Back in September
The sky may
be falling
but we've got
parasols.
Go ahead,
rain nonsense
and
accordions.
six - plus ONE - things about me
1. The one and only time I tasted coquina stew was at New Smyrna Beach in 1965. Salt and sand.
2. In 1968, I'd ride my Schwinn through the cemeteries in New Orleans, already knowing enough about the dead not to be scared.
3. I still love to wait for parades. There aren't enough parades in this world. Obviously, I need to move back to New Orleans.
4. My father, like Popeye, was a sailor man.
5. Fluid in the ear is no joke. I now know why babies with earaches cry and cry and cry.
6. I love words more than fallen leaves.
and because in NOLA we love lagniappe - a little extra:
7. I'm looking for a coastline to call home.
The Gaze of Emilie Staat
“But tango begins before the dance, with a subtle yet terribly important gaze I haven’t yet
mastered. The cabeceo is an invitation, without words, and involves direct and sustained eye
contact, often from across the room. If a leader catches the eye of a follower and nods to the
dance floor, he is inviting her to dance. If she maintains the eye contact, smiles, or nods, she has
accepted. This is perfectly elegant in theory, but fraught with peril in practice.”
- from Emilie Staat’s memoir-in-progress, Tango Face: How I Became a Dancer and Became Myself
Portrait of Emilie by French artist Gersin
Emilie Staat surprises me. Her gaze is open, and her conversation eager and engaging. I’ve come to know her as an incredible reader and editor, and on a sunny May morning in New Orleans, I listened to her stories and later read a few chapters of her memoir-in-progress. Her written words have taken me by surprise all over again. Here, she reveals her love of tango and how the dance has led her on a journey of self-discovery.
Emilie Staat & Casey Mills perform at the 2012 Words and Music Literary Festival – Photo Credit: Sheri Stauch
Emilie, in your award-winning essay, “Tango Face,” you write of the cabeceo, or unspoken invitation to dance, the difficulty of the gaze, the “initial awkwardness” that comes from “the proximity of the embrace.” As a writer, language is your strength. How is the experience of moving into the world of tango, a world with a completely different vocabulary, nuanced and wordless, a world that you describe with thoughtful, passionate prose, deepening your work as a writer?
Originally, I thought tango would help me better understand the main character of my novel, a circus performer who has a visceral relationship with the world that’s very different from my own. And tango did increase my understanding of her physicality. But it became less about research and reached me personally. I think it has made me more generous and empathetic as a person, because you can feel your partner’s nervousness, or distraction, or happiness in their body as you dance together. It’s hard to dance that closely with someone for ten or twelve minutes without feeling connected to them. I’m also more aware of how wrong I often am about what people are thinking or feeling. My best interpretation still contains a seed of me—my experiences, prejudices, and assumptions filter my interpretations. Knowing that helps me set aside the me more cleanly and think about them—my partners, my characters.
In my work, tango has given me a new set of tools, changed my syntax, made me more mindful of the effect the words I choose will have, maybe like music. Recently, I had the opportunity to take workshops with Silvina Valz and Diego Pedernera while they were in New Orleans, including one focusing on the chacarera, a folkloric dance from Argentina that is vastly different than tango. I was struck by the fact that the whole dance is a working toward an embrace at the end. Instead of the intense embrace of tango, there is eye contact as each dancer performs their part, eye contact that becomes itself an embrace. The chacarera made me reconsider the cabeceo, my struggles with it and how intricate and elegant nonverbal communication can be and by contrast, how purposeful and powerful your words should be.
Silvina Valz & Diego Pedernera perform in New Orleans at La Milonga Que Fatalba
“How did I end up… surrounded by $800 worth of shoes, both excited… and terrified of them?”
– from “Comme il Faut,” an essay-in-progress by Emilie Staat
Tango, two-step, or tarantella?
I had to look up the tarantella because I had only a vague notion of what it is. Not that I know much more now, but what strikes me most is that it seems like a dance that is much harder than a casual observer would think. Which is true of most dances, that they are easy to do, but difficult to do well. There is an enormous gap between the verb and the noun, so while I love dancing other styles like two-step, salsa and swing, tango is the only dance that has made me a dancer.
