s modern East End, which has been filmed but not edited, another mystery film project, a children’s book illustration project on the Alaska poems of Robert Service – and finishing my science-fiction chimpanzee-human interbreeding novel Hybrid Vigor, which I have been working on for over ten years.

LP: If Mush were a film, whom would you choose to play Nicky, Carol and Helen? (don’t worry about the budget just yet…)

KB: God! I would love for someone to make a film of Mush. I could see it as sort of Lynne Ramsey semi-experimental or a David Lynch type film. Let me have a think. Ellen’s a little older – she could be played by someone a bit edgy like Fairuza Balk. Then Siri Baruc as Nicky. I do think Lindsay Lohan is a very talented actress and she or Scarlett J might do a fantastic job as Carol. Or Michelle Trachtenberg. Yeah. She would be great.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

"WHAT'S ON YOUR BEDSIDE TABLE - WE ASK KATHLEEN BRYSON" - INTERVIEW WITH DIVA MAGAZINE
December 2006

What are you reading in bed at the moment? And recently? And what do you
think of those books? Do you read different things in bed and out of bed?

Encyclopaedia of Snow by Sarah Miano isn't good to read in bed; it's experimental, and I keep dropping off. I just finished Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog - perfect bedtime reading as well as being the funniest book ever. And I read the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami when I was sick for months, which was creepy and amazing. It had me looking for extra doors in my bedroom.

Do you write in bed? Why/why not?

I don't write in bed, but I edit [my own work] occasionally.

What does the main character in your new book get up to in bed?

In my new book, Clementine has anal sex to Pulp songs in bed, lies listening to Hackney car alarms and blackbirds who mimic them, pretends the trees outside are fuzzy broccoli and tries to make a patch of sunlight dance from her hips to her crotch.

What is on your bedside table apart from books? And in any drawers or secret
compartments!

By my bed are a tiny Greek urn that belonged to my grandma, a Japanese fishing buoy that looks like a crystal ball, long branches with fake silver berries, a golden glass apple, an empty 1950s cut-glass perfume decanter and a candle that smells like pine forests.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

"RENAISSANCE WOMAN" - INTERVIEW WITH GCN MAGAZINE (IRELAND)
December 2006 (with Denis Kehoe)

You probably don't know it, but there is little doubt you've come across Kathleen Bryson before. The painter, actress, editor and film-maker has worked on all things queer for over ten years and continues to push the envelope in her new novel, as Denis Kehoe discovered.


"My big thing is hypocrisy. I have a real problem with it, and I have a real problem with hypocrisy in the acting industry as well," says Kathleen Bryson over the phone from London, where she is busy at work editing a feature film about the closeting system in Hollywood.

I've called her to interview her about her second novel, Girl on a Stick, but it comes as no surprise that she should be so involved in another art form just as the book is coming out. The Alaskan native is a writer, film-maker, artist and actress, among other things, and has always been careful not to define her job description too rigidly.

"I've always been quite stubborn about not pigeon holing myself. I'm kind of that way about sexuality as well," she says with characteristic good-humour and frankness.

Though she has been with her German girlfriend for more than ten years, Bryson has also had her fair share of heterosexual experiences and has said in the past that she has been in love twice: once with a man and once with a woman. Her first novel, Mush, was about a menage-a-trois between three women in Alaska, but it is a heterosexual relationship that is at the core of Girl on a Stick.

About the book Bryson says, "It's about power and I suppose power is quite critical in some heterosexual relationships." The book charts the turbulent relationship between two foreigners in London: Clementine from Washington State, a "sparky but annoying young woman"[as Bryson describes her to me] who is "moving towards a recognition of her own complicity, her own masochism" and green-eyed Norwegian beauty, Per.


It is a book that gets right into the blood and guts of a relationship with language that, like its central character, is sassy, knowing, vulnerable and often damn funny.

Bryson seems glad when I comment on the book's humour as well as its undeniable seriousness. "My girlfriend doesn't think so. Well, because my first book was even bleaker."

The title Girl on a Stick refers in part to the "Man on a Stick" (Jesus) and religion figures heavily in the book, specifically Clementine's relationship with the Catholic Church. In the book she remembers the sexual abuse she suffered as a teenager at the hands of a predatory priest back home as well as recalling fond memories of her friendship with a much nicer man of the cloth. She experiences religious hallucinations while in London and is very much involved in the process of questioning the Church and its role in her life.

Bryson says, "I think that Clementine's relationship between herself and the Church might be read as a slightly blasphemous relationship. I think it has saturated her life to such an extent, both for good and bad, that that's the sort of code she has to understand."

Bryson's mother is Irish-American and Bryson herself grew up Catholic, although her local church was "very radical for Alaska". Though she is horrified by the sexism of the Catholic Church, her faith in a higher being remains an enormously important part of her life. She says, "I'm definitely not an atheist. I'm not even an agnostic. I actually have quite a good sense of something good out there."

Like Clementine, Bryson has lived in London, where she spent ten years. It was there she met her girlfriend, when they were both members of the Lesbian Avengers.

Of the Lesbian Avengers Bryson says the experience was "inspiring", but also "in some ways it was sort of my real moment as opposed to my idealised feminism."

While in London Bryson and her partner became involved in a mammoth immigration appeal, trying to get their immigration rights as a same-sex couple recognised, which they eventually won. It was also in London where Bryson worked as a publisher for the Millivres Prowler Group whose publishing departments Diva Books and The Gay Men's Press are now both sadly deceased.

A year ago Bryson and her partner moved back to the States and they currently reside in Portland, an "extremely leftist little bubble". She says she is "completely freaked out by life in the States. It feels very strange." She mourns the fact that, "the secular state of the United States has been completely eroded" and asserts "I'm very much in favour of a secular state." But the future doesn't look all that bad for the States. It is the day after the Congress and the Senate elections and the Democrats have already taken Congress. "It would be fantastic if the Senate went as well," says Bryson. "It would mean that America has woken up."


And perhaps it's time too that those who hadn't previously heard of Bryson woke up to this delicious American talent.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

LOCAL ARTIST SHARES HER "LUCKY CHARMS" - THE DAILY BAROMETER
27 May 2004 (with Nathalie Weinstein)

I have a feeling Kathleen Bryson would have been comfortable throwing back a bottle of wine with the Brother's Grimm in a secluded cabin in the middle of an enchanted forest.

At first glance, her rich colored, textured paintings appear to be merely picturesque landscapes. However, looking deeper into "Stravinsky's Bird & Schroedinger's Cat," you see the imaginary pets of a musical virtuoso and Nobel Prize-winning mathematician frolicking amidst tangled vegetation, illuminated flowers and smears of night sky. Stravinsky's bird presides menacingly over a nest of what look like Russian nesting-egg dolls, while Schroedinger's cat leans back, ready to leap into the night sky.

You can almost imagine this scene on the tattered pages of a leather bound anthology of creepy children's stories, shoved on a darkened shelf in an obscure used bookstore.

Born in Alaska, Bryson moved to Sweden at age eighteen to study archeology. There she dug up the graves of Vikings, channeling the ghostly energy into her paintings. She also has a B.A. in Swedish and Anthropology, a postgraduate diploma in classical acting form the London Academy of Performing Arts and an MA in independent film and video from the London Institute.

It seems the only thing she isn't trained in is art, her main passion and the thing she appears to excel at the most.

"I am pretty much self-taught," Bryson said, "I've never studied painting or writing and those are the things I love the most." Bryson finds herself inspired by the Alaskan wilderness. "Alaska, you see, is a wilderness full of magic," Bryson said. "Spirits live in the trees; creepy insects crawl around the forest floor. Nothing is safe, but everything is exciting."

You can see this sense of danger and wonder in her landscapes, tranquil and beautiful but with something inherently sinister beneath the surface.

In "Cyborg Letting Snow Fall On Himself," a half- human, half-machine lays sprawled out on an icy winter landscape, flanked by twisting grouping trees. The snow is scattered with marks that look like the entry holes of bullets in glass. Bryson has included all forms of mixed media in her work, including saliva, lipstick, nail polish, needles, fake fur and barbed wire. She is unafraid to inject the ugly into her work, placing the beautiful alongside the grotesque. Currently she has been throwing the other-worldly into her pieces, ghosts, fleeting vapor, low whispers and the glow of the full moon.

Her latest exhibit "Lucky Charms" has to do with unreal, superstitions and magic.

"Lucky Charms is the idea of carrying things," Bryson said. "The idea of taking stuff with you. Its sort of like the invisible lucky charms people wear. In the widest interpretation, you are surrounded by the good thoughts and blessing of other people. Those are the best kind of charms."

See the haunting work of Kathleen Bryson from June 1 through June 30 at Interzone Cafe on 1563 Monroe, across from campus. Contributed Photo

Sadly, newspaper print can't convey the amazing amount of detail in Kathleen Bryson's paintings. Plus, it's always cooler to see a masterpiece in person. Check out her show opening...


Diversions: What kinds of things inspire your art?

Bryson: Stuff I studied. I studied anthropology, not that subject per se, but going to museums and realizing what colors people used to make paint 20,000 years ago.

Humans are inspiring. The natural world inspires me, fairy tales, myths. I'm more interested in the bastard children than the legitimate siblings.

D:What makes your art different from everyone else's?

B: I don't know, sometimes I see stuff that is similar. My art, it's me and it makes it different. It's an individual doing their own view of life filtered through art. The source is the individual. Everyone's art is different.


D:What do you want people to feel when they observe your work?

B: It's better when people like it. Strong reactions are good. A sense of something spooky. Disarmed.


D: Tell me about this band you were in.

B: We never played any gigs. We were the most lazy of the Seattle riot grrl bands of 1992. I was living on Capitol Hill. That was the most tenuous thing on my resume. We did have a cool name. Thommy Goes Down ... it was an all-girl band.


D: What is your best road trip story?

B: My boyfriend and I had a bad breakup and I moved back to the states. I drove down the Alaska-Canada highway, going down to Seattle with my best friend. We refused to sleep.

We did Juneau to Seattle in four days.

I had an allergic reaction and I was coughing up blood in the car. My friend fell asleep at the wheel and nearly ran us off the road.

It was so nightmarish. Imagine driving into Seattle coughing up blood, hallucinating trains coming at you.

We stayed in the U-District that first night with some musicians. There was a guy singing about a chicken's asshole at three in the morning while I was trying to sleep.


D: If you could see any band live, dead or alive, who would it be?

B: Le Tigre, I think they are one of the best live bands I've seen.


D: If you could be any mythical creature, what would you be?

B: I think I'd want to be a sphinx; they can fly.


D: What makes you really happy?

B: Chai tea lattes -- simple but true.

D: What's your favorite joke?

B: I was in a pub yesterday and the cigarette vending machine said to me "You're so ugly." I walked past a bowl of nuts and they said, "Hey, you're pretty." Turns out the cigarette machine was out of order, and the nuts were complimentary.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

GHOSTLY MAGIC: ARTIST KATHLEEN BRYSON BLURS REALITIES / Eugene Weekly
26 May 2004 (with Melissa Bearns)


Speaking with a hint of a British accent picked up from more than a decade living in London, Corvallis artist Kathleen Bryson makes it pretty clear pretty quickly that in the game of "Which one of these is not like the other?," she's the pick. It's not really anything specific that she says. It's the way she likes to blur the lines most people draw with indelible marker, the lines and divisions that help stabilize our own unique definitions of reality.

Bryson paints richly textured, multilayered images that whisper "Magic is real." She explores other realms of existence that leave the viewer with the somewhat unsettling, slightly euphoric feeling that comes from believing, if only for a second, that realities beyond what we can see or feel do actually exist.

