Read to Rebuild Interview: Laura Moulton

Please join us Tuesday, March 16 at The Writers’ Dojo for Read to Rebuild: A Haiti Reading Benefit, featuring six outstanding Portland writers. This is the first in a special series of interviews with each of these readers.  Look for more Read to Rebuild interviews in the next few days.

Laura Moulton earned an MFA from Eastern Washington University. She has taught writing workshops in prisons, universities and a shelter for homeless teens. Her zines and art projects have featured postal workers, immigrants and artists. Her public art project, Object Permanence, was commissioned by Portland State University in 2009, and is installed permanently in the Smith Student Union Building.

Laura currently teaches writing residencies at the Portland Art Museum for Writers in the Schools. Her work has been featured in Hip Mama, Nervy Girl, Portland Tribune, and Brain, Child. She is at work on a novel set in Provo, Utah in the early 90s.

Q: Hi! You’re a writer, an artist, an activist — you work in many media and formats. One theme of your work seems to be some level of engagement with audience, whether that’s a call to action or an invitation to submit a treasured object to the Object Permanence exhibition. Do you work with an audience in mind, however obliquely? Does the idea of engaging readers or viewers often come parceled with your inspiration, or does it show up later, when you’re refining and revising?

A: I am a great fan of the social practice/social sculpture movement that draws art out of the gallery and museum and into the streets, into unexpected places. I like it because it generally has a community component, a level of engagement with people that you don’t see in a more conventional format (like a painting on a wall in a gallery, say). And I think this art form translates well into writing projects as well. Those I love the best are ones that wind up pulling a very disparate-seeming group of people together and giving them a chance to relate to one another, so that their differences enhance the underlying narrative, create interesting new layers and sort of riff off each other.

As a temp worker at the post office one Christmas holiday, I created a yearbook that featured Polaroid pictures of all the temp workers, (ranging in age from 19-84, all races, some from Taiwan, Bolivia and Mexico) plus their hobbies, etc. and I was surprised at how invested everyone got in the project, how on the last day everyone signed each other’s “yearbooks” and hugged goodbye – even the grumpiest curmudgeons got misty-eyed.

Creating opportunities for unexpected, playful community interaction is one of the things I liked about Gumball Poetry, which vended poetry out of gumball machines in cafes and bookstores across the States. I loved the idea that someone in Missoula, Montana could feed a quarter into a machine and receive a piece of bubble gum and a killer poem by an Australian writer.

So I think that it’s true that when I do projects, I work with the idea of an audience in mind, even though I might not yet know how precisely they will be involved. With Object Permanence, I wanted to involve as many people in this as possible. So I had two artist assistants that acted as “Collectors” and went out to the community of students and collected their significant objects and their stories. I installed these in the Object Mobile but then continued a kind of informal solicitation of objects from people who passed by on the university campus, encouraging them to describe their own objects by typing on antique typewriters. And then there is the on-line submission form, where people can still participate in the project by submitting photos and stories of their own precious objects.

So yeah, I do think that I thrive on a certain level of engagement with an audience and it very much informs the kinds of projects I do. The exception I suppose is the work I’m doing on my novel, which requires a pretty solitary effort. But even that has the potential to involve community (i.e. the other day I posted on Facebook: “My main character is stuck at a Halloween party in 1990, where she’s just counted 3 teenage mutant ninja turtles. What other costumes does she see?” and I got all kinds of great responses ranging from Madonna to Pat, the androgynous character from Saturday Night Live).  So I guess with most everything, there’s the potential for audience participation.

By the way, if your readers are interested, there is a great, new-ish MFA program at Portland State University founded by my friend Harrell called Art & Social Practices that explores this kind of art with a built-in level of community engagement.

Q: You’ve been involved with Project Hamad, tracking the detainment of Adel Hamad, a Sudanese man held for several years at Guantanamo Bay (he’s since been repatriated.) Can you say a little bit about the nature and purpose of the project? How did you get involved with the project, what part did you play, and what’s the continuing role for the project now that Mr. Hamad is home?

A: Three of us (Me, my husband Ben and our friend David) created Project Hamad during a time that felt very bleak, politically. There was a lot of secrecy around the detention of prisoners at Guantanamo in the name of national security, and what news we did know was really terrible (revelation of abuses at Abu Ghraib, the passage of the Military Commissions Act which suspended habeas corpus, etc.)

I first learned of Adel Hamad from an article in the Portland Tribune, and when we found that the lawyers volunteering to represent him were from a Portland firm, we approached them with our idea to try and create a campaign around this one man. They agreed to meet with us, and after determining that we were sincere in our interest, and not complete wingnuts, they handed over a huge case file to us.

So in the beginning, that was our main task: to create a story from all the information on Adel.  After the years of anonymity of those detained by the United States, it seemed that bringing to light one story could help people understand that there were detainees who were innocent, who had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who had been swept up in the war on terror and had languished in prison ever since. That was certainly the case with Adel Hamad.

So David and I created the content and Ben took over when it came to creating the website (he is the web developer part of my projects, by the way – I couldn’t program my way out of a paper sack). We studied the ways viral marketing had worked commercially and in art projects (like the spread of Andre the Giant Has A Posse, Shepard Fairey’s project, for instance) and created a look and design that we hoped would work in the same way.