Cicely Tyson
Ernest J. Gaines
When you were awarded the gold medal for “Tango Face,” the Faulkner-Wisdom Nonfiction Prize
winner, the organizers of the Words and Music Literary Festival invited you to perform. Would you tell us about the experience of dancing the tango on the same stage that writer Ernest J. Gaines and actress Cicely Tyson had just shared?
I’d only been learning tango for about a year, and while I was a good beginner, I wasn’t at performance level. When Rosemary James, who organizes the festival, said I should perform, I said no at first. But then, every night for a week, I dreamt about performing. I knew the room, I knew who my partner would be, what dress I would wear and what song we would dance to. Every night, it was such a vivid dream, and I realized how badly I wanted to perform, even if I wasn’t ready. When I asked Rosemary if it was too late, she was utterly gracious and suddenly, everything that seemed like a problem fell away.
The night of the performance, I was humbled by Cicely Tyson’s incredibly intimate and commanding performance and when Ernest Gaines spoke about his career and Faulkner, I was standing just alongside the stage, waiting with my partner to go on, but also just a few feet from what was, and felt like, a very important literary moment. The writer in me, analytical and cerebral, came forward and pushed the dancer back. I got in my head at the worst moment and I was so stiff and terrified. What I like best about the photo of our dance is that Sheri caught the instant, nearly a minute into the performance, that I utterly surrendered to the experience, to the song and to my partner.
Louisiana graffiti
Emilie Staat, director Steve Herek, & actor Jose Zuniga worked together filming “The Chaperone”
As is typical of most writers, you have a day job and an intriguing one at that—as a script coordinator on films such as Twelve Years a Slave, Oldboy, HBO’s True Detective, Now You See Me, and 21 Jump Street.
But your work is far from typical in that film projects can last for intense and long periods, and once they are complete, you take off a block of time to write. Would you tell us about your experiences in some of these projects? The highs, the lows, the stamina needed to survive long hours. And is the balance of all film work and then all writing working well for you?
Sometimes, I think my day job is too interesting, too distracting, and it doesn’t allow me a lot of time to write. But it does satisfy something necessary and I’m building toward a future in film that is more creative. I can’t quite give it up because my entire being lights up when I get a film job, or when I watch a movie I worked on. When I’m not working on a film and I pass by a set, I feel a pang. So, as all-consuming as that life is, I have to make space, find balance. I worked two of my biggest, longest shows (Now You See Me and Twelve Years a Slave) back to back in the year I first started to learn tango. I think it was my way of socializing, having something of a life, because it’s easy to lose that while working. But it also sparked my creativity, fueled my imagination in ways I didn’t expect. I’d been seeking balance for a long time, and tango forced me to work on it in a very real way that filtered into every aspect of my life.
Umbrella Tango in Times Square
Favorite place to write/dance.
For the first five years I lived in New Orleans, I wrote almost exclusively at a coffee shop by my house, which closed on New Year’s Eve almost two years ago. We jokingly called this place Cheers and it was a lot like Central Perk on Friends, very central to my life. Several people asked me if I was going to move when it closed (it took me more than a year, but I did move). I have a tendency to get rooted in one place. So these days, I’ve embraced the rootlessness of not having a steady writing home. It makes me more flexible and more focused on what I bring to the table each day, rather than where I write.
The same is true of my dance venues. There are aspects I appreciate about all of them, but I’ve yet to find a spot that is a perfect combination of elements – floor personality, space, temperature, music, crowd, etc. But I enjoy them all and I try to focus on my dance, rather than the limitations or advantages of the particular space.
Favorite writing tool/tango heel.
I’m ambidextrous in my writing tools. Sometimes I write by hand, very often I type. My iPhone is a tool and so are physical journals. Shoes are similar. My first pair of tango shoes were a pair of suede Comme il Fauts, which many consider the top of the line, with steel-reinforced heels. I call these my “old faithfuls” now cause they’re so worn in. My main pair currently are silver and black Darcos heels that are very sexy and go with everything.
