Matthew D. Kulisch: The Idea I’m not certain which day it was specifically, only that it came to me on a Wednesday in grad school. And I’m not certain which discussion we were in the midst of, only that the indomitable, quiet, and assured Norma Cole—poet and teacher—was the one leading it. We were talking, vaguely, about influence, diving through a pile of related texts (most of them new to us), when Norma gave her harshest imperative of the whole term: a light rap of book-sp

Surface : Context curator: Jenny M. Chu Context is everything. I’ve heard this. You’ve heard this. And context probably isn’teverything, but it’s certainly in the composition. Sometimes a glint, sometimes luminous. It wasn’t until I was in a painting class that I realized what “context” actually meant. It happened on a night when the instructor decided to start the workshop by projecting slides of paintings. The slideshow consisted of some renaissance and some baroque, some i

In late May of 2013, early on a Sunday morning, I slung a duffle full of clothes and my Lowepro bag—this filled with my Canon DSLR, a couple of lenses (primes), memory cards, and some extra batteries—over both shoulders and headed into the brisk foggy air of the South Waterfront neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. Together with a new model, Drew, we walked and talked our way down SW Moody, past Riverplace (many of its shops still closed), and over the Hawthorne Bridge toward SE

On Tuesday, December 9th, following a weekend invitation from my friend, Lee, the pair of us braved the lines at Regal Cinemas Pioneer Place downtown for an advanced screening of Disney’s “Into the Woods,” adapted from Stephen Sondheim’s much-loved Broadway show. Somehow, we got in, taking two seats in the middle of the first row. With cricks in our necks and popcorn in hand, we waited for curtain. This wasn’t the first time I had longed for a Stephen Sondheim movie-musical t