Her paintings imply as much as they leave out, the way the absence of noise can tell you something's wrong. Swirls of pale blues and shadows of barely-there trees are set against a whitened background with wispy air, falling snow and a cyborg lying on the ground staring up at the pallor of the sky. Werewolves, mermaids, gorgons and more otherworldy creatures populate her drawings, all alchemical distillations of two fantastical beasts blended, like her paints, into one.

With bottle-blonde hair swept into a braid away from her high cheekbones, full lips painted blood red, and slate gray eyes, it's hard to imagine this woman, who's dressed like an urban glamour girl in a smart black and white shirt unbuttoned low enough to reveal lots of cleavage, living in Corvallis. She grew up in Alaska, spent some time as a student in Sweden and spent the last decade in London.

But now that she's moved to Corvallis to be with her long-term girlfriend, who recently started working at OSU, she plans to be in Oregon for a while. She's trying to adjust to a slower, less urban lifestyle, and seems to find the quirkiness of small-town life delightful.

"Where slowness was something I longed for in London, I think I'm somewhat in culture shock," she says. In addition to painting, she's (hopefully) about to finalize a deal for a book she describes as "anti-chicklit," less "lesbian" than her last book, Mush, and "kind of wicked, funny and accessible to more people."

Meanwhile Bryson continues to work on multiple paintings at once, using glitter, lipstick and Wite-Out along with traditional paints. Playing with a world of ambiguity, she delves deeply into the gray area of muted sexuality, portraying creatures that are both and none. More recently she has been painting things that are half there — ghosts, shadows, clouds.

Bryson, who holds two passports, speculates that her transition to the barely-there images is probably a shimmering reflection, her own personal mirage, of how she's feeling these days and how the world around her feels.

"It's a subtraction rather than an addition," she explains. "Because ghosts are half, not whole. There's been a lot of upheaval for me lately. I have two passports (U.S. and British), so I feel split in two a lot. And the world feels very tenuous."

Bryson's work is displayed in her eighth solo exhibit, titled "Lucky Charms," at Interzone in Corvallis through June 30.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]



THE OBSERVER / EXCERPT FROM INTERVIEW for feature article "LOUD AND PROUD"
11 November 2001 (with Jessica Berens)

Ten years ago the World Health Organisation still classified homosexuality as a disease. Now we have same-sex weddings, credit cards stamped with the word "Queer" and more than 4m viewers voting for Big Brother's Brian. Jessica Berens talks to a new generation of gay entrepreneurs who are coaxing Britain out of the closet...


[...] Life may be more affordable for gay men, but there is less evidence of it being so for gay women. "No money," says puppeteer Nenagh Watson, when I ask her why lesbians do not enjoy a higher profile.

"No money," says novelist Kathleen Kiirik Bryson, when I ask her the same thing. "That is why we all live in Brixton or Hackney."

The public response to gay men might be becoming ever more enlightened, but the same cannot be said for its attitude towards gay women. Lesbians are still a tiny, powerless subculture whose most public aspect is as erotic fantasy for men - an absurd appropriation that serves to prove the extraordinary fact that men cannot accept that lesbians are not interested in them.



Lesbians, in general, are less accessible than gay men; the latter tend to be fabulous company and are, unsurprisingly, liked by women (ie 50 per cent of the population), while gay women cannot so easily befriend either straight women or straight men. A straight man, interested only in erotic challenge, is unlikely to talk to a lesbian about her art or her travels or her postgrad dissertation on post-structuralism. He is just going to sit there wondering what, you know, she actually does in bed and then laugh nervously about it later with his mates in the Slug and Lettuce. Dykes are still going round the outside.There are no British light-entertainment equivalents to Graham Norton and Julian Clary, no funny lesbo giving a glitzy spin on reality and making it safe for everybody.

Lesbian writers, meanwhile, while single-handedly propelling the genre of erotic fiction from dull foreplay to the interesting realms of slash lit and other forms of progressive and dimensional experimentation, remain at the back of the bookshop under a special label and, with one or two exceptions, are ignored by newspaper 'culture' sections.

Kathleen Kiirik Bryson, a womanly 32-year -old, has platinum-blonde hair, red lipstick and a girlfriend with whom she has been living for seven years. 'I tend to get hit on by more men than women,' she says, not minding, particularly. She speaks Swedish, has studied anthropology and recently published her first novel, Mush .

Born in Alaska, she currently earns her living editing gay male pornography for the Prowler company. 'I have no patience for biologically ascribed sexuality,' she says. 'I think of myself as queer, but it wasn't until I lived in Seattle in 1993 and Queer Nation arrived, that it was suddenly OK.'

There is evidence that, like gay men, younger dykes are now shrugging off the stereotypical lesbian trappings and are joining instead the ever-growing, ever-lovin' polymorphous parade. Long constrained by a self-evolving principle that asked them to be butch or femme, the new queer ladies are instead doing what they want.[...]


FORUM MAGAZINE INTERVIEW: KATHLEEN BRYSON
November 2002 (with Jan Birks)

Jan Birks meets the sexy, talented editor of a hot new lesbian fiction imprint...

Kathleen Bryson is not just a pretty face. She was raised in Alaska. She has dug up Viking graves, performed in a Riot Grrl band, exhibited her paintings in a brothel, trained as an actor, and received her MA in Independent Film. She has lived in Stockholm and Seattle and currently lives in London with her girlfriend of seven years where she works as a fiction editor, and still acts, paints and writes, too.

We met this sassy platinum blonde at the Red Hot Diva book launch party, and after listening to her impressive speech about women in erotic publishing, we knew she'd be a good catch for Forum.

Forum: You were born in Alaska, weren't you?

Kathleen: Yes, in Barrow, on the Arctic coast. It's the most northern city in Alaska, and I grew up for the first few years of my live in Wainwright, where my parents were teaching, and then they moved south to the Kenai Peninsula, and that is where I grew up from the age of three to 18. My parents still live there. I was the oldest of four - girl, boy, girl, boy - and my family are eccentric, like the Six Feet Under family, only possibly slightly less neurotic. We all fought a lot, but there was always a lot of fun, too. My parents are still married. They're so sporty - they're fanatical about canoeing and camping and running for fun on Sundays and my father runs about seven miles a day. My parents aren't natural athletes; actually, none of us is, but we kids were taught that if you work hard it eventually adds up to natural ability, and we all grew up with this sportsman mentality.

Forum: Were your teenage years rebellious?

Kathleen: No, because my parents were strict when I was growing up. They deny it now because they are so chilled out, and they claim not to remember, but as the oldest I had a curfew of 11 o'clock. This kind of thing, of course, I remember quite clearly!

Forum: Were you happy at school?

Kathleen: No, because I was kind of a freak, and I wanted to leave quite desperately.

Forum: In what way? Visually?

Kathleen: Not so much visually - a little bit, maybe, in terms of a punk/new wave look, but more in the sense that I argued with my teachers a lot. I was brought up by parents who were feminists and who encouraged you to speak your mind, and then at the age of 13, you are no longer allowed to be yourself. You are treated more like a girl than a person, and I continued to be a person, and argue with my teachers,a nd say what I thought - getting pissed off with stuff that was unjust. It was your standard American high school full of cheerleaders and jocks, and I didn't really find a home - apart from the drama club. I had lots of good friends, but I was really glad to graduate and get out of there.


Forum: What subject did you study at university?

Kathleen: I was so flaky, I didn't apply for university the first year. I just didn't bother doing it. Instead I became an exchange student, and moved to Sweden, and I fell in love with a Swedish guy there and we went back and forth between Alaska and Sweden, and I studied at the University of Stockholm, and eventually after three or four years, we split up and I went to Seattle. Seattle was my first American city in the continental sense.


Forum: Was Seattle conservative?

Kathleen: No. Sweden was, on the other hand - although you wouldn't think so. Alaska certainly was. In Seattle, however, I was surrounded by people who were socially left, and even though I had been brought up that way, it was wonderful to be surrounded by so many like-minded people. The University of Washington was really cool because I had been to four different universities at that point, and they accepted all my transfer credits. So I only had a year and a half to graduate, and I graduated there.


Forum: When did you come to London?

Kathleen: In 1994. I had a huge college loan to pay back at this point, and I couldn't, so I needed to defer it by entering full-time education, so I went and did a post-graduate course at the London Academy of Performing Arts. I guess I certainly have travelled a lot.

Forum: What did you think of British attitudes, particularly towards sex, compared to other places you had lived?

Kathleen: I had always been used to bi-positive attitudes, and that had always been my field as well, and I guess at the academy, they didn't know what to do with me. Because I was this little grunge girl. Eventually we got used to each other, but it took me a year to adjust. It was a very upper-middle-class environment in Chelsea. I met my girlfriend in 1994, and that was really nice, but college was a different life to my romance with her, and it was the first time I felt lonely since I was 14.

I am quite good socially and I can usually figure out what to say, but I didn't know how to at this college. I didn't know the rules. At least in the US, I would have been aware of cultural subtexts, but that first year in London, I guess I found it unfriendly. Saying that, I just got back from the States and I couldn't get used to people saying hello to me! It drove me nuts.

I also noticed how people are desperate to label you, here. I always make a point of saying what my sexuality is - either in interviews with Sapphire [Virgin's lesbian imprint] or interviews I did about my book, Mush, and make it clear that I am "bisexual" - although I don't actually believe in labels. And whether the interviewers are gay or straight, they still want to call you a "lesbian" because it's safer and you are very much forced into biologically-based sexuality. I can understand here that many people are fighting for their rights, but I also feel labelling can be quite damaging. You should be able to say, "I choose to be queer, and that's a good choice," and that should be enough, rather than, "I am sorry - I wish I could be straight." I can't handle it when people say taht. Or, "Do you think I would choose to be gay?" I can do without that, too. I think people like to shove you in one of two categories, and even the bisexual label I have my problems with. I went to a Seattle bisexual women's group, and people do tend to conform to stereotypes.

Forum: I noticed at the red Hot Diva book launch how women were very supportive and complimentary about each other. You don't get that so much in hetero women circles.


Kathleen: Yeah - to use some of the usual terminology, straight women can be more bitchy than men!

Forum: It's amazing how many straight guys find bi women a turn-on. Many fantasise about their wife/girlfriend taking a female lover, and encourage it in reality. What do you think of that?

Kathleen: Well, I find that interesting and possibly quite sexist, because it's saying that women are less potent, or are no threat to the original relationship. They're "safe". There is this view that women are always gentle. Even reading novels that presumably straight women write with lesbian sex scenes, well, the sex is always very gentle and loving, and I'm not saying that's bad, but men can also be very gentle and loving, and there are women who like fast, rough, quick sex.


Forum: It's pigeon-holing, isn't it?

Kathleen: That's right. I've been living with my girlfriend for seven-and-a-half years, and people say, "But of course you're 'married'," and you know what, I am not 'married', and I wouldn't be married if I were straight or gay. I want to have a separate identity, and we have our own rooms, and it is so romantic because we can negotiate.

Forum: How did you get into publishing from acting?

Kathleen: Although I have been working since I was 15, I had my first "proper" job at the age of 28 and that was working for Black Lace at Virgin Publishing. They were advertising the job of editorial assistant in the Guardian two years previously and I was offered it, but I had to say no due to visa problems. Then I was secretarial temping, and on the same day my grandfather died, I thought, "What the hell?" and called up Virgin and started at the same job I'd once "lost". My life changed immediately from there on. I loved working with Kerri (Sharp, editor of Black Lace). I still work three days a week in publishing, but at MPG instead of Virgin, and I love my colleagues here as well, but on the other two days a week I act, mainly in indie films, or paint, or write - having those two "days off" was how I got a chance to write my own novel. On the other hand, I work part-time, so that has its own problems in terms of finance!

Forum: Your novel is called Mush and it's quite a creepy tale, isn't it? How would you describe your work?