Favorite writer/tango dancer.
I appreciate so many writers and dancers for the things they do particularly well, or what they have to say about craft. And, in both writing and dancing, my favorites have changed as I’ve matured and learned more about myself.
My favorites in my dance community are often people I’ve danced with many, many times and we’ve developed a style, almost a language, together. One of my favorite dancers might be a man I danced with only once, when we were both visitors at a Chicago dance event, and who I’ve never seen again. Or maybe that’s just one of my favorite dances.
I’ve been lucky enough to learn from world-class professional dancers who visit New Orleans, couples like Homer and Cristina Ladas, one of the first visiting couples whose workshops I took. They’re coming back to New Orleans in December for a mini tango festival, together with Ney Melo and Jennifer Bratt, and we’re incredibly lucky to have those two couples visit our community.
As for writers, I’m forming my “memoir tribe” now, with fierce writers like Cheryl Strayed, Melissa Febos and Claire Dederer. I just finished reading Rob Sheffield’s Turn Around Bright Eyes, and I’d definitely put him in my tribe. Dean Koontz and Alice Hoffman are both long-standing favorites who I’ve read since I was a teenager aching to be a writer and they have really formed me in immeasurable ways.
At present, you are working on your memoir, Tango Face: How I Became a Dancer and Became Myself, and you also have a novel-in-progress, The Winter Circus, in the wings. What are your dreams—in terms writing time, space, and subject—for the future?
I’d like to get these two books out into the world, of course. The novel’s been in my life since 2004 and now I’ve been working on the memoir for almost two years. There are more projects in the queue that I’d like to get to, including two t.v. shows and a feature script I co-wrote earlier this year. And as much as I love New Orleans, I miss traveling and I’d like to make it a bigger part of my life. A friend and I are discussing taking a road trip to all the major U.S. tango cities next year, maybe even turning it into a blog or film as we go. We’re looking into crowd-funding, so we’ve been working out the budget and which cities we’d visit. It’s starting to feel like a very real possibility.
Emilie’s Banksy tattoo
& Banksy’s original image
Lagniappe question!
I remember your fascination with graffiti artist Banksy, and your story about getting a Banksy tattoo. The image reminds me a little of your view of the world, holding on and letting go, as in dance and writing. Would you share that story?
I have five tattoos, which I got between the ages of 25 and 30. My tattoos, the project of picking what I would permanently display on my flesh, is about making myself at home in my body, which I struggled to do throughout my teens and twenties. Each of the images is a reminder to myself. Your comment about holding on and letting go is perfect. I’ve never thought about it precisely like that, but I’ve always liked that Banksy’s image is both positive and pessimistic, depending on who is looking at it or where they are in life, or at the moment they see it. It’s about yearning and losing, childhood and hope, love and nostalgia. Contradiction and complexity is what makes it such a fascinating and universal image. It’s the closest to an “off the wall” tattoo I have, since it’s someone’s art exactly and not an image that I designed with the tattoo artist. Yet, you’re right that it does depict my world view.
Emilie Staat
Emilie Staat’s essay Tango Face won the 2012 Faulkner-Wisdom Nonfiction Prize. She is working on a memoir about life and tango under the same title as well as a novel. When she is not working as a script coordinator for film and television, she writes book features for 225 Magazine and blogs at NolaFemmes and her personal blog, Jill of All Genres.
Feature photo: Emilie Staat – in the French Quarter, at the Words and Music Festival, New Orleans Photo Credit: Che Yeun
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The Poppy: An Interview Series
Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis,
black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.
*
This interview first posted at Hothouse Magazine.
