On Monday, Sheepscot Creative and Kami Gray STYLE welcome Alexandra Fuller to the set of The Corner Seat, a new interactive series featuring authors, musicians, actors, and other characters of the sort. In bars.

“Interactive how?” you may be asking. For starters, we want to include your ideas in every shoot.

Ask a question, suggest an appropriate bar game, propose a challenge. Be creative, have fun with it. Or get personal. Traditional talk show and Q&A rules most certainly do not apply. Send text, audio, or video, whatever format best suits your purposes. Email me at dave@sheepscotcreative.com or use the comments field below. Include any links you like.

If we use your contribution, we’ll give full credit on screen and online, however you prefer: using your name, your Twitter handle, your hometown…you choose. You’ll also open your mailbox one day soon and find autographed memorabilia from our shoot.

First up in The Corner Seat: Alexandra Fuller, whose new book has been garnering incredible reviews. All entries submitted by 10:00am (Pacific) on Monday, September 12th will be considered.

Read more about Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness below or visit AlexandraFuller.org.

In Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, Alexandra Fuller braids a multi-layered narrative around the perfectly lit, Happy Valley-era Africa of her mother’s childhood; the emotionally frozen landscape of her father’s English childhood; and the darker, civil war- torn Africa of her own childhood.

At its heart, this is the story of Fuller’s mother, Nicola. Born on the Scottish Isle of Skye and raised in Kenya, Nicola holds dear the kinds of values most likely to get you hurt or killed in Africa: loyalty to blood, passion for land, and a holy belief in the restorative power of all animals.

A story of survival and madness, love and war, loyalty and forgiveness, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is an intimate exploration of the author’s family.

“[An] electrifying new memoir…. Writing in shimmering, musical prose, Ms. Fuller creates portraits of her mother, father and various eccentric relatives that are as indelible and resonant as the family portraits in classic contemporary memoirs like Mary Karr’s Liars’ Club and Andre Aciman’s Out of Egypt.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

We’ll donate $100 when the pilot launches. Our goal is to increase that amount every time we post a new episode.

About the contest: Come October, we’ll be asking people to submit photos that give a glimpse of what makes Oregon special to them. What is it about the way we think and live?

The site opens for entries on October 1st, so get out your cameras and start snapping!

Fun gig. We were at The Cleaners at the Ace Hotel. Any given moment, you’d look outside and a half-dozen faces would be gazing through the wraparound sidewalk windows. If their eyes weren’t trained on the model, they’d be watching the designer, or one of the stylists and their staff, or hair-and-makeup, or a representative from Grayling’s showroom, or the fashion photographer. Twenty dresses on the rack, and a table full of Grayling necklaces and bracelets and earrings.

All the while, a whole lot of lint-rolling and steam-cleaning going on. (Made me briefly wonder how fashion existed before lint rollers and portable steam cleaners.)

Sheepscot was filming for a soon-to-be-launched style startup here in Portland. I snapped the still photo above as a souvenir.

Professional credits
MODEL: Victoria W. with Q6 Model Management
JEWELRY: Grayling Jewelry — Katy Kippen (Designer) and Shannon Zweck
PHOTOGRAPHER: Lisa Warninger
WARDROBE STYLISTS: Eden Dawn and Kami Gray
STYLISTS’ ASSISTANTS: Kayla Rekofke and Nicole Breed
HAIR AND MAKEUP: Claudine Ebel

Dress by Dolce & Gabbana

In March, I’ll be attending SXSW (Interactive & Film) for the first time. If you’re a newbie like me, you’re looking at the promotional materials and feeling completely overwhelmed. Where does one even start? My strategy has been pretty simple: Find people who’ve attended in past years and beg them for advice.

Enter Kevin Smokler (@Weegee), an 11-time veteran of the convention. I asked Kevin for help, and his email reply provided so much comfort that I asked for permission to post it here. What follows, then, is one person’s perspective. Hopefully, you’ll find it as useful as I have.

Meanwhile, if you’ll be in Austin and you’d like to get together, shoot me an email. Let’s arrange a time and place. (See I: Appointments, below.)