Kathleen: Well, Mush is a literary novel about three girls growing up in Alaska, and having a menage-a-trois relationship as adults. Some people call it disturbing, but I prefer to think of it as atmospheric. It is creepy, though, and rather surreal.

Forum: You're editing the Red Hot Diva imprint, too, and I have read Cherry, which was a very juicy novel.

Kathleen: Cherry is grittier than anything I have ever commissioned before, but Charlotte Cooper has an instant take on things that most people can relate to. It's humorous, which makes a change from a lot of erotic writing, and it's bloody horny. It's the first book in the Red Hot Diva series of books - which is for lesbians and bi women and the people who love them - and it's a cracker.


Forum: You must get so many submissions. How do you spot a good writer?

Kathleen: I have pretty catholic tastes. I can enjoy a literary lyrical style - I like that, but I [also can] like it to be snappy like Charlotte Cooper's book, which is very streetwise. I know I've spotted a good writer when I begin reading a proposal for a manuscript, and I get lost in the story. There's that cliche of caring about the characters - but it's true. The story has to make me want to read on. In terms of erotic fiction, you can't usually have the main character dying of cancer towards the end - although that might be realistic. As with crime fiction, it's a genre. In crime, your aim is to make the reader scared. In erotica, you have to turn them on, so I suppose there are certain points you have to touch on. But just because it's genre writing doesn't mean it has to be formulaic.


Forum: Do you think erotic novels have gone as far as they can go - or do you think there is still room for new ideas?

Kathleen: it's so funny because broadsheet newspapers run a feature about the wild new craze of "women reading erotic fiction" every year, and yet they never review any of the books in their review section. A lot of erotic authors are journalists or literary authors, and the standard of writing is high, and that's what I aim for with Red Hot Diva, as well. When Black Lace first started publishing, there was not much out there, and they are still very successful, but the idea of women's erotic fiction isn't as shocking as it once was. Then again, erotic fiction probably sells on its non-acceptance, its "naughty" qualities, and always will.

Forum: Has a book ever shocked you?

Kathleen: Yes, I think it was a Nexus book that truly shocked me. As I get older and more comfortable with myself, I realise I can choose what I read and do, like I don't have to show up at that party if I don't feel like it. I used to be more impressed with the glamour of that aesthetic, but that doesn't happen as much now.

Forum: What does shock you?

Kathleen: Okay, I'll spill the beans. The book was about a dairy that milked lactating women.

Forum: What turns you on?

Kathleen: Anything theatrical. Anything stagy.

Forum: Who is your favourite erotic writer, and why?

Kathleen: I think Angela Carter's writing is inherently erotic, and also Audre Lorde's.


Forum: Why do you think lesbian erotica appeals to so many straight women?

Kathleen: I think it's that sort of bi thing - it's sort of something safe that you can fantasise about without being directly involved in. I think that's why so many straight women like homo-erotica as well because you can look at pretty boys, adn it's separate because you're not involved. It's voyeurism, really.

Forum: Do you think all straight women should have a lesbian experience?

Kathleen: Yes, but I would say that! I think, even more so, that all straight men should have a gay experience. That would chill the world out a lot. A good deal of homophobia is related to sexism, because it reverses gender expectations. If you look at pygmy chimpanzees, our closest genetically related relatives, the females mainly have lesbian experiences as opposed to heterosexual ones; most males have gay sex occasionally, and both sexes defuse group tension with loads of sex. See, if we as human apes had more positive sex instead of fighting, without these categories of who we should and shouldn't fancy, it would be a wonderful world. Probably a lot less war. And maybe there are gay men and gay women who would benefit from having sex with a member of the opposite sex, too. But I also think people should do whatever they want with other consenting adults, as the saying goes, and if it's not your bag, then fine. Just don't insist that your way is the only way.

Forum: It has been said that women are better at cunnilingus because they know how to do it, and that men give the best blowjobs because they know what the other guy wants. Do you agree?

Kathleen: I wonder whether I've ever said that! Hmm. I think it probably depends on the man or the woman. Though that's positive propaganda if I ever heard it and that can't be a bad thing.


Forum: How does working on Red Hot Diva books compare to other jobs?

Kathleen: You forget that stuff you look at clinically can come across to others as obscene. I sometimes forget the appropriateness of what I am discussing; for example, if I am discussing analingus with a person. I don't regret discussing it, but I do tend to forget my boundaries sometimes.

Forum: Because of the work we are both involved in, do you think people make the wrong assumptions about us?

Kathleen: Yeah. That's also within the BDSM and gay communities as well. Like in order to be cool, you have to toe the party line about non-monogamy(good)/monogamy(bad), even if it doesn't feel right for you personally. I find rules of whatever kind problematic, so within a subculture I find myself boxed in by the assumptions people make. Or my friends think I want to read erotica, and the last thing I want to do in my spare time is read erotic fiction, or watch television programmes about sex on Channel Five or Channel Four.


Forum: I agree. We have other interests.

Kathleen: I know other people in the industry who would rather be discussing surreal animation than sex.

Forum: What are your thoughts on the fetish scene?

Kathleen: I can't say I'm close enough to give any opinions of the fetish scene, because my involvement tends to be personal, but I do like going to cross-over clubs which have a great mix of sexuality. I like theatrical nightclubs too - places like Duckie's because it's kooky and fun.

Forum: Who are your icons?

Kathleen: In literature, I like people like Angela Carter, but I also like John Steinbeck and Ali Smith who wrote Hotel World and Geoff Ryman who recently wrote Lust, but I prefer his earlier sci-fantasy work such as The Child Garden. He is amazing. He has this vernacular voice with these really amazing unpredictable things happening. I also like films like Heavenly Creatures, which is mysterious and has a twist. I admire people like Susie Bright, who says that an amateur video of a man licking a woman's pussy is more truthful than any Hollywood sex scene where a woman comes from penetration alone - I agree with that. And when it comes to music, I have to say I saw Peaches in concert a couple of weeks ago, and she was amazing. She totally dominated the stage, was unapologetically, aggressively sexual and all the lads next to me who'd gone to see someone who was supposed to be "sexy" were quaking in their boots. She made Madonna look like a total pussycat. She's like Jim Morrison, she has that kind of stage presence, and confidence, and I don't know if I've ever seen a female music artist project that kind of total control. She rocks!

[INTERVIEW ENDS]


"INTERVIEW: KATHLEEN KIIRIK BRYSON" - RAINBOW NETWORK
January 2001 (with Charlotte Cooper)

Kathleen Kiirik Bryson's first novel, Mush, has just been published by Diva Books. She dropped by the RainbowNetwork offices to tell us a few things about herself and her writing.

How do you feel when people read your work?

In one sense it's laying yourself completely open and showing your insides to people. They are going to interpret the book as being "you" whether or not it is, and that makes me slightly nervous. But it's exciting to get feedback from others when it touches them, and it's gratifying when it's what you wanted that person to feel. Like being a playwright and watching your play performed when the actors get it spot on.

What's your connection to Alaska these days?

When I was writing Mush I wasn't able to leave England because of an immigration case. I really wanted to see my family and the place where I grew up. In July 99 I finally got the stamp in my passport that meant I could leave. I went to Alaska for two weeks and have now been back twice. My immediate family still live in the town where I grew up, and a lot of my close friends as an adult are people I knew growing up, although most of them no longer live in Alaska, probably for the same reasons that I no longer live there. Even Anchorage is a small town.

Is Little Novgorod a real place?

No! It' a cleverly disguised place based on my home town. However, the whole area was colonised by Russia, so there's a Saint Petersburg too. It's not very autobiographical but the town in which I grew up has a river running through it, like Little Novgorod. My mother recognised it when she read the prologue.

The characters in Mush spend a lot of time processing the past. Do you think this is typical of lesbians?

Yeah. I think it's typical of women's social conditioning. I think that when you have two women in a relationship you spend a lot of time processing. It is very much a lesbian novel, I don't think men come into it. It's not trying to leave men out on purpose; I just wanted to write a story about women.

Which one is you?

At one point I thought it was Carol, but now I think it is Ellen. I think she is the one who is the most ambivalent about things, she straddles this dichotomy between butch and femme, she's neither this nor that, and never goes into things compeltely. When she talks about the SM scene in Seattle, it's not about being a dilettante, but she's never completely immersed in it, either. She's bisexual, which is how I describe my own sexuality. I think it would be too flattering to say I was here because I would have to put myself on a pedestal.

Have you ever been in a relationship with more than one partner?

The book came out of a non-sexual relationship I had. I have a girlfriend now, no boyfriend or other girlfriend, but I did find historically that I had been in emotional threesomes quite frequently in my life, from the age of 17 or so.

Where does Kiirik come from? You used to be known as just Kathleen Bryson.

Kiirik is a birth name that was given to me. I grew up in an Inupiat Eskimo village for the first two and a half years of my life, and it was a name my father was given to give to me. My middle name is Diane, but I've always had Kiirik on the side.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]



"NORTHERN LIGHT: ALASKAN-BORN AUTHOR KATHLEEN BRYSON TALKS TO QUEERCOMPANY" - INTERVIEW
January 2001

A striking ice-blonde Alaskan living in London and with successes behind her in music, painting, acting and film, Kathleen Bryson's novel shows she's no mean poet and storyteller either. She understates the sophistication of the book, hoping that readers will recognise in Mush that,

"where there's the main thrust of the story, there's also less definable stuff woven in that has to do with memory, subjugation and fluidity."

There's a lot more besides. Somehow you see Bryson, here in London, surrounded by Alaska. She agrees home landscape shapes a person:

"Many ex-Alaskans seem to have both a reverence for the outdoors and a make-do attitude that comes when you know innately that nature is in control."

Her care with her speech mirrors that of her art.

"When I get the paint/ink in just the right, new place in a painting, it feels very similar to when I've discovered the right line in a poem - but I think my painting is more expressionistic than my writing."

A hotch-potch of tastes - Steinbeck, Margaret Atwood, The Bone People, OK! magazine are her favourites - is reflected in Bryson's difficult-to-pin-down work. What's next?

"[the novel] Girl on a Stick, a critique of Catholicism, even more experimental than Mush - and more angry."

[INTERVIEW ENDS]


"THE INTERNAL" - THE PINK PAPER INTERVIEW
February 1999

Kathleen Bryson, Commissioning Editor for Virgin Publishing's new lesbian erotic fiction

Favourite thing about being a dyke?

The nervous smiles of strangers when they realise you're 30 and unmarried.


Most treasured possession?

My witch rag doll.

What item have you spent the most on?

Thigh-high leather boots.


Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Berkeley, California.

Where do you see yourself in 5 hours' time?

Figuring out how I'll pay for my travelcard this week.


Favourite place to eat out?

Pumpkins in Hackney.


Who do you respect most in the world?

People who say the truth at unpopular times.

Which historical figure would you most like to meet?

Hildegard von Bingen.

What/who in your life has inspired you most?

Pippi Longstocking.


Most passionate/butterfly-inducing kiss?

New Year's Eve, 1994/5.


Favourite sexual deviance?

1950s swimming caps.

Most unlikely-to-be-fulfilled sexual fantasy?

Menage-a-cinque, with me, my girlfriend, Jarvis Cocker, Xena and Anna Nicole Smith.

Favourite bodily fluid?

Sweat.

What turns you off?

Misplaced arrogance.


Favourite part of a woman's body?

Her dirty mind.

What makes you smile?

People laughing at funerals or while saying grace.

What's your favourite place you'll be going to this week?

Outside London.


With whom would you like to go?

My main squeeze.


