SOU’WESTER EVENTS!
Discover what’s happening during your next stay or plan a visit around our free live music, workshops, wellness offerings and more!
Martha Grover’s Messy Lives
The End of My Career Author Is the Voice of Portland Right Now
AS SOON AS Martha Grover opened her new book, The End of My Career, with a story about cleaning, I knew we were on the same page. People make fun of me for liking David Sedaris, but at least he understands how to clean a hardwood floor. Grover does too, as a seasoned custodian. “Cleaning Jack’s House” breaks open an observational mystery about the home of a “total bachelor slob.” She finds the “truly messy” home breathtaking: “A thing of wonder,” she writes fondly, “you so rarely see it. Messy people don’t host dinner parties.”
The first short story in a collection is always a clue about what’s coming next. In this case, Grover sets herself up as the non-judgmental observer of a client who, she gradually begins to discover, is not messy out of laziness but an illness from which he is recovering. This echoes Grover’s own situation—she has idiopathic Cushing’s disease.
Grover’s collection, available now from Portland’s Perfect Day Publishing, continues with “The Truth About Pheromones,” bringing the book’s situation more sharply into perspective. We’re dropped into her dating life as she hooks up repeatedly with someone she isn’t attracted to—all the while wondering why she’s doing it. Grover is suddenly no longer the benevolent observer. Here is her own laundry: some of it dirty, some of it utilitarian, all of it very necessary and human. We are the custodians now, and Grover seems to ask us to regard her with the same impartiality she showed her first chapter’s slob.
Grover’s dating trials will resonate with many. Some are dark. At the end of “The Five Stages,” Grover casually mentions her IUD to her date to explain why she doesn’t have a period. “He looked like he wanted me to stop explaining,” she writes. “As if he didn’t want to be reminded that I had a body.” These short sentences were shocking for their succinct honesty and apt description. I think we’ve all been on the receiving end of that sentiment, naked or otherwise.
I want to graph the passage where a “dating expert” tells Grover about “the three signs that a man is in love […], the four signs that a man only wants sex, the 10 lies that men tell, the seven ways that I can make a man adore me, love me, commit to me, the three signs that he is not ready for a relationship, the three signs that I am not ready for a relationship.”
I’m surprised Grover—who frequently brings up drawing and whose illustrations appear throughout End of My Career—hasn’t illustrated it.
Many of the book’s chapters have appeared in Grover’s ongoing zine Somnambulist, which just recently celebrated its 27th issue in July at the 2016 Portland Zine Symposium. In 2011, eight years’ worth of Somnambulist were collected in Grover’s first book, One More for the People, also released by Perfect Day, which described the everyday grimness of her illness. “In medicine, when they can’t come up with a cause for a disease, they call it idiopathic,” she notes. But in The End of My Career, Grover is recovering, or is perhaps as recovered as she can be for now. She tests out her newly regained strength, trying to take on jobs and wondering if she can ever move out of her parents’ home again.
I don’t have much in common with Grover, but her easy prose makes me feel as if I do. In my mind, she’s exactly where every Portlander is right now. She is coping with an illness. She has strained but important relationships with her family. She tries out different jobs, willing to be versatile, to try everything, to survive. She works as a private investigator and later as a real estate agent. It’s somewhat humbling that—despite growing up in Corbett and the Montavilla neighborhood—Grover still views herself as an interloper. Martha Grover isn’t an outsider. Or maybe she is—but only in the way that in Portland, we all are.
Come along as Bad Assets take you on a musical road trip through the ghost towns and back roads of Oregon
Portland based Indie Pop band Those Willows began almost 10 years ago when Jack Wells and Mel Tarter met in high school in the suburbs of Detroit, MI.
Since then, they have grown to a four piece band and evolved their sound with Motown, folk and soul influences.
With four releases, tours around the US, and songs appearing on MTV, VH1 and Bravo, Those Willows will hook you with their vice grip vocal harmonies and magnetic energy.
David Bowie Cover Band from Portland, OR featuring members of Gossip, Wampire, Fur Coats, Cat Hoch Band, and Snowblind Traveler. Boys Keep Swinging!
