Spoken Word and Singing Babies, June 14, 2000
An L.A. Performance Series Interprets the Stories of a Lincoln Writer  By: Timothy Schaffert
    Though short-story writer Judith Slater has been landlocked in Lincoln for nearly 15 years, she left her heart in San Francisco and in the little towns that dot the Oregon coast. Among the characters of her book, The Baby Can Sing and Other Stories, are a waitress in a fog-swept seaside town; a bride tossing a bouquet across a cramped San Francisco garden and a misplaced woman following the tracks of sandpipers on the beach. The impressionistic title story has the hazy sweep of a watercolor and features an infant at one with the ocean. The baby wears seashells as dance shoes and is a "tiny, plump Zorba" on the beach. Slater's only story set in Nebraska is "Phil's Third Eye," which takes place entirely within a Laundromat. Otherwise, Nebraska is the place from which her characters run to feed their hunger for cotton candy sold on a boardwalk.
    Thus, it should be no surprise that Slater's collection of stories, published last fall by Sarabande Books as part of the prestigious Mary McCarthy Prize series, would be featured in a Los Angeles spoken-word performance series devoted to West Coast authors. On June 13, five of Slater's stories were to be performed in North Hollywood, under the direction of spoken-word artist Sally Shore. In an interview about Slater's work, Shore said, "One of my goals in doing this is to really stay available to new voices. Out here on the West Coast, we're very fortunate because there's a huge writing community." Upon reading Slater's work, Shore was happy to extend the scope of the series up the coast to include the Pacific Northwest that is so vividly recreated in Slater's stories.
    Slater grew up in Klamath Falls, Ore., then lived for a time in San Francisco. After graduate school in Amherst, Mass., she and her husband, author Gerald Shapiro (Bad Jews), moved to Lincoln where they joined the faculty of the English department at the University of Nebraska. Throughout Slater's Lincoln home are items referenced in her stories, such as a framed work of Chinese brush painting that hangs on a wall. Slater incorporated her own fascination with the art into "The Glass House," in which a college student abandons her studies to stay up all night painting on rolls of rice paper by candlelight. Other things in her home only seem like they came directly from her work. Among them: a bowl full of tiny origami cranes that were sent to her father years ago when he was mayor of Klamath Falls; and two cartoonish French dolls with plump beanbag bodies and outrageous porcelain hats that Slater bought at a secondhand shop.  "Even though some of their situations are unusual," Shore said, "the characters in Judith's work are all very sincere." Shore has emphasized this sincerity to the other spoken-word artists who will be performing the stories along with her. "My philosophy is that a performance evolves from the text," she said. Shore does not adhere to the method approach to acting, to embellishing the work with the actor's own personal background. "I really pull performance from what's written there," she said. To prepare for a performance, Shore reads the work over and over, "so that it's second nature to me. I have to make an emotional connection with what's in the text."
   The New Short Fiction Series began when Shore became anxious to stage new work and was disappointed with the North Hollywood theater scene. She considered turning some short stories into a play, then decided on an interpretive reading. Now Shore directs 11 shows a year in a permanent gallery space, and invites guest actors to join her. Some cable broadcasters have expressed interest in bringing The New Short Fiction Series to wider audiences, either through television or online broadcast. "On the one hand," Shore said, "the idea of broadcasting to a larger audience is very exciting, but I'm having to be careful to make sure that what I've created stays what I created."
    Shore compares her work to that of monologist Spalding Gray, but she doesn't really know of anyone else approaching live theater in the same way she is. The spoken-word projects are not full performances, but neither are they simple readings. They allow the actors to explore characters and interpretations in scaled-down intimate settings, without scenery or staging. The actors sit on a stool and perform through gesture, expression and voice as they read the stories.

    "My origins as a dancer are very useful to me," Shore said, "because when you learn to dance, you are basically interpreting the music. It does become a performance, but it has to be very rooted."
     Slater is thankful for Shore's dedication to the craft. "It's really flattering," Slater said. "It's nice to think that she would respect the work enough to approach it that way. As a writer, you labor over those sentences endlessly, and revise a million times just to get it right. By the time it's published, hopefully it says what you want it to say. It's nice that someone would respect that and try to be faithful to it."
The Young and the Restless
     Shore's dedication to the short-story form is the sign of a widely revived interest in contemporary fiction. Short-story collections such as A Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Banks, Birds of America by Lorrie Moore, as well as the 2000 Pulitzer Prize winner Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, have all spent some time recently on best seller lists, while also garnering accolades from critics.
     "Young audiences especially," Shore said, "are really intrigued by the directness of the exchange between actors and the audience." Shore started the series in 1995, and has observed that young audience members return season after season. "So I sense there's a desire for emotional content. For whatever failings in the public education system, these young people have not been readers but are getting tuned into reading through performance and spoken word."
     Slater has also noticed this increased interest among her creative writing students. "For many of my students in the introductory courses," she said, "they're not taking my classes deliberately because they feel the need for creativity or literature in their lives. But they do it for fun, or they happen on to it, but once they've discovered writing, they're really excited by it. I think they feel a lack but without realizing it, a lack of creative impulse."
     After months of giving readings at book signings across the country, Slater said she looks forward to becoming a part of the audience at Shore 's spoken-word performance. "I'm used to my own conception of my stories," Slater said, "and I read them in a certain way, with the same inflections, and I say the dialogue in a certain way. I'll be interested to see someone else's interpretation."
     The Baby Can Sing has attracted attention across the country, but Slater is particularly pleased with the book's acceptance by local readers. In addition to giving a number of area readings, Slater also taped an episode of NETV's "Roger Welsch & ..." for broadcast on June 30. The book has remained the top of Amazon.com's regional best seller lists for Lincoln and the state since its release last fall.   Slater has consistently outranked Tom Osborne's fall release, Faith in the Game, a fact that tends to impress her students. "I try to make sure to mention that every chance I get," Slater said, laughing.