At the 5-year anniversary of Adel Hamad’s detention, I sent 2nd hand anniversary cards to Rumsfeld, Bush and Condoleeza Rice (hers was a card with two swans with their necks crossing – in a pink envelope). Many people became “members” of Project Hamad, (nearly a thousand names at last count) and we got good press from the Willamette [Week], the Tribune and some national papers. A year after we began our campaign, Adel Hamad was released.

It’s hard to know how helpful we were in the end, but I don’t imagine it hurt to have that publicity out there, to have those in charge receiving letters from constituents and pressure from politicians. I always believed that telling a simple story well could make a difference, and that if people just knew that Adel had a great sense of humor, that he was a mean ping pong player and helped refugees for a living, then something would have to give. Because our country wouldn’t detain a man like this for years without a trial, right? And then send him home with not even a fruit basket.

But in the end, that’s basically what happened. Adel Hamad is home in Sudan with his family, which is great, but he’s still waiting for his day in court.

Q: You’ve also contributed (under the auspices of Gumball Poetry) to the excellent online Psychic Book Project, in which Madame Lola’s robotic dog Pietro recommends books to readers (with good results, I can attest.) So I think it’s safe to say that you’re interested in the playful as well as the profound. How do you see those two tendencies interacting in your own work? How do you stay light and grounded at the same time?

A: My original idea with the Psychic Book Project was to have people submit information to Madame Lola, who would divine the perfect book for them and then actually buy a used copy, fill it with intriguing marginalia ( a few well chosen phrases, poems, etc.) and objects (pressed leaves or flowers, a recipe for lentil loaf, a love note, you get the idea).

It was the kind of thing I would love to receive in the mail, wrapped in brown paper, and I thought it would be great to do it for other people. But once the first orders came in, I panicked and realized that unless I wanted to fill Psychic Book orders full-time (and you can imagine it wasn’t the most lucrative business model) I was going to have to make some changes. Ben stepped in with his mad web skills and helped me automate it. It’s possible I’ll go back to the handmade-real-live-book model someday, but for now I trust Pietro to help me.

In terms of how the playful and profound interact, and staying light and grounded at the same time, I guess that I try to maintain a certain level of humor in my work. Or I might insert a bizarre or unexpected scene in what is otherwise a serious passage.

The novel I’m working on right now is at heart a fairly serious coming-of-age story about a young woman in Provo, Utah, set in the early 90s. It has all the angst and grappling-with-faith stuff you’d expect of a story set at a religious university. But there is a lot of humor in it as well, the way the prankster characters chafe against the rules imposed on them, and the way they interact with those among them who are more faithful and compliant. So I believe it’s very possible to have something that takes itself seriously (whether an art project or a piece of writing) contain elements of humor and playfulness at the same time.

Q: You teach writing in several settings — what do you tell beginning writers as they start to learn about genre and form? Do you find that most of your students gravitate naturally toward one genre or another — say, poetry vs the personal essay? What tricks, exercises, or strategies do you use to help new writers who are afraid to try something?

A: At the beginning of my residencies, I talk to students about the importance of being a keen observer and documenter of their experiences. I ask them to look with fresh eyes at their surroundings and daily life and to keep a journal if they don’t already – this is the raw material from which we’ll craft our stories and poems. And early on, our focus is on generating as much writing as we can.

I think for many of my students, it’s easiest in the beginning to just write their own stories. No invention required, really: there it is, hanging in the air right in front of them, this experience that already exists, whether it’s “what happened to me last summer” or “the divorce” and they need only to bend over their papers and write it down on paper. So in this way, I’d say personal essays might be an easier genre to start with.

I often begin my writing residencies by asking students to simply make a list of things they know about (I learned this from the great Portland writer Martha Gies). This can be a list of things they are experts at, or things they are just generally familiar with, (over the years I’ve gotten stuff like what it’s like to win first prize, what it’s like to have an alcoholic father, what it’s like to have sex in a car, etc.). This simple list provides the backbone for the rest of what we do in the residency. It effectively sidesteps whatever “I don’t know what to write/I haven’t got anything to write about” impulse students might have had, because it’s right there on the paper in front of them.

Right now I’m teaching a residency at the Portland Art Museum to Lincoln High School students, which has been really fascinating. We’re able to interact with the art there and much of the writing that’s come from the students so far has been really terrific. This week we will tour the current exhibit called “Disquieted,” which is definitely worth a visit.

Q: What have you read lately and loved? What book does Pietro the Robotic Dog recommend you read next? And…any hints about what you’ll read at the benefit on March 16?

A: I’ve read a couple of short stories that stand out: Graham Greene’s “Cheap in August” and a short story called “Intervention” by Jill McCorkle. Both really knocked me on my back because the narration is a very intimate-feeling 3rd person, and since I’m trying for that myself in the novel I’m working on, I like studying how others have done it.

I’ve also been rereading a few graphic novels, in preparation to use them with my high school students. Sentences: The Life and Times of M.F. Grimm by Percy Carey is really good. So is Blankets, by Craig Thompson and The Arrival by Shaun Tan. Definite must-reads.

I took my own online survey and Pietro the Robotic Dog recommended that I read Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, by Fatema Mernissi, which is very exciting because I’ve never heard of it. I placed a hold on it at the library. It adds an extra layer of intrigue to get a book recommendation from a fictional Robotic Dog, doesn’t it? Not that Pietro isn’t real.

As far as what I’ll read at the Haiti benefit, I’m pretty it will be from my novel-in-progress, and that will be good because I haven’t read from it since summer, when I presented at a Mormon symposium in Salt Lake City. So we’ll see how it goes over with a Portland audience.