Surrealist A.W. Sprague II
Island Head - by A.W. Sprague II
“Ego Ergo Imbroglio” – by A.W. Sprague II
First Place – Surreal Circus
“Ego Ergo Imbroglio”
Here I am
and there I go
Ego Ergo Imbroglio
Where ever I am
is where I know
there’s Ego Ergo Imbroglio
A confident man
fumbling a plan
that’s Ego Ergo Imbroglio
when wringing the hands
or making a stand
it’s Ego Ergo Imbroglio
intricate
confusing
sometimes deluding
Ego Ergo Imbroglio
my own best friend
my own worst enemy
I’m Ego Ergo Imbroglio
When self is self-centered
expect bad weather
because Ego means Ergo Imbroglio
The best laid plans
whether mouse or man
are Ego Ergo Imbroglio
- by A.W. Sprague II
“The Dramatic Dharma of Dueling Dualism” – by A.W. Sprague II
A.W. Sprague II is an artist and writer who explores Surrealism and investigates big questions – Zen, Dharma, Dali, Kerouac, even Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Within his philosophical ponderings, Sprague – known to his friends as Bill – creates a world, one brilliant with color and vision, complex and perplexed, evocative and elaborate. He labors over the absurd and the meaning of life, finding a place to express himself in art and words.
“Decreased Working Class Dining Fashion Courtesy of Migratory Manufacturing Madness” – by A.W. Sprague II
Bill, you’ve told me about your early childhood in a small town along the Susquehanna River in central New York, near an industrial plant that built parts for the Saturn V space program. I’m struck by the same elements in your art: the pastoral setting of fields and waterways, marked by the grand workings of man in his determination to explore. Do you think your beginnings, in terms of place and experience, have influenced your art? Would you tell us about this?
Absolutely. The Foothills of the Catskills is a region filled with spectacular scenery marked by the progress of mankind. From the trees and grassy meadows, low mountains and babbling brooks, blue skies and midnight moons to the railroad tracks, iron bridges and concrete dam that were all part of my childhood surroundings, those influences appear in many ways, both subtle and gross, in my assembled scenarios. I can also attribute the joy and desire I have for creating art and writing pieces to growing up in that region. There was, and still is, a very strong cultural arts presence in the area; and it imbued me with the perspective that art is both valuable and important.
The proximity of the Saturn V project to my childhood home made the notion of space travel perfectly tangible to me. It gave me an expectation for a science-fiction level future. Another impact of the Saturn V program was learning how manufacturing jobs could bring pride and economic stability to a previously depressed region; and then how those things would fade when the manufacturing jobs disappeared.
“Jimmy Snork Ponders the Moon” – by A.W. Sprague II
Obelisk, icon, or satellite?
Tough question. I love obelisks for what they are, icons for what they do, and satellites because I act like one. I’d like to vote for all three.
“The Memory Pool” – by A.W. Sprague II
Literary influences? And art influences?
The first author to have a profound impact on my life was Steinbeck; and the effect did not come from reading his books, but rather from seeing about one hour’s worth of the black-and-white movie version of The Grapes of Wrath. At the age of nine, I felt that television news was just the plight of strangers who lived in places far away. I had little context for what they were experiencing. The dramatic portrayal of Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl farmers hit me at an emotional level like the proverbial ton of bricks. It vexed me for days and led to several meaningful conversations with my parent about what “real” life was like. I was much less a child after that.
Conscious influences on my art would be the color palette of Maxfield Parrish, the attitude of Robert Rauschenberg, the approach of Dadaism and the presentations of Dali. The inspirations I juggle in my mind when writing include Carlos Castenada, Gene Rodenberry, Roald Dahl, Rod Serling, and Richard Bach, the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
“Prometheus’ Pals” – by A.W. Sprague II
the nothing to be alarmed about alarm bell is ringing
remain calm
the nothing to be alarmed about alarm bell rings
because there is nothing to be alarmed about
so remain calm
- from The Nothing to Be Alarmed About Alarm Bell Rings
– an illustrated book by A.W. Sprague
“An Evolution of Toys” – by A.W. Sprague II
Do you think your experiences while in the Air Force during the 1970′s have shaped your writing in terms of structure and subject? I’m thinking especially of your illustrated book, When the Nothing to Be Alarmed About Alarm Bell Rings.
