Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013, October 20, 2000, Page 43, Image 43

Below is the OCR text representation for this newspapers page. It is also available as plain text as well as XML.

    October 2 0 .2 0 0 0 <
1 ast of Portland in the Eagle Creek wilder­
ness is the 52-acre We’Moon Women’s
Land, where a handful of women known as
¡¡¡li Mother Tongue Ink annually produces
We’Moon: Gaia Rhythms for Womyn, an anthol­
ogy of women’s art and writing and an astrolog­
ical calendar.
One of those women is Amy Schutzer, who
left a job, security and a house in familiar
Northeast Portland to move to We’Moon and
concentrate on her writing. Having just pub­
lished her first novel, Undertow, it appears the
daring leap is paying off.
Originally from New Jersey, Schutzer attend­
ed Antioch College during the 70s. The cur­
riculum demanded some practical work-study,
which she decided to fulfill on the West Coast.
Fortunately for poetry and prose lovers in
Oregon, nothing was available in San Francis­
co— “where I wanted to go”—so Schutzer
struck out for the wilds of “Orygone.” (Her pro­
nunciation since has improved.)
“1 was pretty naive about the whole West
Coast in general, and I just loved it,” Schutzer
explains. “I mean, from the very first moment I
got here.”
She moved out permanently after earning
her communications degree in 1979. Her first
Portland digs were in the Lair Hill neighbor­
hood “in a hippie household," but she eventu­
ally moved to Northeast Portland, where she
worked full-time in various jobs and eventually
bought a house.
And once she moved to Oregon, her sexual
orientation became clear. Because Undertow
depicts young dykes discovering and eagerly
experimenting with their desires during the
early 70s, I assumed Schutzer had done the
same. I looked forward to her stories about rad­
ical university women in the sexual and social
revolution.
But “I was just kind of clueless,” she admits.
“Even though there was so much going on with
the women’s movement, it didn’t kind of trick­
le down to me. I was very out of the loop.”
She caught up with the loop here, though,
and incorporated her sense of lesbian identity
into her writing.
“It broadened my view and opened up new
avenues,” Schutzer observes. “Politically, it
opened my eyes a bit to not just always feeling
like some sort of an outsider. It gave me voice.
What is that feeling about— I could put some
names to that: I’m a lesbian, I’ve always felt
that way.”
Schutzer’s poetry has been published in a
variety of local and national publications,
including Fireweed, Common Lives/Lesbian Lives,
Northwest Magazine and the Portland Review.
Most recently, one of her poems appeared in
the Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly.
Currents in the woods
Oregon author takes the plunge, on and off the page
by
L isa B radshaw
*
m
iÆ
*
ÍSIIIÍÉÉ í
1 4 *.
fog
" <4
m ’ i •
* L ***& «
W Sßv
*1 1
Poetry is Schutzer’s first love, but a few years
ago she felt the need to expand into a longer
genre. Finding the time and confidence in her
work to commit to being a literary artist was
daunting.
“Taking myself seriously as a writer is a long
process,” she says. “I’m sure there are some peo­
ple who come to it really naturally, but that
wasn’t me.”
Schutzer credits much of that forward jour­
ney to Portland writer Judith Barrington, who
she calls “a phenomenal teacher and mentor.”
Schutzer continues to meet with the group Bar­
rington organized 18 years ago, the 29th Street
Writers. “I gained a lot of confidence as a
writer being in the group she led.”
In 1997, Schutzer received a $10,000 writ­
ing grant from the ASTRAEA National Les­
bian Action Foundation, which helped solidify
her plans. She packed up, sold her house,
ended her seven-year tenure at Nature’s North­
west and moved to We’Moon.
Surrounded by woods and a garden, her
two-room house looks like something out of a
fairy tale. She and her visitors employ a built-
in wooden ladder to reach the combination
loft bedroom and workspace.
£. ôô king Ac? a gee? lime?
I L ove Y ou ,
Y ou ' re P er F ect ,
Now CliANqE
| ndertow is the story of an emergency room
nurse, Macy, who takes care of another 40-
something woman, Dotty, after a serious
accident. Macy is obsessed with discovering how
the body heals itself after being wrenched apart,
as she explains early in the book:
“What I wanted to know was when we
break or lose parts of ourselves, how do we get
them back? Do we? And in what new arrange­
ments? ...I wanted to get inside that place
where the body doesn’t remember what it had
been and the mind can’t tell anyone what it
had become. Would that place be a whirlpool
of loss and confusion or the calmest seat in the
universe? I was sure Dotty would tell me.”
These words serve as a metaphor for the
book’s ultimate theme: questioning how people
heal themselves internally from past abuse and
trauma. Macy’s preoccupation with the physi­
cal self frames the characters’ struggles to
UNDERTOW is published by Calyx Books; soft-
cover is $14.95, hardcover is $29.95. Amy
Schutzer will read 7:30 p.m. Oct. 20 at Annie
Bloom’s Books, 7834 S.W. Capitol Highway.
LlSA B r a d sh a w is a free-lance writer who
also loved Portland as soon as she got here.
twe hót shews in l we ceel u enti es...
The Hot New Musical Revue
TWIN PEAKS meets BLUE VELVET...
V
l
0
*»
•»HL...
FOR TICKETS CALL
BOX OFFICE (503) 239-5919
FASTTIXX (503) 224-8499
0 ne noi
BOX OFFICE (503) 239-5919
FASTTIX X (503) 224-8499
AT THE WORLD TRADE CENTER AUDITORIUM
. *V . ■
Now, Schutzer works for
We’Moon, the calendar,
and also on maintaining
We’Moon, the land. More
importantly, she’s found the
time to be a writer.
rebuild their lives from the emotional wreckage
of their youth.
“We do lose parts of ourselves,” Schutzer
maintains. “Whatever our traumas were, what­
ever our challenges were as children, we have
to deal with those— incorporate it into our
lives— to become the adults that we are."
Schutzer is interested in both physical and
emotional healing differences in individuals.
“You would think that if you gave people the
same set of stimuli, they would react the same
way, but they don’t... that’s the mystery of each
person.”
She incorporates mystery into her main
characters in the form of a shared past experi­
ence neither knows the other had. The author
holds off revealing how this will affect the cou­
ple until the final page, which creates a rather
successful tension. Schutzer also generally
avoids a cliched or completely predictable end­
ing, instead concluding the revelation in a
hopeful, but believable, way.
Although Undertow sug­
gests the pair are brought
together by (dare 1 say it)
fate, it avoids melodrama.
And Schutzer makes no
apologies in any case, remark­
ing: “I hear all the time of
strange coincidences. 1 think
you can call that fate...it’s
just these currents that feed
you into these situations.”
JH 1
Undertow is commendable
___ for a first novel. Although the
*
Wm dialogue tends to feel forced
or a bit stilted at times, there
are moments of complete
beauty: “When I woke again,”
Dotty says at the beginning,
“I was peels and shards held together with steel
and catgut. It might not get any clearer. It was
not just sky I fell through, but sky with the
taste of flesh.”
Quintessential lesbian author Jeanette
Winterson has said good writing isn’t about
brilliant words but about putting together sim­
ple words in a brilliant way. Undertow supports
that idea.
Schutzer already is writing her second
novel, The Color of Weather. With Undertow as
an introduction, we can look forward to her
future work. j n
t
.«*»* » . »* -
*****
Cf*n*
• Î
AT THEATER! THEATRE! ON BELMONT
L O f/ i’
*