[INTERVIEW ENDS]

"VIRGIN LAUNCHES NEW EROTIC IMPRINT FOR LESBIAN MARKET" - INTERVIEW, THE PINK PAPER
July 1998 (with Mel Steel)

The first and long-awaited series of British full-length lesbian erotic fiction is to be launched early next summer by Virgin Publishing, writes Mel Steel. Promising sexy and explicit writing by and for lesbians, the new Sapphire imprint also has a lesbian commissioning editor.

Virgin already has three successful and established imprints of full-length erotic fiction: Nexus, for straight men with fetish interests; Black Lace, for straight women; and Idol, for gay men. But Sapphire represents the first substantial investment in the lesbian erotic market by a mainstream publisher.

"Virgin has put its neck out and cornered the market with its other imprints," said commissioning editor Kathleen Bryson; "and they felt that a lesbian imprint was a natural progression." The time is right, she feels. "A sexual revolution has gone on in the lesbian community since the sex wars of the 80s," she says. "This couldn't have been done ten years ago. But I'm not going to be promoting a lipstick lesbian culture to titillate men. This is for dykes."

Sapphire will launch with two flagship titles and follow up with one title every month afterwards. Submissions - from lesbian and bisexual writers only - are welcome. Bryson is looking for well-written, interesting novels; arousing, escapist fantasy; an atmosphere dripping with eroticism; and themes which embrace the experimental, forbidden, kinky, secret, decadent and liberating.

"Sapphire books are not wafty lesbian romances with a few sultry scenes thrown in," she says; and "won't strive to be politically correct separatist or feminist tracts."

But she stresses that there will be limits, including no sex with children; no [non-consensual/permanent] physical harm; and no incest.

Laurence Jauget-Paget, co-editor of lesbian sex magazine Flirt!, welcomed the news of the series. "There's a huge gap in the market," she said, "and the more there is to fill it the better."

[INTERVIEW ENDS]


"EXPOSé: PORTRAIT OF A LADY" - INTERVIEW WITH LOWDOWN MAGAZINE
April 1997 (with Tom Allen)

"You're always a fish out of water when you originate from Alaska," laughs artist, writer and actress Kathleen Bryson.

But on the eve of her first London exhibition of paintings at First Out, she seems to feel quite at home.

"The major art form in Alaska is painting these pans they use to look for gold. They paint mountain stills on them and sell them to tourists. The big running joke when you're growing up is that you don't want to end up doing that. I got out of there when I was 18!"

Moving to study in Sweden, Kathleen started acting.

"I appeared in short films, videos and plays, but kept on painting. I didn't really start exhibiting them [her paintings] until I moved to Seattle three years later. People's reactions ranged from disgust to fanaticism, both of which I loved."

As commissions started coming in for magazine covers and posters, she continued to work on her degree in Anthropology and played electric Hawaiian slide-guitar in a Riot Grrl band called Thommy Goes Down.

"The band was fun, but we gave up after a while; we kind of lost interest. I ended up pawning my bike in order to come to London. I haven't looked back since."

Arriving here in '94 to study drama, she ended up not painting for nine months.

"I didn't even bring my previous work with me. It was kind of good to distance myself for awhile. I got my old paintings shipped over in '96 and decided to re-immerse myself in them. A lot of the materials I use now are either found or 'stolen' [the Tippex]. Kids' paint, nail varnish, Tippex, glitter glue, even lipstick. Some pieces are very collage-styled."

But while there is a light-hearted aspect to Kathleen's work, there is a darker side as well.

"I love beautiful art, but ugliness fascinates me. I like to delve really deep into what society finds repellent. My work is definitely not minimalist. I guess you could call it 'representational': you can see what's there. But just because it's not a fish in a plastic bag doesn't mean it's not conceptual."

In keeping with her electric personality, Kathleen doesn't shy away from exploring taboos.

"My next project is going to be based around the subject of bestiality. I'm looking at the side of it that is an issue of exploitation. Throughout history people have been oppressed and dehumanised to the point of being treated like animals. As for bestiality itself, it's such a taboo in society that nobody wants to even think about it, but laws aren't made unless something exists. To me the question is one of consent [which animals are unable to give]."

From one extreme to another (something Kathleen practices with pride), she can be found down at First Out most nights for the duration of her showing, playing electric Hawaiian slide-guitar.

"I don't know if that'll create the right atmosphere to view my paintings in, but it'll make things more fun. I might even get a bubble machine. Why not?!"

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

Skilak

I bet it's so beautiful back home right now. I am envious hearing about my brother's class reunion and how he and my sister-in-law hiked into Skilak Lake, the most beautiful place on earth with no exception. I remember camping at Skilak as a Girl Scout and the marshy excitement of bear tracks, and then how we wandered along the shore that lasted forever, where lake-driftwood and old fishing lures meant the chance to collect a handful of jangly jewellery. There were rotting salmon, which were a different kind of (bear) lure.

Camping with my family was always wonderful at Skilak; it was the first time I realised how the wilderness just never stops. Every time we cleared one lagoon on our hikes, eating peanut butter from tubes and hard salami and apples, climbing over bushes for hours, we'd hit another lagoon. Thirty, forty coves; they just never stopped.

The water made me think of pirates as a kid; it was the same colour as in tropical pictures I'd seen, bright blue like in this picture, but Skilak is so cold. It's glacial water. I want to go swimming in glacial water until someone tells me I'm being stupid, to get out before I get hypothermia, to get over to the campfire.

I haven't gone camping this summer.

(I got these pix from Google Images and they were taken by other people who are strangers)

Strawberry Places

Crayfish boiled with grassy dill,
one piece of buttered yellowjacket toast, one shot of vodka.
It’s not the trees, they have such trees where I come from,
And notably more wilderness, and a midnight sun to boot,
It’s the old red barns up here with spinning wheels in attics,
their separateness from Americana,
a fairy tale telling itself in a language with polkadot vowels.
The postcards all have trolls on them. They’re big on trolls in these parts.
The birch trees are trembling.
It’s too late in the season to wear flowers in my hair.
That would have been two months ago,
when my boyfriend slept with another girl on midsummer,
the night they all go crazed with drink
and use the sun as an excuse (which we don’t use in Alaska)
Young men should cheat with me, I’m the type
Early-morning meadow sex;
the sun burns white and moons, a cheeky bastard.
Wild berry patches where I’d rest my head.
I’m a mistress, not a wife. I am not dead.
Pick nine kinds of flowers and sleep with them under your pillow
You will dream of the man you’re going to marry.
Mosippa anemones, liverleaf, marsh orchid, bellflower,
a forest clock, a bellis, pink roses, the sky’s bluebells, daisies,
I want to be a crazy girl.

My boyfriend calls these northerners inbred.
But no more or less than in the hicktown I hail from;
his parents are from here, and he himself
turned out very pretty despite the inbreeding.
We’re not the people we’re going to turn out to be.
Fireweed will be braided to sour dandelions,
I want to run out of this crayfish party
(crayfish, then bread and then vodka, then repeat,
there is nothing new under this stern Scandinavian sun)
screaming, roll in grass,
I want wild roses and purple twinflowers in my hair.

Swedish girls wear silver princess crowns
for their weddings, anti-tiaras, tiny and sturdy.
I am not a Swedish girl.
My crown leaves, wildflowers, leaves, my crown
I could lie down. Here. This glade. This nook.
If I used wild strawberries, I’d live in a storybook,
my boyfriend could eat them from my hair, lady style.
The sun never sets. It is loose.
I’m getting sunburnt towards midnight.

Control your chosen star through lotion.
I supernova by eating ten crayfish,
ten pieces of toast, drinking ten vodkas.
And then we all take off for town and
the annual and local Sour Herring Festival.
You bury the herring for a couple of months,
until they rot, and then eat them in full fermentation.
There are no curing elements of salt or brine, as for
gravad lax. The tin cans of surströmming bulge up and are
forbidden on airplanes, as there have been cases of them exploding.
Surströmming smells, in addition, like a sewer,
and so does this entire village festival.

He’s down in Stockholm. I can’t remember why.
I can’t remember him now,
and I couldn’t remember him then after ten vodkas.
I’m escorted by his brother and his cousins.
We’re laughing like ravens.

The night before was awkward, yet we go forth.
Not enough rooms up in the north.
The relatives assigned us a berth together,
the brother and I. We’re young. We are alive.
We think we’re old. I’m twenty-one and he’s twenty-five.
We hug the corners of the bed. We’re both oldest children.
As such, we always do the right thing, then.
We never take chances. We’re strictly good.
I don’t think to this day I’ve ever had
such a bad sleep, so terrified that I’d wake up,
in the grey muck of that night that never inkens,
think he was my boyfriend, and accidentally stroke his side.
Yes, talk about awkward.
I want to do the unforgivable, like someone else.

I don’t know why I didn’t date
the brother instead. He’s just as good-looking.
He has handsome eyes and a sexy milky heart.
But now we’re like siblings,
walking in a gang through herringtown,
and when I drink more orange Fanta-and-vodkas
and find myself screaming and crying for love lost
by some bushes, beyond consolation,
it is the brother who watches over me.
I’m far gone, but even so it is Swedish policy
(since they have so many suicides)
to take into temporary custody any
young person crying uncontrollably in public,
and since bro objects to this decision
by two strolling police officers and thus defends me,
we both get taken to the station until we sober up.
The cousins join us. By three a.m., my tears run dry.
Brother is released. The authorities agree
that I am not a risk to myself. The cousins
continue to laugh. We walk home in the dawn.
The strawberries and the sun are out.
The wicked hangover of my life.
My boyfriend’s parents, brother, cousins are a little uneasy,
since they knew I never drink that much usually,
and possibly because
I have been cursing said boyfriend’s name all night.
Wailing and screaming. I have left the house.
I have run out into the forest to shriek with trolls.
I have broken the rules.
I want my strawberry place, my crown

I’d love to say it smelled like sour herring that next day,
but I am out for most of it,
and when I wake up it all smells fresh
birch buds and perhaps cottongrass, rose-hips

The Pillage (April 2009)

When she first arrived in Sweden,
she thought: what tidy houses.
One small town was named Sigtuna,
which had to be a joke, or at least a brand of canned fish.

She hadn’t slept for fifty-five hours
when she stepped off the plane.
She’d left moss-covered jeeps
rotting slower than roadkill in backyards
and met the clean blond world where
all houses came from manufacturing templates,
trim slats of red-painted wood,
where no gardens could
be described as shop-soiled offcuts.

She had been working eighteen-hour shifts
in the fish factory previous to that,
punctuated by four-hour reststops.
This wears even on the young, not just the old.
Everything in the blond world was controlled.
People would stare. She had flaxen hair and pale eyes
for her disguise, but they smelled the different brand of fish on her.
A crazy person you avoid on public transport (subsidized).
She was the Viking, not them. She was stepping on their soil.
She might as well have still been wearing fishing boots from the cannery
covered in blood and holding a gutting knife.

She had plans for Sweden, after all.
In Stockholm, she would meet a boy
with a quicksilver mind
and tongue, they’d laugh together while having sex.
In fact, she would aim low, and simply have sex
for the first time, might as well start at the beginning.
They initially would kiss beneath spindly town halls,
the frigid grip of winter,
the ice packs bumping the shore like insistent wolf pups.
The cold would eventually dim the blushes on their cheeks,
but the blushes would still slide down their throats like hot cocoa
and settle in their stomachs, stir them up. Let’s continue.
They’d date for years. Get engaged. Have a kid.
Tie the knot at some point. A tasteful wedding,
perhaps outside by the gazebo.

Mrs. Erica Ravensdaughter.
Father Thor-Bear, newly christened, loves his holy water.
The Vikings settled, you know.
They settled in the new territories
and took native loves;
they settled for orderly lives.
They forgot their dragonboats;
the dragons were carved and gutted,
packaged into tin cans.

