Melissa Sillitoe and Luke Lefler Promote Portland Arts & Culture Three Friends At A Time

This post is authored by contributor, Teresa Bergen.  Ms. Bergen is the author of the novel Killing The President, and in addition to writing, transcribes and edits oral histories, paints animal portraits, makes costume devil horns, teaches yoga, and plays bass in an indie rock band.

I first met Melissa Sillitoe and Luke Lefler in August of 2008, when my band played in Melissa’s living room. It wasn’t the first living room we’d played in, but it was the first one that was open as an art gallery for First Thursday. Someone was showing art on the walls, and Melissa had arranged for both music and spoken word performances. Luke had all his equipment set up to podcast the event. I wondered about this woman who was so devoted to creative expression that she’d named her home the Show and Tell Gallery and opened it to the public

Later, Melissa asked us to play another event that she and Luke co-produced, and I learned about their performance series at the Three Friends Coffeehouse in Southeast Portland. Every Monday night from 7-8 PM (tonight’s event features the father/daughter death-pop duo Tortune), they arrange for three friends to perform together. It might be music, or poetry, or prose, or anything else they want to do. By the end of last year they had added an open mic to follow the featured readers. All of this was recorded, podcast and archived by Luke.

I’m extremely impressed by their dedication to fostering people’s art. They each spend fifteen to twenty unpaid hours a week on producing, promoting and archiving events. They let me interview them at the New Seasons on Interstate last weekend so I could find out about their collaboration and their passion for encouraging people to produce art.

Melissa grew up in Salt Lake City. Luke is from Washington. Both were involved in many creative activities from childhood. Melissa enjoyed dancing, coloring, painting, making believe, and especially writing. As an adult, she stopped writing for some years. “I tried really hard to just separate myself from being introspective, and tried to be a very different kind of person,” she said. “And it didn’t work. And I started being creative again. I started writing again. And then I came to Portland.”

Luke watched a lot of television and movies as a child. “I sort of got hooked on television comedy and scary movies and comic books and pop music, and was fascinated by what made that stuff happen,” he said. “And as I grew up, I looked into the other side of it, being behind the camera, being the writer, being the dreamer, the visionary.” When he got older, he became more interested in music, especially in being a radio disc jockey. He liked being “the gatekeeper of culture,” as he put it.

When Melissa moved to Portland in a few years back, she was determined to make art her priority. Not a fan of poetry readings in Utah, she was reluctant to attend Portland open mics. But a friend finally dragged her to one. “I read and it was just awful,” she said. “I had done public speaking in jobs before. But standing up there and reading my poetry, it was like I had no skin.” She kept going back anyway. “The people were friendly,” she said. “And I needed to make friends.” After regularly attending two open mics a week for a year, she knew lots of people. So she had plenty of talent to call on when she began hostessing events.

Luke and Melissa met in spring of 2008, at a performance event that Melissa was hostessing at the now defunct Rake Gallery. Luke was impressed that although Melissa was attractive and well dressed, she was warm, welcoming and unpretentious. “I’d been looking for a podcasting gig,” he said. “It just kind of clicked. What better thing to podcast than original performances here in Portland? So I announced that I was interested. Melissa said yes immediately.”

At first, Melissa wasn’t sure if it would work out. “I remember trying to make it very clear to Luke that I didn’t think we were going to make any money,” she said. “And then when I got to know Luke better, I realized just how passionate he is about art, and also about archiving events. And just that he was really solid. I mean, really early on working together, I knew if Luke said he would do something, he would do it. And that hasn’t always been true with everyone I met.”

Luke had his show, Baron Landscape’s Broken Hours, on KBOO from 1983-1993. After that, he lost touch with the Portland arts world. By the time he met Melissa, he was ready to reconnect with creative people. “Melissa appealed to me as someone who could attract people, who had a good sense of community,” he said. “She was brimming with enthusiasm and ideas. And I’m the kind of person that likes to sort of sit back and maybe kind of actually crawl in a hole and work on stuff in a studio. I’m not a huge people person. So I would be very poor at trying to go out and drum up contacts. And I saw that through Melissa, I could meet all kinds of different people.”

So what makes the open mic at Three Friends different from similar events? The times I’ve been there, I’ve found the participants especially encouraging, and the regulars feel so comfortable that it verges on support group. On a recent Monday, one open mic poet announced from the stage that he’d suffered a breakup. Another shared with the crowd that his father had just died. A guitar player announced his phone number, hoping somebody listening on the podcast would call him just to connect. One guy even did an extemporaneous show and tell with a rock that had special meaning to him, ending in an exhortation to the audience to see beauty and not lose faith in life.

“For some people, that’s really their chance every week to be an artist,” Melissa said. “And so we both take that seriously.” She and Luke work to make a safe space for people to share all kinds of artistic expression. “One of the dreams I had, that I had tried out at Rake, is I wanted to do an open mic that wasn’t just poetry,” Melissa said. “That really was a show and tell. That was poetry, music and art. At a lot of the poetry open mics, if you stand up there and read a story, they’re going to get mad. Which, you know, that’s cool. I’m not dissing the other open mics.” Melissa has been happy to see many different expressions of art, including off the cuff storytelling. “Maybe someday someone will do a dance,” she said.

Luke sees turning on an open mic as an act of revolution. “You’re saying, ‘Come on, give it your best shot,’” he said. “And to me that opens the door for something amazing, if it’s going to happen.” Luke enjoys facilitating other people’s moment in the spotlight. “I know exactly how important it is. And so I bring to it a level of sensitivity. I want people to get the credit if they want it. I want to spell names right. I want to take flattering pictures. I want to do everything that helps it come off the way that they want it to. Because some of these people that perform, perform all the time, and it’s no big deal to them. But we do get a lot of people that come in for their first time. It’s a big deal.”

Is it hard to keep an event going week after week, and produce other events on the side, all without pay? Sometimes Luke and Melissa feel less inspired than other times, but they show up anyway.

In addition to intangible contributions like time and energy, Luke has faced excessive computer demands. “When I started doing this,” he said, “I was thinking okay, well we’re just going to get this stuff captured and put it out there. I never thought of like one day I was going to have 400 megabytes of .wav files and thousands of megs of photographs of all this stuff. It just didn’t even occur to me. And so, yeah, I’ve had to invest in external hard drives and the whole nine yards. And I treat it like gold. I really do. Every scooting chair and creaking microphone stand.”

In between events, the co-producers try to work on their own art. Melissa recently published some poetry in the Bear Deluxe. Now she is weighing the pros and cons of electronic publishing versus the traditional poetry chapbook. Luke wants to polish seven or eight of his favorite songs he’s written and perform them as a song cycle.

What advice would they give people who think they might want to perform at an open mic, but are nervous? Melissa stressed the advantages of committing to regular attendance. “It gave me a reason to write,” she said. “Because with poetry, you don’t have deadlines. And so it’s really easy to just kind of get into a rut. If no one’s pressuring you to make art, it’s really easy not to find time to do it. So if you find an open mic where you feel comfortable, you get to know the people a little bit, it can be a really great creative tool as a writer. Also, you have the instant gratification that you don’t always get as a writer of being able to publish, to get out there and get your writing out there. And you get reactions to it, too, from other writers.”

Both Luke and Melissa advise showing up once or twice before committing to reading, to get the feel for the atmosphere. It you want to read, get there early to sign up. And try to let go of your expectations. It may or may not go well, but it’s important to take the chance.

“I would also like to think that the open mics don’t belong to any particular group of people, or any individuals,” Luke said. It’s an open mic, you know. This is your show.”