Welcome to Literary Ashland

Dante Fumagalli is a senior at Southern Oregon University studying English and Art History. He is passionate about education, the arts, and accessibility.

EB: Tell us a little bit about your internship at MoMA.

DF: I interned with the education department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City from June 8 to August 12. My time was specifically split between Community and Access Programs; School and Teacher Programs; and Interpretation, Research, and Digital Learning.

EB: What sort of things did you do?

DF: Being split between three different departments, I ended up doing a lot of varying tasks. With Community and Access, I mostly helped facilitate programs. MoMA offers a wide variety of programs for people with disabilities and it was great to see the extent of how MoMA serves these populations. I also got to attend and help facilitate a professional development conference for teachers called Connecting Collections which is hosted by MoMA, The Met, and The Guggenheim. It was amazing being able to meet people from all of these different museums, in addition to teachers from around the world who came to New York to learn more about arts education. I got to develop a lesson plan for a gallery session centered on the essential question: How did artists in the 1960s make use of everyday objects to explore political, personal, and conceptual themes?

EB: What did you learn?

DF: I learned a lot about best practices in museum pedagogy. At Southern Oregon University, I’m a staff member and a docent at the Schneider Museum of Art. My general teaching style when leading groups through the museum was friendly, but also primarily didactic. At MoMA, they stress the importance of inquiry-based teaching strategies. Watching professional museum educators and going through the many training resources that the museum offers really has changed the way that I approach teaching in these spaces.

EB: How did the work complement or expand on your academic studies?

DF: When I was working on my lesson plan, I made use of a lot of the theory that I’ve learned in both my art history and literature classes. One piece in particular that I used was Black Girl’s Window by Betye Saar. I first was exposed to Saar’s work in a class I took called Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Art with SOU professor Jennifer Longshore. We discussed how her assemblage piece, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima used found objects to compose a comment on racist imagery in the United States. This was a great foundation for my work with Black Girl’s Window, which similarly uses found objects.

EB: What was the most interesting aspect of the internship? Any surprises or revelations?

DF: For me, the most interesting part was helping out with the program Meet Me at MoMA. It’s designed for people with Alzheimer’s and their caretakers. The framework for the program is hugely influential in Museum access worldwide, so it was incredible to see the program happen. Educators at MoMA are very patient and for this program they really extend their inquiry-based methods and bring out discussion amongst participants. At one point during the program, we visited a Roy Lichtenstein painting and one man who had been mostly silent the whole time became visibly excited and told us a story of how he had gone to school with Lichtenstein. It was really moving.

EB: How did you like New York?

DF: I loved New York, though it was very overwhelming at first. The day I arrived, after I picked up my bag, I just remember stepping outside of the terminal at La Guardia and trying to make sense of all the chaos that was going on ahead of me. And that was only in Queens! I lived in Belmont, a neighborhood in the Bronx right across from Fordham University which was nice but also meant that I had quite a commute. If anything, though, that commute motivated me to go out and see the city much more than I probably would have otherwise. I made a concerted effort to go see all sorts of sights after work. My MoMA ID also allowed me to attend other New York cultural institutions for free so I definitely tried to make the best of that. During my time I visited The Met, The Met Breur, The Studio Museum at Harlem, The Bronx Museum of Art, The Guggenheim, The Brooklyn Museum, and MoMA PS1. It’s crazy to me that with all of that, I still missed out on so many other things in such a crazy city.

I definitely want to come back after I graduate. I’ve been doing research on year-long museum education positions in the city and I’ve found that The Met, MoMA and The Brooklyn Museum all offer paid 12-month internships I’m going to be applying for. I found that once you get used to getting around this city, it’s easy to become attached. So many of the other interns I met shared this feeling with me; it definitely brought us closer.

EB: Any advice for other students thinking about internships?

DF: Don’t sell yourself short. You don’t have to be at a school like Harvard, Yale, or Columbia to get one a coveted internship in the professional world. While I was filling out my application, I nearly talked myself out of it. I thought there was no way that they were going to accept me, a student from a small school in Oregon who isn’t even an art history major, at one of the most well-known museums in the world. Even my first day, I still could hardly believe it. It didn’t help that the first person I met was working on his PhD in art history and here I was still in school. But I was able to contextualize the experiences I have had and relate them to the mission of MoMA in my application and in my interview. And I think that’s the most important thing when applying for jobs. You have to give yourself credit for what you have already done and see how that fits in where you’re applying.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

DF: Thank you! I appreciate getting the chance to reflect on and talk about my experience.