A Grunge Life

A guy tries to pick me up with lines like,
I am the manager for Mudhoney and I’m a friend of Kurt. I mean, really.
Drink your microbrew like you drink your espresso and shut your pretty mouth.
The Comet Tavern, so full of fallen stars,
The Comet Tavern, so full of spaced-out rock,
The Comet Tavern, so full of black holes, or so write the disappointed young misogynists
composing poetry across the street at Café Paradiso by candlelight.
In their flannel shirts that in Seattle are less a fashion statement,
yes, far less like Kate Moss, despite the hype,
and more what everyone can afford
at the Chicken Soup Brigade secondhand store
down off, what was it, Broadway.

O, how I wish I could shoot pool like my best friend’s cousin
I feel it’s the ultimate seduction ruse –
look tough; show cleavage.
I swear she has designs on the guy I’m fucking
and it appears to be reciprocated.
He has a washboard stomach, which was a surprise since
he’s practically a junky, sporadic smack and coke, though of course he’s artistic and plays
trombone in a 18-man band at the Ballard Firehouse where I go and feel too feminine
with my ironic waist-long blonde hair extensions and retro false eyelashes,
I’m not taken as seriously as these scrubbed-face Theater Major girls,
these girls who are always mousy brunettes, and when we French I feel my clit pulse.
This asshole’s as skanky as fuck and I’d give him the boot but he’s so good in bed, and by that
I don’t mean he can fuck forever, I mean he wants to see me
fuck forever. It doesn’t hurt that he is a great kisser
but it does hurt that he lied about the condom being broken
and I had to get the morning-after pill, which really fucked-
up my cycle and gave me a yeast infection, or perhaps that was him.
I have better tits than her. I wish I knew how to play pool.

Of course this all being about a month before everything smells like teen spirit.
O, it kicks ass to be single, no duties except to myself,
and I adhere to those, I promise, I walk home to save on cab fare,
almost sober because I nursed one dirty draft all night,
blaming every man within four blocks, sawdust in my hair,
red platform heels in my purse (I’m practically Dorothy) and sporting snappy tennis shoes,
but lately I share a taxi because Mia Zapata was raped and strangled
walking home along the same route up 12th. And after Mia gone it’s River Phoenix,
and just in the middle of those spicy rumours that he fucked a guy who knows a guy I knew,
but we all wanted to fuck him, let’s not kid ourselves, they don’t get prettier or cooler than him. What bone structure. Even better these days.

Fans of Kurt Cobain, did you mark today in any way?
O, that one there in the long underwear under cut-off jeans was dreaming of Cobain’s death, considering his misadventures and European overdoses before his fall.
That riot grrl to his left didn’t expect it.
Knew him from Olympia. No one wished it. He was leaving
No one had murky theories
about Courtney back then, it was all just sad and she was grieving.
We were mulattos and albinos, ones who broke our own rules of political correction
in our anti-racist, anti-classist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexistravaganza
just so we could rhyme the lyric stanza.
What then? Our tarnished Ken doll with a heart (shaped box) became 2-D,
lost instantly to pin-up posters and T-shirt iconography,
and conspiracy biography,
O blonde and blue-eyed suicide blonde, our grimy Marilyn.

Let’s lionize those who stay to fight or try to fight, not those who slip away.
The Seattle Center vigil takes place
on a bizarrely hot spring day.
TV crews show up and people tell them to fuck off
(I like that, that’s real)
People turn their backs. This isn’t meant for you.
These days we crave lens like it’s pussy or it’s cock.
The film crews know a change is coming, the way they try to hype grunge rock.
The way they only see things in terms of image or of gloss.
They don’t see loss. They can’t feel loss. They can’t touch
Courtney’s raging sorrow but then tomorrow
lots of I-SAW-YOU ads in the Stranger newspaper to follow.
("I saw you with the cute secondhand green prom dress and
vintage shades at the vigil - wanna hook up?").
(“April 10, 1994, at the Vigil: our eyes met over the candles.
Was there a spark? Maybe. You were the guy wearing
the backwards Copenhagen baseball cap and a
East German army surplus coat.”)
I don't attend. It seems weird when he was just the friend of a friend of a friend,
and besides I have my own life going on. I don’t attend.

O, I’ll go on to get my navel pierced by the sexy older guy
with the long grey hair and world-weary look that
hangs out at the Café Roma coffeehouse off John & Broadway.
And to be honest I’ll only know the basics of caffeine-fueled existentialist studies
and the peyote rantings of Carlos Castaneda will baffle me
alongside Cornish dance students drinking cappuccinos,
I swear they sit up straight on purpose, a signifier as glaring as their Evita hair-buns.
He will push that bristling needle through and he won’t make a pass,
which will be slightly insulting even though I’ll think it’s honorable,
because I am a hot piece and so is my friend Cindy who will tag along,
and I’ll be there half naked in his piercing studio.
This guy will be writing a novel or something. He’ll be gritty. He’ll be serious.

O, I’ll go on to buy vibrators at Toys in Babeland and volunteer for the Northwest AIDS
foundation, because people will be kind of freaking out, and it will be a hot summer,
the kind of summer where people will disappear,
because last year’s landlord called Chip stole my Oxford English Dictionary with the magnifying glass and when I look him up, his boyfriend will tell me
Chip was hallucinating at the time and since has died of AIDS.
And what will become of that sweet guy from West Texas,
so gorgeous, his name was Beautiful Buddy.
I’ll make up an ending for him. He’ll make all the way to combination therapy.
I’ll go on to wish he fucked girls even though I believe that was during the 3-month period in
my life when I was an avowed lesbian.

O, it will be at the Comet Tavern where I first say yes to drugs,
every scare saga they warned me with as a kid,
story complete with a luminous pill, the nefarious fabled purple heart,
and taking drugs a kind of bravery, I won’t know what comes next,
no conditional tension headache, though thank god I will never be particularly brave
and aside from my guttering purple heart, the violet flame rearing and then sputtering out in
nausea and cluster-B personality disorder-level paranoia,
my general rule will take shape and entail never trying anything that can kill a lady,
no speed, no smack, no coke, no crack
and I will always wonder about that girl with all the facial piercings
and the punk-rock dyke-mullet that used to hang out outside Café Roma with her dog,
she seemed to be a junky, but she knew everyone and was
awfully sweet. I wonder if she made it.

I think that was the end of it, alongside Mia Zapata's death.

Word Clouds - The Ultimate Procrastination Tool

Current Clouds

He's Lucid (completed novel)




Spaceships Over Corvallis (completed feature screenplay - alas, the main character Will doesn't show up, as it's too common a word)




Girl on a Stick (novel, complete)

It makes me profoundly happy that, other than a decent-seeming former librarian from the University of Transylvania, the most common Kathleen Bryson out there other than myself is a homophobic Republican from Utah who spends a lot of money donating to right-wing causes and posting about how wonderful the Pope is. It must drive her NUTS to search upon her name and come up with mine and all its queer, quasi-socialist associations, let alone the linked articles where I was interviewed as an editor of erotic fiction. Good.

Hope you find your way here, too, (Mrs.) Kathleen Bryson of Provo, Utah.

Bigot.

Louis MacNeice - Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

London River... Pink and Red...

... was a great film. Best I have seen so far. Went to a lecture on indie distribution and self distribution by the director of that Nazis on the Moon flick (it had a great trailer) and M dot Strange earlier.

We have pink bags (swag) and everywhere in Berlin people bear pink Berlinale bags (Talent Campus) or red (general Berlin). And we have to wear lanyards with our photos as well. Hey, it's a signifier! I have gotten moee used to just walking up to people and starting conversations. It is really freeing, but does not come naturally to me. Our course leaders (who did special effects for The Changeling and Letters from Iwo Jima) seemed pleased with our results over the week (we had an internal critique today and there is a public screening tomorrow).

Had a meeting with a very cool Greek production designer.

The British party was a blast. Apparently Tilda Swinton was there, but I didn't see her. It snowed on the way home. It was magical.

It is only 11 and I am turning in early for the night for once. It will be delicious to have 7-8 hours' sleep.

Athlete's Foot

Remind me to tell you the story one time of a woman who, after walking three days in tights and leather boots, ventured into a boutique selling cremes and the like to buy athlete's foot medication, quietly repeating the request to the assistant, who didn't understand, and who began calling passers-by in the store to translate to German, where people begin offering their guesses - "athlete's foot? Das ist smutisch, nein?"). Er, no. And perhaps then the woman's face got redder and redder as more and more Berliners, being the helpful type, gathered round to help. And the word "fungus" had to be pronounced again and again, until she was saved by a kindly German man who had lived in New York, who explained that there was no German word for it, and directed her to an apothecary, where she really should have thought of going in the first place.

And then remind me to tell you how that woman continued on bravely, softly repeating the German word for "rash" to herself, so as not to forget when she reached the pharmacy. And then the relief of explaining again to the pharmicist, saying how common this particular rash was; she was sure, for example, that Germans got it too when their feet got sweaty in gyms in the winter. How the pharmacist had looked nervous but nodded seriously, and returned with a tube of vaginal itching creme. How a bilingual German/Californian interrupted at that point to translate the real word. How everyone listening in the line looked on curiously, wondering perhaps for the first time whether Germans often suffered from vaginal itching when their feet got sweaty from gyms in wintertime.

Remind me to tell you about it some time.

In other news, I just watched Mammoth by Lukas Moodyson (loved it; it got terrible reviews), Bluebeard (quite liked it, it reminded me of The Village, which I loved and most people hated as well) and a seminar from South African filmmakers about intra-African xenophobia, which was very good.

Last night I saw some great short films from Mexico, Denmark etc. At 1am I then took the wrong nightbus home and froze my ass off somewhere way out in East Berlin until I walked through the hostel at 3am.

Tomorrow I am meeting up with a production designer to talk through some projects.

Tonight I am going to the big British Council party for all their film delegates.

Today I saw a photo of my girlfriend making fake turtle tracks that made me smile more than anything in a very long time. Cool!

xxx Kathleen

I am having an amazing time which is difficult to express with the oddly placed letters on a German keyboad.

I saw The International with Clive Owen/Naomi Watts. I've liked other previous stuff by this director (Run Lola Run), but I don't think this was my cup of tea, even though I like both actors. Amazing camerawork,though.

I have also:

Handled cameras in the last two days that cost half a million all on their own. They are HD that can do 35mm. Luminous, beautiful.

Worked with the guy who did the titles for Apocalypto.

Had a long conversation with all+around cool filmmaker M Dot Strange.

Met people from Mongolia, Egypt, Argentina, Taiwan, the Dominican Republic, Mozambique, Italy, many more places. Absolutelý amazing.

Was blagged into a German Film Institute party and ate spaetzle and Badisch ham (Hi, Simone!).

Gotten less than five hours of sleep every night so far.

It is really thrilling to be here. They had a film about global warming (documentary) set in Alaska which was very moving. We met the filmmakers, who were cool and very genuine too.

Been instructed on cameras by the people who shot Babel.

Handed info on Spaceships Over Corvallis to a casting director I would love to work with in Portland.

I am going to try to get 7-8 hours sleep tonight, because after all the week has only just started.

It is not pretentious here at all. Instead it is full of people who love films and love to talk about them. I love it. Wow. I am blown away.

xxx

Exhilaration, Residual Goddamn Americanisms

I made it on the plane!

I slept one and a half hours last night, got up at 3:20, then waited for the bus on deserted Chatworth Road, which believe me doesn't feel all that safe when it's pitch black and entirely deserted.