Enjoy the show!
~Dave

I. Appointments
If there’s anyone you want to have a business (or even social) meeting with, try to schedule both for your conference before arriving in Austin. The inclination will be to say, “Oh, we’ll figure it out or run into each other when we get there.” Resist that inclination. SXSW has grown to T-Rex-sized proportions. There’s a good chance that Big Bird could be keynoting at the conference and you’d never see him.

II. Scheduling
It’s good to plan out beforehand what panels you’d like to go to, but I recommend a) leaving room for at least one session outside of your area of interest/comfort zone per day. I’ve found that those turn out to be the most surprisingly valuable; b) Don’t kill yourself to get to the keynotes. Keynotes can be very hit-and-miss, where you either get a Jane McGonigal, who knocked it out of the park two years ago, or the CEO of Spotify, who last year talked about everything except when Spotify is coming to America, which is why everyone was in the room to begin with. Also, keynotes are recorded six ways to Sunday and have overflow rooms, so “getting a good seat” is largely a waste of time and effort; c) Be prepared to junk your plans if you’re in a fabulous conversation, hear about something cool, etc. That element of surprise is SXSW’s best asset.

III. Where You Are
Now that SXSW is ginormous, I’ve concluded that it’s better to have six, in-depth, worthwhile conversations than forty-five, two-minute, shallow conversations. Practically, this means that if you’re in a fabulous dialogue with someone and it’s time to go to the next session, forget the next session. If you’re into something good, that’s where you’re supposed to be.

IV. Nighttime
The official conference nighttime parties are huge, loud affairs. If you thrive in that environment, go for it. But, overall, I’ve found them pretty useless for meeting anyone, as you’re just screaming to be heard. You’re better off going to dinner with the fifteen interesting people you met that afternoon. Also, the unofficial conference calendar is great stuff. Two events that are completely unique to SXSW (and therefore should not be missed) are 20×2 and Fray Cafe. Two of the oldest events at SXSW, which attract a dedicated, influential crowd.

V. Your Health
Take good care of yourself. You’ll almost certainly be sleep-deprived and eating meals at odd hours. I therefore try to pack multivitamins and hand sanitizer, walk as much as possible, and workout at least once. Think of it as a marathon on your body, not a sprint, even if its only five days. Because you’ll be zonked when it’s over.

Kevin Smokler is the co-founder and CEO of BookTour.com, an Amazon-funded startup that produces affordable promotional and marketing tools for authors. He lectures across North America on the future of publishing and reading and lives in San Francisco.

The event emerged from a conversation about Portland’s rich publishing landscape, and the sense that we’d all benefit from an open exchange of ideas and experiences. With so much change afoot in the industry, and so many innovative applications of new technologies, we wanted to bring people together to talk about experiments undertaken and new directions traveled in the name of publishing progress.

What’s working? What have we learned? How might we apply these lessons to our own businesses?

“The evening was about business and creative people finding innovative ways to keep publishing and literature alive and profitable in the digitized world…. An optimistic and informative night.” —Jacob Schraer, Portland Mercury

PageTurn featured nine speakers. Each used a modified version of the Pecha Kucha presentation style: seven minutes per presenter, and twenty-one slides advancing automatically every twenty seconds. Seven of the presentations are linked below. (Our sincere apologies to Victoria Blake and Aaron Colter, whose talks were not recorded.)

Click to watch presentations from PageTurn PDX.

 

 

Photo by Mike McCune

December 14, 2010
The Cleaners at The Ace Hotel
403 SW 10th Avenue, Portland
Doors open at 7:00pm
Talks run from 7:30 to 9:30pm (with beer break)
Free with cash bar

Event Format: 7x21x20 (7 minutes, 21 slides, 20 seconds per slide)
Presented by Astronaut Projects and Sheepscot Creative

Featured speakers
Victoria Blake, Underland Press
Aaron Colter, Dark Horse Comics
Melissa Delzio, Our Portland Story Project
Tim Grahl, Out:think Group
Justin Hocking, Independent Publishing Resource Center
Josh Kenyon and Colby Nichols, Jolby
Greg Netzer, Wordstock
Matthew Stadler, Publication Studio
Joshua Tallent, eBook Architects

Questions? Contact Dave Weich (dave@sheepscotcreative.com) or Todd Sattersten (todd@astroprojects.com).

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