Writer Carole T. Beers is a descendant of Oregon Trail pioneers, who worked as a reporter and dance critic for the Seattle Times newspaper, where she won several awards and interview such celebrities such as Katharine Hepburn, John Wayne, Clayton Moore, B.B. King, and Rudolph Nureyev.

She has a life-long love of writing and riding, and got her first horse and her first author autograph at eleven. After earning a B.A. in Journalism at University of Washington, she taught writing at a private school, wrote for romance and horse magazines, such as Modern Romance and Western Horseman, and began her career as reporter.

She also received a number of awards as horsewoman, including the 2012 American Paint Horse Association’s National Honor Roll Championship in Amateur Walk-Trot Horsemanship and Trail, and Reserve National Championship in Amateur Walk-Trot Western Pleasure.

Today Carole T. Beers still rides and writes. She pens mystery and adventure books and stories for adults and teens and her book Saddle Tramps combines two sassy women, show horses and crimes. She has also written a forthcoming novella, The Stone Horse, inspired by Zuni carvings of spirit animals, contributed to the collaborative mystery novel, Naked Came the Rogue, and has several projects in the works. We talked about her recently released Saddle Tramps.

EB: Tell us about Saddle Tramps.

CTB: The book is a fast and fun read set in the high-stakes western horse-show world — a world seldom if ever explored in fiction. In many ways it speaks of a New American West, where old traditions such as courage, honor, and connections to horses and the land are challenged by new yet strangely familiar crimes and passions. Retired reporter, Pepper Kane, aided by her Lakota-policeman lover, Sonny Chief, and her horsey buddies, tracks down the killer of a valuable stallion. And yes, there’s a gunfight at the end!

EB: Saddle Tramps is kind of a western but set in modern Gold Hill. How did you choose the setting and time period?

CTB: I write what I know. Both from my own heritage and history, but also what’s happening now. I wanted readers to experience some of the pride and other emotions I carry for the New West, which for me is in Oregon, Washington and California. And of course to learn something of this area — mainly the Rogue River Valley, first chronicled in Zane Grey novels of nearly a century ago. Tiny Gold Hill, where our heroine lives, is where in 1850 a five-pound nugget was found, launching the Oregon Gold Rush a year after the famous rush in California. I lived in Gold Hill once. The region is breathtakingly beautiful and truly Western flavored!

EB: You kill a horse at the very beginning. Did you worry that readers might be upset?

CTB: A bit. But I wanted to start the story with a bang, show its horse centeredness in a subdued yet compellng way, and then quickly get on with the crime-solving without offing a human. I’ve worked up to killing people in my present writing projects.

EB: I was fascinated with the description of the showhorse culture. Which characters were the most fun to write?

CTB: The heroine, naturally, but also her elusive but devilishly handsome lover, Sonny Chief. He is a traditional Lakota man, but also moves well through the modern world. Pepper’s buddies, such as her sassy best friend and dramatically inclined hairdresser, Freddie Uffenpinscher, additionally got me up and writing happy. Ditto that self-important, grizzly-bear sheriff who harasses Pepper for messing with his investigation!

EB: Pepper Kane is horsewoman and former journalist and so are you. Are you like Pepper?

CTB: There are several things an author and a lady shouldn’t tell (but sometimes does): Her age, how the book ends, and the names of real people who inspired certain characters. However, as I cannot sue myself. I confess that she and I share many qualities — with her name and some details changed to protect the guilty.

EB: You were also an award-winning journalist with the Seattle Times. What were some of the highlights of that experience?

CTB: Talking with and digging up facts about all manner of people, dead or alive, still stand as a cumulative highlight of my nearly forty-year newspaper career. I wrote news about lawbreakers and lawmakers. But mainly I wrote features, reviews and profile obituaries. I still feel privileged to have known leaders in the arts, business, politics, science, education and spiritual ways, as well as cowboys, cooks, test pilots, farmers, loggers, housewives and the homeless, I covered visits by Queen Elizabeth and Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton as well as by arts luminaries such as John Wayne, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Peggy Lee, B.B. King, Frank Sinatra, Jr. and writer J.A. Jance. It is not so much the news from Microsoft, Boeing or the City of Seattle that I remember, but the people, and their sharing of deep and fascinating stories.

EB: How has your work as a journalist informed your fiction writing?