The bus came late; I got to the train station; the train was cancelled due to bad weather. The next was at 5:49 - it takes an hour to get to the airport, and the plane itself was taking off at 6:25. I took a 10-pound cab to a different station, got on the Stansted Express; got to the airport at 6:01. Ran to baggage check. They wouldn't let me in because the boarding pass Ryanair had forwarded to be was the bloody return ticket pass. I ran to Ryanair (now 6:10). The nasty woman at the counter said, due to my accent, "Is it because you're not an EU citizen?" This was WHILE she was holding my EU passport. She printed the pass because I was in tears. I ran to baggage control again. Suddenly a security guard swooped on me, screaming, "Don't let this one in; her baggage is overweight, she's trying to sneak through again!" I said I hadn't even had my bag weighed yet (it was fine). He called me a liar. 6:13. I suddenly became very American and shouted, "Well then, Ryanair should have printed the goddamn boarding pass correctly!" That is probably the first time in my life I have ever spoken the word "goddamn." I think I was still stinging from the nasty ticket lady.

Anyway, I was through and waiting behind 100-plus people to go through security. Miraculously, they all let me through, one by one, when I explained my plane was taking off in a matter of minutes. I was at Gate 1. My plane was at Gate 87. 6:18 am. I made it. Everyone after security at Ryanair was lovely and helpful. My bag was too big and they didn't even charge me.

An hour and a half later, and I was furiously writing out my schedule, having been greeted and assisted by a Berlinale Welcome Desk at the airport (they rock! so nice!), en route to Alexanderplatz. And I felt a huge rush of excitement, and not just because I'm going on no sleep. I just felt so happy and excited as the train whizzed towards Berlin. Made it easily to the hostel, where people working here are absolutely helpful as well.

In a few minutes I'm going to take off to get accredited and registered at the Berlinale itself. Then I'm going to have a nap. Then I'm going to finish memorising my pitches for all four films (see www.spaceshipsovercorvallis.com). Then I'm going to study the various camera types we're using in the studio programme tomorrow, because I got accepted to a specialised intensive study programme *within* the Berlinale Talent Campus. And then I'm going to better-formulate some concepts regarding the theme of "Inside/Outside." I want to be less nebulous, though I have some ideas.

And then?

Who knows?

I am so fucking excited. And now I'm taking off!

"Tomorrow Belongs to Me"

Voter suppression is always an indicator of a fascist state.

I was actually asked to stop registering voters on a sidewalk outside Whole Foods in Portland, Oregon after a complaint by a dead-eyed Republican mother/daughter team. I was 15 feet away initially. I was wearing a small Obama button (and an "Alaska Grown" T-shirt). Obviously, I will register anyone of any political persuasion. Whole Foods argued that it was private property (it's ambiguous where the sidewalk starts/begins) and that I was being a little "too obvious", and that Whole Foods (a Republican-owned company) didn't accept solicitors. I pointed out that voter regsitration was hardly asking people for money, and then I moved my pitch.

The twenty-something daughter muttered "that's bullshit" in my direction as she refused to look at me after her complaint (several minutes before I was asked to leave).

Her eyes and her mother's eyes were like Hitler's. I'm not fucking kidding.

Don't let them have tomorrow.

Wainwright

Kind of interesting to be considered part of the "history" of something. That's me on the right. The little boy on the left was my first friend. He had the same birthday as me, and he died when we were in high school due to high school kids up in Wainwright making a punch out of (ethyl?) alcohol. It was really tragic. Meanwhile, my friends and I were doing exactly the same thing down in Kenai, and using Everclear. I have a copy of this picture that my dad had labeled, and the woman holding me is my "Eskimo Grandma", according to Dad's handwriting. I think I remember being told that she was my babysitter. I wonder whether I have a cache of Inupiat words somewhere in my brain left over from 0 - 2 years old, and whether I'd find it easier to learn the language because of that. I oughta try it some day.

The Syllogism - FINALIST!

"Behold! The Winning Entries of the "My Pretty Portland" Film Contest!
Posted by Erik Henriksen on Sun, Aug 31 at 11:10 AM

Last night--downtown, sometime around sunset, at a block party hosted by the Art Institute of Portland--the best nine films we received in the "My Pretty Portland" film contest were screened. We got over 30 entries, and for myself and a crack team of intrepid Mercury writers, it was no easy task to decide the winners, but I think we did an alright job of it. It should probably be noted here that we gave extra credit to films that featured unicorns.

My memory of last night is the tiniest bit blurry thanks to my possible abuse of the drink ticket system, but I remember enough of the evening to know it went pretty well, and the crowd seemed to dig most of the entries. For those of you who couldn't make it out last night--and those who were there and want to re-watch particular films--here are the nine finalists we selected. The first place winner is immediately below, with second place and seven others (plus an honorable mention!) after the jump."

...

Here's the article and my film plus the other finalists...

God, I love disco. I would have never worn a Disco Sucks T-short back in the day.

San Francisco

I am a definite nurture as opposed to nature gal. Not sure which one this is, but this was my favorite song in fifth grade (along with Heart of Glass and Steal Away).

http://village-people-the-san-francisco-you-039-mp3-download.kohit.net/_/381095

Korea - The Wedding Itself

The Bridal Couple: my brother David, and Hyun-Mi. (photo by Karin Bryson)



During the wedding ceremony: Hyun-Mi looking beautiful, just as her name suggests. (photo by Karin Bryson)



Wishstones that fill an empty tree stump - Haeinsa Temple - pre-wedding, different location (photo by Kathleen Bryson)



Near Haeinsa Temple (a picture I liked that I forgot to post, pre-wedding, different location) (photo by Kathleen Bryson)




David and Hyun-Mi, after the wedding (photo by Phil Bryson)




Wedding ceremony with laden table and (live, and still alive) chickens... (shamanist ceremony) (photo by Pat Bryson)




The Wedding, with Mi's Japanese friends in formal dress in the foreground



The Wedding... (photo by Pat Bryson)



The Temple... (photo by Pat Bryson)



My Dad, Phil! (photo by Pat Bryson)




The bride Hyun-Mi and her sister Soo-Mi (photo by Pat Bryson)




Bride and Groom (photo by Pat Bryson)




Bride and Groom 2 (photo by Pat Bryson)




Bride and Groom 3 (photo by Pat Bryson)



Bride and Groom 4... (photo by Pat Bryson)




Here comes the bride (photo by Pat Bryson)



My new sister-in-law Hyun-Mi and me... (photo by David Bryson)



Family after Temple hike (photo by David Bryson)



My brother David growling with the bears. (photo by David Bryson)



David and Mi on Paradise Island - Odeo (photo by David Bryson)



David and Mi, Cavers! (photo by David Bryson)



Kaving in Korea... (my family decided that the word "cavers" was a lot more hip than the word "caveman" or "cavewoman", or the anthropological "cave-dwellers". We saw so many gorgeous caves - 5 or 6? Loved them. (Photo by David Bryson)

South Korea

At Haeinsa Temple - me, Mom, dad, David and Mi.



The Tripitaka scripts - the Koreans invented moveable type several centuries before the Gutenberg press - they are housed in a special room by the temple at Haeinsa. (From Wikipedia: "It is the world's most comprehensive and oldest intact version of Buddhist canon in Chinese script, with no known errors or errata in the 52,382,960 characters which are organized in over 1496 titles and 6568 volumes. Each wood block measures 70 centimeters in width and 24 centimeters in length. The thickness of the blocks range from 2.6 to 4 centimeters and each weights about three to four kilograms.")



A particularly beautiful fountain on Odeo.



Odeo Island - the topiary looks like Dr. Seuss.



The temple was so beautiful...




At Odeo Island ("Paradise Island") - most of the statuary was Greek while the topiary was Korean, but this seemed a touch of the Americana to me.




My brother David and his fiancee Mi!


You can place a rock on top of the temple and make a wish...






First sight of Busan after 23 hours of flying - looked like a candy Disneyland with all the neon.

All Bottled Up

Yay! I just got a message from my UK agent saying that she totally loves my genie novel All Bottled Up. I thought she would, since she adores Matchbox and it's similar in tone, but I hadn't heard anything for a few weeks. It's part of a trio of "lighter" novels for which I have written either the entire manuscript (The Matchbox) or the proposal (The Absinthe Fairy, and now All Bottled Up). The books are all linked, but they're stand-alone as well. It's kind of fun to write cheerier, slapstick stuff, though there is enough darkness/quirkiness in all three so that I don't feel like I've sold out. They're like Gregory Maguire's Wicked, I guess. Which is no bad thing. It doesn't have to be all angst and tenderness, all the time, and that doesn't mean it's being dumbed down, either. You know, I liked Stardust just as much as I liked Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and that's quite a bit.

The main character in All Bottled Up, Morgan Mothrey, is very fond of perfume bottles, and so that chimes in nicely with my most recent post.

Here is the synopsis:

All Bottled Up
synopsis

Novel: 65,000 words. Setting: current-day Portland, Oregon.

Food tester and minor cable “celebrity” Morgan Mothrey invokes a genie, a good-looking fellow name of Jim Scox, who starts to fulfill all of her dreams, despite his great love of bad puns and anagrams. But soon she discovers that, as a textbook chauvinist pig, he has desires of his own, ones that she finds herself fulfilling as well. It’s the ultimate battle of the sexes, one that makes Taming of the Shrew look like I Dream of Jeannie, and one which turns the whole genie myth upside down and gives the bottle a few shakes to boot.

For as the gameplay and wordplay and stakes with Jim Scox grow higher and more complex, and her own ambitions and wishes ever more grandiose (Twelve swimming pools filled with green champagne! Six boyfriends slavishly devoted to her every whim who all can cook as well! Seven-league high-heels! A functioning remote control!), Morgan begins to realize that some of the power might be her own. And not just in a post-feminist metaphor way, but really her own: all signs are pointing to the fact that she is herself an incarnation of the well-known genie Gremory, who was depicted in 1583 by Johann Wier as “appearing in the form of a beautiful woman with the crown of a duchess tied around her waist, and riding a camel”. This troubles Morgan, to say the least. Particularly the camel.

It’s also troubling that Jim the Genie’s power seems to be waning as the perfume in his bottle dries up, and unless she figures out his latest oneupmanship battle-of-the-wits puzzle with which he’s been baiting her, one which involves a trio of his ex-girlfriends, the genies Wickifer, Djinnifer and Nancy, she’s screwed (back into her own bottle, it seems).

Most troubling of all is the fact that Morgan and Jim are falling head over heels in love. This is despite the bad puns and fierce rivalry.

Part fairy tale, part detective story, all word play, All Bottled Up reminds us in all the best possible ways that common anagrams for “I dream of genies” are “a fireside gnome”, “faerie smidgeon” and “maiden fries ego”.

Just as in The Taming of the Shrew, here’s to frying all egos, always sunnyside-up.

Confessions of a Perfume Transvestite

Perfume. We watched the movie two nights ago - the book was a birthday gift my girlfriend gave me after we'd been together a month. She is German and of course Patrick Süskind is a well-known German writer. I always loved it; it was so sensual and so twisted. I loved the movie as well. It was perfectly cast and they manage successfully to get the idea of scent across in a medium that lacks it. The lead, Ben Whishaw (?) was amazing and terrifying, perfect for the part. I would love to call him up and ask him if he wants to be in Spaceships Over Corvallis, a little later down the road, when we've had the kudos for The Viva Voce Virus buzzing in our heads and it's officially finished.

I have always wanted to be a perfumer (parfumier?) and indeed would organize perfume-making contests for my class when I was in fourth grade/ten years old. I remember judging one particular contest and awarding first prize - $2, maybe? - to another little girl who later admitted that she had used strawberry-scented shampoo as her "perfume". I had urged the contest makers to mix their mothers' perfumes with different vanilla food flavoring and peppermint extracts. The strawberry winner showed chutzpah, though, so I didn't think that she had cheated.

