Caitlin Doyle at Infusion Tea

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“Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.” Flannery Oconnor.

I went to a reading by the Kerouac House resident author, Caitlin Doyle. I had spent a wonderful evening sketching Caitlin as she worked on her poetry. I came to realize that poetry like art takes plenty of hard work. I was pleased and relieved that Caitlin had been able to relax and made major headway towards finishing the poem she was working on called “The Ship.” I felt a warm glow of satisfaction when she announced that she planned to read the poem at Infusion. I had been witness to the birth of its creation.

To give you a flavor of the poem, you can read an excerpt of it below with the first two stanzas and the beginning of the third stanza. Caitlin plans to include the poem in her book manuscript, the project on which she is working while at the Kerouac House, so if you look for Caitlin’s book in the future you will be able to read the complete piece.

The Ship

The August I was grounded for sneaking out
at night, so stuck indoors I was homesick
for anywhere but home, my dad showed me how
to make a ship fit in a bottle – the trick,
string-rigged masts pulled full sail only once the hull
had been inserted through the bottle’s neck.
If wrongly put together, the ship could wreck

halfway inside, a tangle of strings and shards.
Mine cracked in two before the stern made it through,
as if to say: ‘better broken than contained’.
But my dad answered it with a tube of glue.
The parts seemed to come back in place by choice.
He raised the sails and corked the bottle to seal
the ship inside the glass. I watched the keel

rise on invisible waves day after day…

The poem then goes on to continue its exploration of freedom and containment in the speaker’s coming-of-age experience, as embodied by the metaphor of the ship and enacted in the tension between looseness and restriction within the poem’s rhythm and form.

To satiate my need for a suger rush, I ordered a banana split vegan cupcake and the iced tea of the day. Rachel Kapitan showed me some poems she is crafting which take the form of architecture. For the open mic that followed Caitlin’s reading, Rachel first recited from memory a Robert Frost poem titled “Stopping be Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Hearing the familiar poems lines was comforting. She faltered for a moment and the poets in the audience were on the verge of shouting out the familiar lines…

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep

She then read her own poem that involved a Kafkaesque form of sexual performance art. It had an anger and vehemence that caused the audience to howl. The evenings endless variety was exhilarating.

Caitlin Doyle

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I met the present resident author of the Kerouac house, Caitlin Doyle, at Rachel Kapitan’s reading of her short stories at Neon Forest. We became Facebook friends and after a quick exchange of messages, I arranged to sketch her on a Friday evening after I finished work at Full Sail. I was nervous and excited when I parked in front of the Kerouac house. It was dark outside but a warm light filtered through the 1950s styled curtains. I knocked and the old door shook on its hinges.

Caitlin welcomed me and made her way to the kitchen table where her computer and note pads were set up. She offered me water but I just wanted to get right to work. I explained that the sketch might take a couple of hours and I would be quiet as a mouse. There was some sort of scurrying scratchy noise that came from the kitchen or back of the house. I asked, “What was that?” She got up and went into the dark kitchen looking at the ceiling. “I don’t know” she said, “This house makes some strange noises.” She was a bit self conscious at first about writing while I sketched. She thought she might not be able to concentrate. She explained that she had been painted by an artist once before, and he talked to himself the whole time which made her want to laugh.

Soon we were both working, lost in the moment. She was working on a series of poems about objects in bottles. The poem she was working on went through multiple drafts. She worked with pencil on paper. Occasionally we both erased and made frantic adjustments. Pencils and pens scratched away in unison. A smoke detector or security device made faint chirping sounds but soon those sounds were erased from my thoughts as the sketch took form. She only glanced at the computer a few times, referring to a thesaurus. There is a shared energy that comes when creative people work together in the same room. This must be what life was like in Victorian times when people gathered in parlors and spent quiet creative time together rather than passively staring at a TV.

Later we had a fascinating discussion on the similarities between our art forms. I explained that creating a sketch on location was much like a jig saw puzzle where all the pieces are constantly in motion not only on a two dimensional plane, but deep in space. I would commit to a puzzle piece and lock it in place in the sketch making compositional adjustments around it. She said poetry is much the same only the pieces are words. Her poems have a predefined rhyme scheme but then she needs to find ways to break up the pattern making it organic and unpredictable. She erased and changed lines until the poem took form, its meaning and depth growing in the process.

After the first sketch was done, Caitlin said she had made serious headway on the poem she was working on called “The Ship.” She had been so focused, that she forgot I was there. Since she was comfortable, and we were both getting plenty of work done, I asked if she minded me doing a second sketch. She agreed. I made bolder choices and allowed the second sketch to take form with ease. Caitlin had to review a You Tube video of one of her poetry readings. I leaned forward to listen. Some of the poems were light hearted and fun while others had a dark profound meaning. One poem titled “The Doll Museum” was about the lessons dolls have taught through the ages and the loss of a sister to a surgeons scalpel. Something about the innocent description of the light, lifelike doll followed by sudden loss hit me hard. Later Caitlin let me know she never had a sister. The poem was told from the vantage point of a friend who had lost her sister.

The strength of poetry is that it never feels like fiction, it strips a soul bare unquestioned. Caitlin told me her last name Doyle means black stranger. With her jet black hair and poems that have a sharp cunning edge, the name is a perfect fit. She is reading some of her poems tonight at Infusion Tea (1600 Edgewater Drive, College Park) starting at 7pm. Come on out to what is sure to be a great evening of poetry.