CTB: I am not satisfied with presenting sketchy stories, settings or personalities. I am driven to go long, go deep, and bring out the hidden quirk or fact. Then deliver it with flow, cleanly and compellingly to readers. Make it so I’d want to read it. If I don’t care, why should they?

EB: You were also the dance critic, so I need to ask you this. How is dance like horse riding?

CTB: Both require centeredness, in-the-moment yet forward focus, ever-changing balance, an ability to isolate and use different muscle groups, attunement to one’s terrain (stage) and co-performer. In ballet, as in show riding, one is pulled up and out looking, yet oddly relaxed, Moving with purpose, conviction. Yes, I am a dancer. With a thousand-pound partner who speaks no English!

EB: What are you working on currently?

CTB: You mean besides marketing myself and Saddle Tramps? I recall you said one of your interview subjects said he was too busy being an author, to write! I am beginning to write a second Pepper Kane mystery, tentatively titled Final Cut, about the mysterious death of a leading horse judge at a world championship show in Texas. I’m also doing a rewrite of a young-adult novel, Hannah and the Mustangs, and readying several short stories for publication in short-story eZines.

EB: Tell us a little about your writing process.

CTB: Ideas and writing directions bubble in my brain just about 24/7. Sometimes I deal with them consciously, sometimes not. But when an idea for a character or situation keeps returning, I will jot a note. Mainly I write a bit every day, usually in the morning, when I and the day are fresh. From one to four hours, depending how it’s going. My best writing times are when the plot or character is at a critical point. Then I have to sit there tapping keys until it’s all resolved. The best inspiration, aside from reading authors you like, is write what YOU like!

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

CTB: It was a great interview, Ed. Your questions cut to the heart of what we do, and make us think constructively about what we do. So we can maybe do it better.

Carole T. Beers’s Saddle Tramps is available at Bloomsbury Books in Ashland, Oregon, and in print and eReader formats online.

Portland author Jason Gurley is the author of the novels Greatfall, The Man Who Ended the World, The Settlers, The Colonists, and the short story collection Deep Breath Hold Tight. His novel Eleanor was acquired by Crown Publishing in the U.S., HarperCollins in the U.K., and will be translated into Turkish, German, and Portuguese.
Gurley’s short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed Magazine and the anthologies, among them Loosed Upon the World and Help Fund My Robot Army!!!

On September 7, he will be reading at Bloomsbury Books in Ashland at 7 pm.

You can learn more about this work at www.jasongurley.com.

EB: Tell us a little about your background?

JG: I come from Alaska, and from Texas; I’ve spent half my life or more divided between those two very different homes. I started writing as a kid, but got serious about it in high school, when a very special writing teacher lit a fire under me. These days I spend just about all of my time in Portland, Oregon, with my family. By day I design software interfaces, and in the evenings or on weekends, I write stories.

EB: How did the idea for Eleanor come about?

JG: In retrospect, it’s far easier to understand what Eleanor was and where it came from, but at the time, it was quite mysterious to me. I was in my early twenties and returning from a holiday road trip to the Oregon coast, and in the wee early hours — when you’re driving in the pre-dawn hours, your mind wanders, you know — a very particular sentence came to me: For all of her life, Eleanor had been falling. That struck me as a nice line, and I knew nothing about this Eleanor character, so as I drove, I toyed with the line, building on it. And by the time I reached home — Reno, at the time — I had the rough shape of the story.
Looking back, however, it’s clear that Eleanor emerged from the things I was most struggling with in my life at that time. And while the novel that you’ve read is nothing like the novel it was then, there’s still a great deal of myself and my own fears and questions in this book.

EB: Is a psychological story but also about alternate realities but also a family story that features a fouteen-year old protagonist. Who is your ideal reader or audience?

JG: Oh, I think it’s me. I try my best not to think too much about a particular reader as I’m writing; I find that, for me, imagining the preferences or desires or tastes of the eventual audience will steer me away from writing something honest. I tend to write the weird little stories that capture my own imagination, and if there are people in the world who are interested in that, too, then it all shakes out just fine. I’m a rather emotional writer, too; if a scene wrecks me, I’m doing something right. And Eleanor wrecked me, many times over.

EB: Was it difficulty to write from the point of view of a fourteen-year-old girl?