Workshop Series at The Sou’wester
Writing is Magic: Story Structure with Nick Jaina & Olivia Pepper
This class will be an exploration of the magic that is writing. We will intersperse short lectures on the hidden truths in the etymology of language with writing exercises that unlock what you are afraid to write about. The purpose is to explore the reverential nature of writing, as a form of therapy, understanding, and communication. Olivia and Nick will focus on inspiration, building meaningful stories, and connecting to the parts of ourselves that are atavistic, that have always existed. (Students are encouraged to take both classes, April 8th and April 15th, but are also welcome to join one or the other. The content of each class will be different. The focus of the class on April 8th will be on Story Structure: We will focus on mythology and the roots of storytelling to inform us how we can structure a story to provide a satisfying progression for the character and themes. The focus of the class on April 15th will be on Mechanics: We will focus on subtext, dialogue, and other ways of packing as much emotion and depth into every line of our writing.)
It will be fun too! Your life is your art. You have already collected all the beautiful things in your world with every choice you’ve made. Now all you have to do is see your own life with grace, and document what you see with honesty. Easy.
Nick Jaina is a writer and musician from Portland, Oregon. His memoir Get It While You Can was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award. Olivia Pepper is a healer and mystic from Austin, Texas.
COST: $50
BRING: pen and paper or laptop, and please bring a sack lunch and/or snack (hot tea and coffee provided)
All workshops are open to the public.
All Skill Levels Welcome.
This workshop is for students age 14 and up.
RSVP via souwesterfrontdesk@gmail.com or 360-642-2542
Laurel Simmons is the songwriter behind MayMay and has just released her second LP, Mountains Hills Plateuas and Plains
MayMay debuted their first release, And so I place you in the setting sun, in 2012 after a few years of shows under the moniker and has evolved to be a project, at various times, played with Heather Woods Broderick, Peter Broderick, Birger Olsen and Raul Pastor Medall.
MayMay’s sound is inviting and reflective with lush yet spacious arrangements; weaving ethereal vocalizations, homespun beats, twangy guitars and melodic piano.
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Workshop Series at The Sou’wester
Writing is Magic: Mechanics with Nick Jaina & Olivia Pepper
This class will be an exploration of the magic that is writing. We will intersperse short lectures on the hidden truths in the etymology of language with writing exercises that unlock what you are afraid to write about. The purpose is to explore the reverential nature of writing, as a form of therapy, understanding, and communication. Olivia and Nick will focus on inspiration, building meaningful stories, and connecting to the parts of ourselves that are atavistic, that have always existed. (Students are encouraged to take both classes, April 8th and April 15th, but are also welcome to join one or the other. The content of each class will be different. The focus of the class on April 8th will be on Story Structure: We will focus on mythology and the roots of storytelling to inform us how we can structure a story to provide a satisfying progression for the character and themes. The focus of the class on April 15th will be on Mechanics: We will focus on subtext, dialogue, and other ways of packing as much emotion and depth into every line of our writing.)
It will be fun too! Your life is your art. You have already collected all the beautiful things in your world with every choice you’ve made. Now all you have to do is see your own life with grace, and document what you see with honesty. Easy.
Nick Jaina is a writer and musician from Portland, Oregon. His memoir Get It While You Can was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award. Olivia Pepper is a healer and mystic from Austin, Texas.
COST: $50
BRING: pen and paper or laptop, and please bring a sack lunch and/or snack (hot tea and coffee provided)
All workshops are open to the public.
All Skill Levels Welcome.
This workshop is for students age 14 and up.
RSVP via souwesterfrontdesk@gmail.com or 360-642-2542
Calling all Sou’wester Guests…..Please join us in Welcoming Springtime with an Easter Egg Hunt starting at 10:00am. Come on into the lodge for coffee and tea and then rush off to find your treats!
10:00am to 12:00pm
Egg Hunt OUTSIDE for Kiddos (Kid-Kind Treats)
AND
Egg Hunt INSIDE the Lodge for Adults (Adult-Themed Treats)
You’ll even find some fun non-traditional non-junk food style fun in the hunt too! (Event for Sou’wester friends/family and for guests staying in lodging at the Sou’wester.)
