NEWS/ARTS WHAT’S THE STORY, MORNING GLORY?
LAU R IE PEAR M AN
Alley Repertory Theater will pull back the curtains once again for its second-annual reading series Plays From the Alley at Visual Arts Collective. Four local playwrights have been invited to collaborate with local directors and actors to present unfinished scripts in front of a live audience. A postreading chat and survey forms will help the playwrights strengthen their works-in-progress. These collaborations take place each Monday in July. This season’s roster includes Phil Atlakson on July 5 with The Primordial State of Every Single Thing, a play about a married couple and their son’s 2D body pillow lover. On July 12, see Evan Sesek’s Champagne Breakfast, the story of a 20-somethings’ love triangle. On July 19, Mary Steelsmith presents her Isaac, I Am, a play about an online chatroom-loving woman. Jef Peterson’s The Apple Doesn’t Fall, a play about a married woman’s return to her childhood home, takes center stage on July 26. Readings start at 7:30 p.m., and picnics are encouraged. For more information, visit alleyrep.org. In other Alley Rep news, Story Story Night—the company’s live storytelling collaboration with the Cabin and the Boise State Story Initiative—has hit full stride. The theme of the next Moth-inspired event, which is on Monday, June 21, is “Falling for it: Stories of Gullibility.” The evening’s three featured storytellers are Mike Jackson, who will recount the story of his search for a knock-off Louis Vuitton on Canal Street, Charmagne Westcott speaking about the life of a child raised by Carnies, and Tony McKnight telling a tale of a 6-year-old English boy who cons the gullible. The event begins at 7 p.m. at the Linen Building and features a full bar to ease storyteller’s (and listeners’) nervous jitters. Other upcoming Story Story Nights include “On the Road: Stories of Travel,” on Monday, July 19, and “Dog Days: Stories of Summer” on Monday, Aug. 23. For more info, visit storystorynight.org. Also in full swing, is Idaho Shakespeare Festival, now in its 34th year. This season’s lineup of plays includes classics such as A Midsummer’s Night Dream and some ver y unexpected surprises such as the Weekly World News-inspired Bat Boy: The Musical. For a review of Bat Boy, visit boiseweekly.com. If you’re looking for a hands-on artistic experience, the Idaho Center for Art and Crafts (formerly the Mend Project) has an upcoming adult metalsmithing course titled Creating an Adornment Anthology. On Saturday, June 19, from 10 a.m.-6 p.m., course registrants will create a collection of handconstructed wearable jewelry pieces using personal or vintage items like crocheted handkerchiefs and cufflinks. Cost is $80. For more information, visit theidahoschoolartandcraft.wordpress.com.
ARTS/VISUAL
LOOKING AHEAD Anthony Doerr on his new collection, Memory Wall BILL ENGLISH Anthony Doerr’s three-year tenure as Idaho’s writer-in-residence ends this month, and he’ll mark the occasion with the publication of a new book. Memory Wall—his first collection of short stories since his acclaimed The Shell Collector in 2002—is a feast of exotic locales and deftly created characters. The two novellas and four short stories are set on four different continents as Doerr explores the lives of people living in China, South Africa, Germany, Korea, Lithuania, magazine) placed him on its list of the “21 Wyoming and Idaho. Best Young American novelists” after the “I often argue that a story collection’s publication of his first novel, About Grace. greatest strength is that it has the potenRecently, Doerr was awarded a Guggenheim tial to roam more widely than a novel,” Fellowship, which comes with a check for Doerr explained one afternoon over lunch. “Between the covers of a single book, you’ll more than $40,000. As Idaho’s writer-in-residence, Doerr find protagonists of all ages with different served as a literary ambassador for Idaho. stories to tell. In a sense, you’re getting Cort Conley, Idaho Commission on the more for your money in a short story colArts’ literature program director, said Doerr lection: a dozen different windows into will be missed when he the world, rather than the steps down. single, sustained window “So far, every former of a novel.” Idaho writer-in-residence Utilizing a tight, almost has left a large pair of Hemingway-like apshoes to fill,” Conley said. proach to language, Doerr “After Doerr’s amiable, achieves clarity by pruning graceful residency—what? away excess, drawing the Sasquatch?” reader into a realm that is Being the writer-inat once familiar and exotic. residence offered Doerr the “I never think of the opportunity to take giant potential power of my footsteps toward learning writing,” Doerr said. “I more about Idaho and its never think of it in grand citizens. terms. I’m just trying to “I’ve read in towns like create something seamless Coeur d’Alene, Moscow, and interesting. I work Rexburg, Driggs and almost entirely by instinct Twin Falls,” Doerr said. and doubt. I doubt my “I’ve discovered there’s a work all the way through quiet hunger for books and the process, and after it’s literature throughout the published, I doubt it even Anthony Doerr will sign copies of state. I’ve gotten to meet more.” Memor y Wall on Thursday, hundreds of kids and hopeDoerr might be alone in July 8, 7 p.m., $10. fully, I’ve shown them that that doubt. During the past THE LINEN BUILDING you don’t have to be from eight years, he has emerged 1402 Grove St. Paris or New York to be a as a highly respected writer linenbuilding.com full-time writer.” among readers, literary As inspiring as cities organizations and his peers. like Paris, New York and His short fiction won three the other locales Doerr writes about are, O. Henry Prizes. He has been honored he didn’t need to visit each one to give with the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, Memory Wall its vivid sense of place. the Rome Prize, and the New York Public “In ‘Village 113,’ the exact location of Library’s Young Lions of Fiction Award. where the story is set is never specified,” In 2007, Granta (a quarterly literary
Everything is looking up for local author Anthony Doerr.
Doerr explained. “I have been to Hong Kong, but never to mainland China. I used my journals from my travels to the Far East and combined them with research and imagination to create a sense of place. Sometimes I feel it’s better to write a story away from the place you’re writing about.” The title piece of Doerr’s new collection is the story of 74-year-old Alma Konachek, a woman from Cape Town, South Africa, whose memories have been harvested and recorded on cartridges, which are commonly traded on the street like DVDs. Devious characters quickly discover that one of Alma’s recollections might reveal the location of something hidden, priceless and extremely rare. An exciting story full of visual possibilities, Memory Wall would be a perfect candidate for the movies. It comes as no surprise that someone else thought so, too. “We’ve already optioned the film rights to that novella,” Doerr acknowledged, “but I don’t think I’m the screenwriter type. I’m too fond of being a narrator and controlling where a reader’s attention goes. “In a story or a novel, a writer gets to be director, actor, cinematographer and sound editor. Film is too collaborative. I prefer to work with language. You need $1 million to make a good movie. All you need to make a persuasive novel is a pencil and a ream of paper.” As the 36-year-old Doerr approaches mid-career, he suggests that his perspective on the writing life has changed. “I know now that good work comes from a pure and truthful place inside,” Doerr said. “That the best work is not guided by thoughts about what folks might like to see or what might sell. The best work comes from the love of an idea and spending thousands of hours seeing that idea to fruition.”
—Tara Morgan
30 | JUNE 16–22, 2010 | BOISEweekly
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