JG: You know, I’ve been asked many times why I chose to write from that particular point of view, but I’m not sure if anyone’s asked me if it was difficult to do so. That’s an interesting wrinkle. I suppose I’d say yes, because I’ve never been a fourteen-year-old girl, and I’m sure I missed quite a bit of the nuance that makes a young girl’s voice unique. But Eleanor’s also deeply curious, very quiet; she listens rather than speaks; she longs for a past that never quite belonged to her. I have many things in common with this character, and I hope those things come through with an honesty that brings her even more to life for a reader.

EB: I liked the way that the fantastical elements combined with the story of Eleanor’s family’s grief. Do you think that fantasy or just stories help us cope with the world?

JG: Absolutely. Perhaps more so in our youth, although the novel certainly throws that hypothesis out the window. Writing stories has always helped me in that regard, though I’m not always aware of it at the time. The women in this novel are at the mercy of consequences, with so little control over the events that set these repercussions in motion. I found it interesting to explore how their interior lives might blur the lines of reality and fantasy, to see if grief was something that might break down the boundaries between what’s real and what isn’t. But the other realities that surface in this book aren’t the same for everyone; some take comfort in it, while others are far more exposed and vulnerable.

EB: You wrote Eleanor over a long period with several breaks from it. Do you find it’s helpful to put a project aside and then come back to it fresh? Did it cause you to rethink the characters or plot?

JG: As I get older I find myself doing this more and more. I’ve been working on a new project since late 2014, and it seems to reveal itself to me in enormous waves. Now and then I have to put it aside and let myself think about it for a while, and inevitably, I’ll discover some little maneuver, some new facet that catches the light in a different way, and it will cause me to reconsider much of the book. That doesn’t mean it isn’t frustrating; it can be. But it does seem to be part of my ill-defined process these days.

With Eleanor the periods away from the novel were both short and long, both intentional and un-. The novel took nearly fifteen years, but of course that wasn’t fifteen uninterrupted years of writing. There were false starts, entire drafts thrown away, diversions and detours. Those were as important as the writing time, in the end; in those gaps, I grew up, had more experiences, met and married my wife, became a father. All of those things informed the novel that Eleanor became, and I think it’s a far better book as a result.

Of course, I’d like to write my next book a little more quickly.

EB: You’ve released some of your previous books yourself and this time are trying Crown Publishing. How would you compare the two experiences?

JG: Both experiences have been so rewarding, in both different and similar ways. I self-published a novel, The Man Who Ended the World, in early 2013, and it was a revelation for me. At that point in my life, I’d been writing novels for about sixteen years — and aside from my family and a few friends, none of them had ever been read. That first step into self-publishing led me to readers, and that was utterly intoxicating and terrifying and wonderful. Some of those readers have stuck with me, which I’m grateful for.

Working with my editors at Crown, and watching a novel born into the world with the assistance of so many other people, has been a wild experience as well. There are things that, as a self-published author, I couldn’t easily achieve on my own — and yet my publisher accomplishes them with ease. I still get a charge when I walk into an unfamiliar bookstore and see my own novel on the shelf, usually a stone’s throw from David Guterson or Lev Grossman.

EB: Given the way, this book evolved, what do you think about the future of the publishing business and the ability of authors to work in different modes of publishing? Are things getting more flexible for authors?

JG: Oh, that certainly seems to be the case. There are more roads for authors to take than ever before, and I think that’s a good thing for authors, and mostly a good thing for readers. The volume of books that appear in the world each day has certainly increased; it’s both harder and easier to find something to read these days. Harder in the sense that there’s much more to sort through; easier in that there are far more people writing in narrow niches now than ever before, so readers with very particular tastes may find that they’re no longer limited to the one or two authors of whom they’d previously been aware. It’s certainly an interesting time for people who love books.

EB: What do you do when you are not writing books?

JG: I spend as much time as I can with my family. Recently, the majority of that time has been spent packing and unpacking, or making little changes to our new home. My happiest times are spent reading with my four-year-old daughter, or having tickle fights. And if I’m not doing that, I can usually be found in one of my few holy places: in a bookstore, at a ballgame, in a movie theater, or at a good diner, reading a book.

EB: Any future projects you’d like to let folks know about?

JG: At the moment I’m working on a young adult novel, which is an exciting new adventure. I’ve got an idea for a collection of short stories, or perhaps a very weird novel, that I’ll indulge eventually. At any given moment I have one project on my plate, and about fifty attempting to distract me from writing it. If I can focus on one, I’m good.

EB: Thanks for talking with us. I really enjoyed Eleanor.

JG: It’s been my pleasure, Ed — thanks for having me, and for giving my book a chance!