I got my first chemistry set around the same time, and I am fairly sure that the experiments I tried, after making invisible ink, were those where you were concocting rose smells and rotten egg smells. Probably that same year, my friend Melanie received a perfume sampler set from her grandma full of beautiful, differently shaped tiny bottles, and I coveted it dearly. I was always trying to get Melanie to mix some together to create an entirely new perfume, but I don't think she ever fell for it.

I have always been INCREDIBLY picky about which perfumes I have worn myself, with a few exceptions in the 90s where I just wore Gaultier, which I was neutral about, because I loved the bottles so much.

I am fairly sure that I have always loved musk, and therefore from my teens often preferred male colognes over overly sickly sweet fragrances. I recall borrowing my ex-boyfriend's Pierre Cardin and Lacoste colognes, and possibly even Brut, in the late 80s/early 90s. I have a feeling I would still like these were I to smell them again, if nothing else than for nostalgic attachments to particular colognes. My girlfriend (also a perfume gender rebel) wears Kenzo and Lolita Lempicka for Men and I like these on her a lot too, and wouldn't feel too uncomfortable stealing a squirt, but I am not sure I would seek them out and *pay* for them. I also prefer some women's perfumes even more than men's colognes (god forbid it should be the same word!), so I guess I am not really a perfume transvestite at all, but more like a perfume switch-hitter, a nefarious fragrance bi-scentual.

Here, though, is a backwards chronology of those perfumes for which I have laid out good money (or little money) in my time to purchase, picky as I am, alongside reviews of their qualities. I wonder whether I could concoct the perfect perfume all for me, using these descriptions, and having the expertise (which I clearly lack). Maybe I will mix them all together one day.

I am 18 - 22 years old. I have just left Alaska and moved to Sweden and fallen in love. I am introduced to "Paris" by my new New Yorker friend Georgia, a fellow exchange student who is my polar opposite (organized, preppy, ambitious in a Working Girl movie kind of way that I detachedly admire), but with whom I (flakey semi-philosophical punkish neurotic small-town Alaskan free spirit) inexplicably hit it off, becoming friends after she lends me her Egyptian-cotton towel after I realize I forgot my stained ratty one after an impromptu bikini dip in a cold Swedish lake. Obviously I managed to remember my bathing suit, but dismissing my towel as something less important seems kind of par for the course for me back then. Anyway, Georgia saved me from hypothermia and introduced me to "Paris".


"Aromatic, Floral, Fruity. Designed by Yves Saint Laurent in 1983, Paris is an exquisite, floral fragrance. It is the result of the following top fragrance Notes: mimosa, orange blossom and linden. The middle notes are: moss, violet and ylang-ylang and the base of the fragrance is: amber, musk and iris. Paris is recommended for romantic use." - from The Perfume Emporium




I am 22 - 25 years old, living in Seattle. I have just finished college and can't find a job except telemarketing. I have realized I am bisexual. I am painting a good deal and just beginning to show people my writing. I am on the periphery of the Queer Nation/ACT-UP political movement. My friends are as messed up and lovable as I am. I am wearing the Body Shop's essential oil (for men) "Activiste" - also known as the less-Frenchified "Activist".

"Top notes of citrus, a spicy heart of cedarwood, ylang ylang and armoise, and base notes of sandalwood, patchouli and amber. Oriental in style, and active in approach." - The Body Shop International




I am 25 - 27 years old - I move to London for drama school, join Lesbian Avengers, fall in love, finish drama school and can't find a job. My girlfriend gives me the Body Shop's "White Musk" as a first Valentine's Day present and I love it.

"The smell of this perfume is really nice. White musk is really hard to describe but it has almost a talcum powder smell but more posh and strong - perfume experts must think I'm mad! It can be worn day or night, as it has one of those versatile scents that is suitable for all occasions which is why it is one of my favourites." - from DOO YOO

"Fragrance Notes: Top: Musk, Lily, Ylang Ylang, hints of Galbanum and Basil Middle: Musk, Jasmine, Lily, Rose Base: Musk, Jasmine, Rose, Iris, Amber, Patchouli, Vetiver, hints of Peach, Oakmoss, Vanilla" - from The Body Shop




I am 27 - 30 years old; I'm living in London, dabbling with Gaultier perfumes because of the doll-shaped and snowdome-shaped bottles, when I discover that I love the Body Shop's vanilla perfume spray even more than "White Musk". Why do I love it? Because it smells like Play-Dough. To my horror, after only several years of wearing it, it is discontinued! I buy up as many bottles of "Vanilla" as I can. I have started an MA and am working in a publishing company. I am still too broke to buy more than 6 bottles of "Vanilla" even at 75% slashed prices.

"A refreshing, non-greasy body mist that moisturizes and helps to soften the skin, leaving it subtly scented with a sweet, warm and spicy vanilla fragrance... Bergamot, peach, strawberry, orange flower, jasmine, plum, ylang ylang, vanilla, sandalwood, amber and musk... have been blended together to create the sweet, warm and velvety vanilla fragrance." - The Body Shop



I am 30 - 32, and have just finished my MA in film, and my first book Mush is coming out soon. After reading a description of "Hypnotic Poison" in a fashion magazine, I think to myself that that sounds like something I would love, and guess what, I do. It is one of the most amazing things I have ever smelled.

Here's what a customer reviewer on eopinions said: "A few months ago, after hearing so many raves and reading tons of rave reviews on the internet, I decided to go and test Hypnotic Poison by Christian Dior. It's been out since 1998, so it isn't anything new to the market, but it was new to me. I was so excited to test out this scent that was being reviewed and advertised as a man-magnet (not that I needed to be a magnet since I do have a boyfriend, but I was still curious to see what this thing was all about)! Jeez..I'm a girl and girls love to smell pretty to everyone around them, right? :)... So, I stopped by Ulta, and walked up to that red bottle again, and VERY LIGHTLY misted my wrist from a far, far distance. Wow..the air smelled SO GOOD. I thought it must've been something else sprayed by another customer. Nope..it was just me there. I put my nose to my hypnotically poisoned wrist, and I felt stuck. My nose was stuck to my wrist. I was captivated by the way it smelled. But this was supposed to smell like a rootbeer float with playdoh on the side. I sprayed a paper card again to see if maybe this bottle might have been a fresh one and the one I tried months ago might've been old. NO! I smelled the rootbeer mixture again! This stuff really does smell different on SKIN than it does on PAPER, or even from the nozzle.

Hypnotic Poison, according to basenotes, claims to have: "..the result of the following top fragrance notes: bitter almond, caraway and jasmine. The middle notes are: moss, sandalwood and oakmoss and the base of the fragrance is: vanilla, musk and cedar." On my skin, I could smell the warmth of vanilla, but in a non-sugary, non-foody way. I could smell the bitter almond keeping this fragrance from turning sickeningly sweet. The rest of the ingredients mingled together to form this gorgeous, intriguing, alluring, and very sexy scent. It becomes a part of you when you put it on. I recommend that you please try this on your skin if you're interested in it. It smells completely different on my skin than it did on paper. After about 30 minutes, it just keeps getting better and better. The lasting power is AMAZING! At least 24 hours!"




I am 32 - 34 years old, and encounter the amazing scents of Philosophy Baby Grace fragrance in Sephora in New York, and I am hooked. I think it smells better than anything I've ever smelled before. Clean, fresh, perfect, new. It's a new century as well.

"Baby Grace is a sophisticated, clean scent formulated for women who are young-at-heart. The perfect scent for those who love the way a baby smells... Notes: Poppy, Green Accord, Pink Mimosa, Pepper, Creamy White Woods, Musk. Style:Light. Clean. Slightly Sweet." - from Sephora



I am 34 - to present, and I am working on directing my first feature film. I move back to the States. I can't find a job. My second book Girl on a Stick and my third book He's Lucid are accepted for publication. I am reeling from culture shock after having been away a decade and then straight into the mouth of the Bush-culture beast. I am wearing... Karma by Lush.

"Complex citrus and patchouli spread light and love... Karma is a proper perfume, not an eau de toilette, so a little goes a very long way. It's made with patchouli to make you more objective and orange oil to revive you when you're frazzled. Lavender refreshes, pine brings happiness into your life, lemongrass lifts your spirits and elemi ought to make you feel joyful. Once you've sprayed a little on your wrists and taken a good sniff, dab it on everyone you know to spread love and light all over the place." - from the Lush website

Who(hu)man Beings

I can't believe I cried at Horton Hears a Who last night. That kind of takes the cake as far as sentimentality goes, although I believe I once wept at the abysmal 80s film Fresh Horses as well. But, as I was trying to justify to Simone, there was something very moving/human about all the Whos in Whoville shouting "We are here!" together that reminded me of two million people marching through London to demand accountability from their government to *not* illegally attack another country. We, and yes I was among those two million, already knew that the WMD claims were spurious, so it confounds me when people say they only found out about it later. Anyway, I think I cried because it all ended up being to no avail; the government *didn't* listen; the people really couldn't speak. It reminds me of our whole planet shouting out to somewhere else in space, "We are here!". "Someone take notice!".

Or maybe I'm just pre-menstrual.

Which Epic Poet are You?

Which Epic Poet Are You?
created with QuizFarm.com
You scored as Dante Alighieri

You are Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy. You chose to employ a very complex allegorical method to attack the political and religous shortcomings of your contemporaries, as well as to express wider spiritual truths. Your affection for Vergil led you to make him a central character in your epic.

Well, I suppose "very complex allegorical method to attack the political and religious shortcomings of your contemporaries" might apply to my book Girl on a Stick as well, if I flatter myself. I've never actually read The Divine Comedy, though I've always liked the idea of it. I plan to take at least ten books to Korea to catch up on my reading, as I'll be there for 10 days and my hosts (my brother's fiancee's parents) don't speak English. I would also like to walk around Busan a lot; not to get too Genet-ish about it (or whorish?), but I really do like dock-towns and port cities. Here's a painting I did of Marseilles called The Hairy Fish-Wife. Click on it to enlarge it.

On the Subject of Thin Skin

As a writer, I have tough skin, unless I have a flood of rejections in a row. I reckon I have about a 25% acceptance rate from short stories/poems/novels I send out. If I can see that the publishing company/agent has accepted someone as a client/author who I consider to be less talented, I can just shrug a rejection off and say to myself, well, bad taste, better luck next time. There is a codicil here that has to do with Girl on a Stick. I worked my ass off on Girl on a Stick, and it was devastating nearly every time I got another rejection before it was accepted, and I guess what made it particularly awful was big-deal agents saying how much they loved my writing, but this just didn't grab them/they weren't in love with it (I am sure any writer knows well the not-in-love-with-it phrase; as I've been a fiction editor, I know it's what editors use when they have no good reason to reject other than personal taste, which is fair enough).

With Girl on a Stick, it got a little pathological, and even as a published novelist and someone who has been in love with books and reading my entire life, I found myself resenting every new book I saw, and trying to keep myself from envying other people's success when I couldn't understand why GOAS wasn't being lauded/accepted. That was painful, and bitterness is not a common trait with me, or something I admire in myself. That eased when GOAS got a publisher, but I still think it hasn't gotten its due, and possibly never will. I tend to be very self-critical, so if I say that something I have created is good, it's probably very good. It has taken me years to be able to say "I am a writer" to people. People still say, "Really? Self-published?" Er, no. (And, again not something I am proud of: "Fuck you for your underestimation!", but only in my head, of course.) Anyway, GOAS aside, usually thick skin.

As a painter, even thicker skin, possibly because I am so outside the system anyway. I don't even know how to work it. I just keep painting, and putting shows on from time to time, and people keep buying the paintings. I would love to have a manager/agent who discovered and believed in me, but I don't have the energy/time to look for one. If someone doesn't like my art, I can usually think, in a good-natured way, of course, "To hell with ya." Lately, though, I see contemporaries have the $$$ to devote to their painting careers full-time and I am jealous of that, though not of them, really. I have a good feeling about my paintings, actually, like one day I actually will be discovered and hopefully by this I won't be too cynical to be delighted by the stardom.

