Love and Mushrooms at Literary Arts
Image: Courtesy Phyllis Ma/Orion
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Fabric swatches dyed with mushroom pigments illustrate the opening section of Orion magazine’s summer issue. Pulled from Julie Beeler’s book about natural dyes, The Mushroom Color Atlas, each grouping showcases the range of hues a particular fungus can produce. Pigments matched to Gymnopilus ventricosus and Hydnellum caeruleum become tactile, familiar; and through that visual language, botanical nomenclature is translated for a general readership.
The swatches make a good introduction to the literary quarterly’s summer issue, themed around fungi, for which Literary Arts is hosting a launch party next Tuesday (7pm July 22, free). But the series also goes far in articulating the magazine itself, which publishes essays, poems, narrative features, and short fiction about the places nature and culture overlap. In the new issue, Portlander Tove Danovich elegantly connects the sex lives of fungal networks to her own divorce and new romance in an essay titled “Fruiting Bodies.” There’s also a Lidia Yuknavitch short story about “a woman who lost her gender” in the woods titled “Nugrybauti”—a Lithuanian word that describes both mushroom foraging and wandering from a plotline. Orion isn’t a local publication, however; its offices are in Massachusetts. (Perhaps our region’s glut of mushrooms skewed this issue’s contributors list; perhaps it was our glut of world-class writers.) These pieces sit next to others by Eula Biss, Ross Gay, and Leslie Jamison.
Tuesday’s event is based partially around a story about foraging—for both men and mushrooms—by Erica Berry, the author of Wolfish and yet another Portland writer. For the piece, Berry trekked into the woods with local fungi expert and educator Elan Hagens, and learned that the ones that appear safe are often most dangerous (that’s mushrooms, but you see where this is going). Orion’s deputy editor, Tara Rae Miner, is hosting a panel discussion with Berry, Hagens, and Beeler. And after the panel, Beeler is holding a workshop on painting with mushroom pigments and Hagens is hosting another on felting mushroom-dyed wool into small sculptures—transposing fungi into yet another language.
More Things to Do This Week
MOVIES All About My Mother
7PM THU, JULY 17 | TOMORROW THEATER, $15
Two of my favorite shops in town, the magazine store Chess Club and the avant-garde boutique Stand Up Comedy, are teaming up to curate a film series at Portland Art Museum’s Tomorrow Theater all summer long. The banner is Summer of ’99, and a nostalgia for that springboard of a year in cinema is the only thread connecting the movies, which range from The Talented Mr. Ripley to Girl, Interrupted to Office Space. This week, it’s Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother, a famously sensitive and precocious movie about transgender lives, the AIDS crisis, and the mystical qualities of organ transplants.
VISUAL ART Marina Grize
THRU AUG 2 | ADAMS AND OLLMAN, FREE
In-Between Touch is the latest group of pictures from an ongoing series comprising stills pulled from lesbian cinema by Philadelphia artist Marina Grize. The images come mostly from Hays Code–era films (1930s–1960s), and, as the title implies, they draw their intimacy from the spaces between bodies instead of the physical touch the code prohibited. Grize repurposes the old movie images by making dye diffusion transfer prints, a.k.a Polaroids. Though her 8-by-10 photos carry the medium’s alluring tactility and leave behind any Pop Art–adjacent quirk.
BROADWAY MJ the Musical
THRU JULY 20 | Keller Auditorium, $78+
Michael Jackson tells a reporter he wants to “keep this about the music” early in this biographical Broadway musical. The reporter’s counter, asking if it’s possible to separate the music from the man, is the same issue pretty much every review took up when the production launched in 2022. Yes, seems to have been the production’s answer. And other than attacking the wholesale elision of the most troubling dark corners of Jackson’s life, reviewers applauded Pulitzer-winning playwright Lynn Nottage’s book. Expect a romp encompassing “Bad,” “Billie Jean,” “Man in the Mirror” and “Thriller.” The show jams through—at least pieces of—37 songs altogether, ending in 1992, just before the first major accusations against Jackson came out.
Elsewhere...
- The Oregon Ravens, Portland’s growing team in the tackle league of the Women’s National Football Conference. (Portland Mercury)
- PSU professor Paul Collins on trying to read the world’s biggest (physical) newspaper. Printed in 1859, the so-called “mastodon” broadsheet is bigger than a king-size mattress. (The Believer)