The idea/subject for “Alarm Bell” originated with the government’s daily terror alerts in the years after September 11, 2001. In concert, both national and local media followed suit with speculations on most likely targets, precautions to take, and things to do if caught in an event or aftermath. This constant barrage of fear-instilling thoughts pushed me to a point where I had to reassure myself that a terrorist act was not likely to happen in my town, or at any of the places I frequented. Remembering the words of a recovering alcoholic I once knew, in how he had conditioned his mind to react to advertisements for alcohol as reminders that he should not drink, I turned my situation on its head by perceiving the alerts as alarms that told me everything was going to be okay.
The inspiration for the structure came from a common element in Dystopian stories, in which a repetitive regimented announcement, usually broadcast by a totalitarian government, drones on for the purpose of conditioning the populace. Influences from my military experience can be found in several of the pictures in this piece.
“Celebratory Minions of The Absurd Embrace The Directions of Sacred Leaders and Venerate an Indicated Untitled” – by A.W. Sprague II
Tell us about your interest in Surrealism and your work with The Surreal Circus.
Surrealism has been a fascination of mine since I was young. The odd objects, strange arrangements, and eerie backdrops usually present a sense of mystery or mysticism, and the puzzle solver within me rises eagerly to the challenge of ferreting out meaning. From an artistic standpoint, I embrace Surrealism because I believe we all need to have our psyches challenged. The history of humanity is filled with incidences where we, as a group, had to alter mental perceptions on the fly in order to accommodate newly discovered, life-changing dimensions of reality, previously hidden or unnoticed. In this light, Surrealism is an evolutionary helper that exercises the part of our mind which digests, interprets, and adapts to unusual and unexpected things from the safety of home, gallery, or museum.
The Surreal Circus was a very active Internet group. I have to say “was” because the Gather.com web site has been stalled under renovations for the past five months; very sad. At the time I stumbled into The Circus, it was being actively managed by an arts and nature blogger, Ann Marcaida (annmarcaida.tumblr.com). Ann’s open and friendly communications set an interactive and encouraging spirit which permeated the overall group. After sharing many works, both artistic and written, and having them well received, I entered a short story in their flash fiction contest and an image in their digital art contest. Honorable mention was awarded to the story, while the image won First Place. Soon after this, I was invited to become one of the moderators.
Moderating for a group is a challenge. Work submitted to the group had to be reviewed and approved; and there were as many as fifty submissions per day. Blatantly off-topic submissions could be rejected easily, while on-topic and near-topic submissions required extra thought and consideration. Moderating to that level of flow and criteria often took hours. My favorite reward was the inspiration that so often came after being saturated in the works of others.
“Jealoedipusib” – by A.W. Sprague II
“I’m a plastic coated dharma bum,
dashboard companion to a station wagon,
bubblin’ down some roads of life.”
“The clerk walked me over and handed me a copy of “On The Road” suggesting it as a good place to start and then left me to it. I read the jacket and hesitantly put it back. “The Dharma Bums” was next to it and that was the book I’d come looking for. I wanted to read the book that supposedly chronicled the start of the Zen lunatics and the rucksack wanderers.
You’ll probably think it pretentious that I think of myself as spiritual kin to Kerouac types. Rest assured, I’m fully aware that compared to their solar brilliance I am but a twinkle in the eye of someone who was looking the other way.”
- from “Plastic Coated Dharma Bum” – by A.W. Sprague II
A.W. Sprague II – Artist & Writer
A.W. Sprague II is a creative artist and writer, currently living in Central Ohio. He uses photo manipulation software and digital illustration techniques to create artwork along the surreal, science fiction, and graphic genres. He also paints with acrylics, builds ceramics, creates mixed media sculptures and writes poetry, essays, non-fiction, and fiction. His award-winning work has been featured in several places on the Internet, as well as published in small, alternative, and amateur presses since 1986. Previous to that, it filled notebooks, decorated walls and gathered dust in piles and boxes.
His art and writing are featured on his website http://tastethebrain.blogspot.com and at http://columbusarts.com/artists/464-aw-sprague-ii/.
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The Poppy: An Interview Series
Four to six questions begin as pods, then burst open with answers, bright lapis,
black-stamened, conspicuous—ornament, remembrance, opiate.
*
This interview first posted at Hothouse Magazine.