As a filmmaker and actor, rice-paper thin skin. For the former, lack of experience playing the festival/distribution game and therefore lack of confidence in my own work (men never seem to suffer from this, I've noticed); for the latter, residual neurosis from a fucked-up experience at drama school, which has been partly healed by taking part in the lovely Sarah Wood's films and being praised etc. I am definitely someone who blooms under praise, not criticism.

My last posts have been heavily narcissistic, but that's art for ya. Besides, I feel uncomfortable spilling personal details about my life, my girlfriend, my family, my friends. And I rarely even discuss my "artistic life" anyway with anyone, so these last two posts are something quite new for me as well. One personal detail is that, for some reason, I have really been missing my London-based friend Venetia recently. It's weird to live 10 years in one place and then have all those people, all those memories, just gone. It was sort of the same with Stockholm, where I lived for around 3 years and then left abruptly, never to return. I always assume I'll just show up for a film festival or a book reading at some point. I still dream in fluent Swedish from time to time. It would be odd to see the way it smells, feels. But London, I feel, is current with me, kind of more in my present blood (like Seattle, 3 years as well). Stockholm feels like Alaska, something taken for given. It's not exactly the past. London, New York, even San Francisco, Barcelona, my sell-out dream beachhouse in San Diego, all feel like the present and the future to me.

I am feeling - fuck. I don't know. I'm going to list.

GIRL ON A STICK:
I am waiting for my second novel to come out, and I have been waiting for over a year and a half from its first scheduled publication date. I think my publishers are bringing it out soon. I worked so hard on it and I have a fear that it probably won't get reviewed. It kind of breaks my heart. At the same time I really love my publishers and their vision and I know they are doing everything they can. I think it's a very good book. I just want it to come out; I don't care that it won't get its due in terms of reviews/coverage; I just want it published.

I am trying to get a U.S. agent at the moment, while still retaining my lovely UK agent. That means I have a few bigshot agents reading my stuff. I have had rejection letters in my life previously, of course, but they are never form letters and they always say "you're a terrific writer" or "you're a very talented writer", so I will choose to believe them and carry on. Honestly, though, sometimes I am close to giving up hope as a writer and a filmmaker and painter. I am already working menial temp jobs for $10/hour (I've been temping at a cool place recently, though); maybe I should just accept my fate with no ambitions, but I think that would kill me. I think it is already killing me. No one knows.

Anyway, I had my bound proofs of GIRL ON A STICK that were sent off with some of my proposals to NY agents, and most of them are still reading/considering at the moment, and that includes being read by two dream agents that I would dearly love to have. One of the few rejections I have had (actually it was more of a "please rewrite and we will reconsider" letter) was a great rejection as far as rejections go, one where they said that THE MATCHBOX should be darker and more twisted and they knew I could do dark and twisted because they'd read part of GOAS and that the characters in THE MATCHBOX were just too mainstream. I had to laugh at that one; I am not usually encouraged to be more edgy. I actually felt better after reading it, again not a common occurrence with rejection letters. At least she got it, and got me.

HE'S LUCID:
Is the novel which was sold to the same publishers as GOAS as part of a 2-book deal, but their schedule is delayed, so I don't know when it will be published. HE'S LUCID is kind of a cross between GIRL ON A STICK and THE MATCHBOX. It's set 131 years in the future, in an Alaska devastated by global warming. It's very funny. It's extremely playful and even lighthearted while still being edgy as fuck. I like the language best here in HE'S LUCID, though GIRL ON A STICK is a close second. HE'S LUCID is my favorite thing that I've written. The entire manuscript is complete and, having been bought, is waiting to be published. I performed some sections to dancing polar bears and a violin at Bumbershoot a few years back, but that seems so long ago too. I am waiting on this one as well.

THE MATCHBOX:
Is my mainstream book, or at least as mainstream as I can go without feeling like I'm selling out. It is like eating a decadent chocolate fairy tale. I stand by it. I think it's clever. We'll see about that one. That is the one that is out with agents at the moment. Bloomsbury UK nearly bought it, but the final purse-strings editor wasn't as wild about it as the two commissioning editors. It has gotten a lot of support from the former editor of Granta. The entire manuscript is complete.


THE ABSINTHE FAIRY:
Is set in 1898 in Gold Rush Alaska, and is a fairy tale of sorts that is linked to THE MATCHBOX. It stars a young woman who runs off to be the lover of a dancehall girl. I may post more about this at some time. There are 4 completed and polished chapters for this (10,000 words). I have never sent it out, but my agent loved it.

ALL BOTTLED UP:
Is a reverse Taming of Shrew, about a cranky, glamorous food editor who discovers a male genie in a perfume bottle. It is (very) loosely based on 1,001 Arabian Nights. There are 4 completed and polished chapters for this (10,000 words). I just gave this one to my British agent. THE MATCHBOX, THE ABSINTHE FAIRY and ALL BOTTLED UP all go together, with overlapping characters, but all are stand-alone.


HYBRID VIGOR:
Is my chimp-human interbreeding science fiction blockbuster. I would love to sell this one. Proposal + 20,000 words completed. The SF novel of my heart.

MY TSUNAMI:
Is literary fiction, set in current-day Alaska. It's sort of similar in tone to The Shipping News, playful and dark, sweet and sad. Proposal + 10,000 words complete.


THE WITCH OF AGNESI:
A novel of linked short stories. I hope to finish this this week. 90,000 words. God knows if it will ever be published, but I am proud of it.


THE ROCKINGHORSE WORLD:
A children's book that I have written and illustrated. It's all completed. It's zany. I spent years on it.

LUCIFERIN:
A poetry manuscript, completed. Most of the poems have been published previously, but I just don't have the energy to send this off.

100+ paintings.

1 interesting, quirky feature film that feels like it's never going to get done.

1 filmed but unedited feature documentary film about craftmakers.

1 cool feature screenplay that I would like to film called Spaceships Over Corvallis.

Is it any wonder that I feel like a fucking failure? All this and all for nothing. I am just worn down. I have tried so hard for so many years, and come close so many times, and now I'm just shutting down. Am I cursed? My writing, my filmmaking, my paintings - occasionally even my acting - is beautiful and interesting. Why. Can't. I. Get. A. Break. I feel like an iris retreating in on itself. I'm sorry. I'm in a dark place. No one ever sees it, but it's there.

Yeah, I'm listing, like a ship going down with all my treasures. Fuck it.

Passport Photos

Well, I am getting a new passport. And I had to choose between extreme Wednesday Addams and just averagely grumpy. I decided not to go with pure evil.

Seriously, I'm a pretty cheerful person.

Seconds after the 10K

Ghost in the Snow - SOLD!

Ghost in the Snow - probably my favorite painting of the moment. Large painting (24" x 34") unframed, acrylics on paper.

Eve Wall Hanging $250 (£125)

Huge Wall Hanging - Acrylics, pastels, pen-and-ink on paper - 3' x 4.5 '

The sketch gives an idea of the image itself; the colour details show the colours of the large original.

Saint Wiggle $250 (£125)

It's a large painting (25" x 27") on paper and cardboard using beads, glitter, acrylics and pen-and-ink. Saint Wiggle is framed with a homemade wooden picture frame, which also has been painted on. The story to this painting is told on the painting itself. Painted 2007.

The Gunny Wolf $500 (£250)

24" x 34" unframed. Watercolours, acrylics and pen on heavy watercolour board.

Saint Malabaster $250 (£125)

24" x 34" framed in hand-painted frame (no glass).

Eden III: Brand New Colony $500 (£250)

20" x 24" framed under glass.

Amongst the Peppercorns and Wintergreens - SOLD!

8.5" x 11" Framed, under glass.

“Volcano, Change(nie)ling” $250 (£125)

“Volcano, Change(nie)ling”

16" x 20" Mixed media on cardboard, framed without glass.

“Tattooed Honey” $250 (£125)

“Tattooed Honey”, tattooed woman with bee stings on dock. 16" x 20" framed.

“In the Forest/Red” $250 (£125)

16" x 20" framed, under glass.

Saint Wilgefortis $250 (£125)

Saint Wilgefortis: An Eclipse Turns Above a Female Citizen of Nature’s Own DragKingdom, Also Called Uncumber. 11" x 24" unframed.

“Chumanpanzee” $500 (£250)

“Chumanpanzee Considers All 5 Sides of the Question at the Giant's Causeway”

The HYBRID VIGOUR Series, Mixed Media on Paper & Canvas Board. 24" x 34" She's a thoughtful hybrid between homo sapiens sapiens and pan paniscus, isolated on a famous pentagonal rock structure in Northern Ireland. Humans are more closely related to pygmy chimpanzees than a horse is to a donkey (we have 98% genetic compatibility). This means that there's a fair chance not only of offspring, but also that any offspring would be fertile - unlike the sterile mule. Would we exploit animals if we admitted that they are us? This hybrid has human tits (as does the sun that shines down on it). Mammaries are often considered taboo in photographic depictions of the human animal. They look too animal. Genitalia is often played down in photographic depictions of chimpanzees and gorillas. It looks too human. That's part of what the chumanpanzee is thinking about. Her other four thoughts are private.

“Anorexic Werewolf (Hunger) Strikes Again, The” $500 (£125)

“Anorexic Werewolf (Hunger) Strikes Again, The”

The HYBRID VIGOUR Series Mixed Media on Cardboard. 24" x 34". Toilet tissue drenched in glue. Turkey. Apple. Becks beer. Pepsi. One fat beady orange. I thought you said I / worse than / ought to have a cosmicstring around my ring / thinking of choking on a / finger and on my own tongue. My dear beloved ventriloquist, O fiancée you reached forth and – I admit it – dragged those / I sat there in my cosmic veil and tried it / dead ringers back fingers I do thee wed gagged a couple times before I remembered with a string around my finger I was an idiot, disgusting / I thought I'd court far more than you. A ring – I choke upon my fingers – a fellow – my food comes up to be swallowed 2wice – a ring-bearer. I planned my ceremony 2 be double ring heading 2rds double trouble dead ringer 2 the deceased. Now who's the stupid doppelganger best man? one it's not me two throwing the bouquet to the side to catch it catch it cosmic ringer-ringer-ringer three catch it on my swallowed finger.

“Rapture: Souls & Spunk Ascend to Heaven” $250 (£125)

“Rapture: Souls & Spunk Ascend to Heaven”

Spray paint, gold leaf, acrylics, pen & ink on cardboard. 24" x 34", Top of church. Sky above church. Left-hand side of sun. Ultimate meltdown of the sacred and profane, floating up to HEAVEN at the end of the world.

The Fall $250 (£125)

The Fall. Acrylics and pen on cardboard - framed under glass.

Little Devil $250 (£125)

Little Devil (framed under glass) 8.5 x 8.5

Gorgon Tears Out The Hyperbled Heart $500 (£250)

Gorgon Tears Out The Hyperbled Heart. 24" x 34", framed under glass.

“Come. Here. (The Ovaries of a Siren)" $500 (£250)

“Come. Here. (The Ovaries of a Siren)"

30" x 40", unframed.

Devil $125 (£63)

11" x 11"

“Transsexual by Choice" $125 (£63)

“Transsexual by Choice, and also by Bengal Quince/Goldfinger Banana Tree” (glows in the dark)

10" x 10"

Phil Feeds the Goats (Bringing in the Stars) $500 (£250)

16" x 20", framed, under glass.

Women Signs 1991 $125 (£63)

8.5" x 11", framed under glass.

1991 Self-Portrait $125 (£63)

8.5" x 11", unframed, acrylics, oils & pen on cardboard.