Woolite

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Mona Washington the author in residence at the Kerouac House, hosted a reading of her one act play Woolite. Mona began as the narrator setting the scene. In a laundry room, a male character played by Dennis Neil, is doing a load of laundry when he stuffs something in his pocket. The female character played by Val Gamble enters. The couple flirts and cuddles affectionately. It becomes apparent that they are a loving married couple. As they hug, Val notices the bulge in her husbands pocket. She pulls out a pair of woman’s panties, not hers. What followed was a long argument in which she questions her husbands fidelity. She comes to realize she almost wished he had cheated on her since THIS could not be discussed with anyone. The play was laugh out loud funny at times. For instance she suddenly realized that he must have been a panty thief in college.

The question and answer session after the reading was just as outlandish and funny. As one member of the audience said, “Every rabbit has her habit.” During the argument, the husband counters with the fact that she is very loud in bed. Of course she was getting her freak on within the confines of the marrage while he was sniffing other women’s panties. How men and women vary in defining infidelity is explored with great comic effect.

There was a going away party for Mona with snacks and wine after the reading. Rachel Leona Kapitan told me a bit about the book she is working on. Scott Donald, one of the partners at Neon Forest, arrived after the reading and told me about how the gallery was doing. Mona and I discussed the possibility of working on a graphic novel together. The story centers around a young college art student who moves to Orlando and discovers the thriving quirky art scene. Who knows where this story might lead?

Phenomenal Conundrum

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Back in Orlando, I found I had time to kill between scheduled sketch assignments. I was coming from Baldwin Park where the opening of a French furnishings store turned out to be an uninspiring subject. I drove to College Park where Mona Washington was going to have a reading of one of her plays at the Kerouac House. I was early so I stopped at infusion tea and ordered an Italian Gelato. Sitting on a comfortable couch in the back of the room, I was reminded of a scene in “Eat Pray Love” where the main character sits quietly in a bustling Italian square savoring a Gelato and enjoying being alone taking in the scene around her. As I savored my Gelato, using the delicate little spoon, I noticed Rachel Kapitan sitting at a table near the door, looking a bit corporate yet very edgy, working on a laptop probably writing up a storm.

In the far corner, a guitarist got behind the mic and started strumming. His friend worked the knobs on a speaker and walked into the middle of the room to check the sound levels. When he was satisfied, he sat down and started playing the drum. They had a warm, mellow soothing sound and I moved closer. A group of women had just abandoned the front table, so I sat down and started sketching. I really had to rush the sketch since I only had an hour before the Kerouac house reading. One of the women returned and she jokingly raised an eye brow and pointed at me as she picked up her full cup of tea. I laughed as she quickly made her way to the door to catch up with her friends.

The musicians were Alexander Gunn and Raymond Hussmann and they called themselves “Phenomenal Conundrum.” They hail from Washington D.C. and they had been performing the Pirate Bars along Florida’s coast before sharing their music at Infusion Tea. They had some paintings from a friend leaning against the wall beside them. On the guitar a message was scrawled that said, “This machine kills Fascists.” As I got close to finishing the sketch, I saw Rachel walk past the plate glass windows. I knew she was looking forward to Mona’s play reading, so I knew I was out of time. The Kerouac house is only a few blocks from Infusion. The sketch was finished with a mad flurry of watercolor washes. I left in the middle of a song, fanning the sketchbook to try and dry the washes.

Mona Washington – Playwright

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Mona Washington is the present resident writer at the Kerouac House. We met at a reading she did at Infusion Tea. She saw the sketch I did and invited me over to the Kerouac House to do a sketch of her as she worked. I have always approached each resident author with the idea of sketching them and this was the first time the stars lined up. As I was sketching Mona at the kitchen table, she was doing online research for the play she was working on. The play is about freed slaves after the Civil War who are not entirely free. She was researching how female slaves were often used sexually by their owners. After years of this kind of treatment, a slaves body is not entirely her own. A male slave who was trained as a blacksmith had a relationship with this female slave and he was shocked by her promiscuity. She just wanted to feel good.

Mona had on her lucky Police tee shirt. This was the shirt she was wearing last time I sketched her. The Gato Negro red wine we were drinking was sweet and delicious. Mona read aloud from some of the sites she found using the Google search engine. She read to me from a KKK website and I told her about a KKK demonstration that I had witnessed in Maitland. Jack Kerouac glanced over at us from his framed in place of honor in the kitchen. Mona started offering suggestions for residencies that I should apply for. As we talked she was firing off e-mails to my home computer. She is an incredibly giving person and that evening she opened my eyes to creative opportunities that I didn’t know existed.

On November 12th at 8pm Mona is going to read from her work in progress at the Kerouac House (on the corner of Shady Lane and Clouser in College Park.) Mona’s work is insightful and deeply moving, you don’t want to miss it.

Mona Washington Reads at Infusion Tea

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Monthly author readings have resumed at Infusion Tea. Mona Washington who is the new resident author at the Kerouac House, read from a work in progress. Terry had never been to Infusion before so she asked that I get there a half hour early so we could talk for a while before I started sketching. I got a last minute call that T-shirts I had ordered for the ColORLANDO event were ready to be picked up. I called Terry to let her know I was bound to be late. I parked two blocks away from Mother Falcon, where I had ordered the shirts. I called Terry as I walked and again after I had the shirts in hand. I got to Infusion just as Naomi Butterfield was getting up to the podium to get things started. There was little time for conversation before I got to work. When Mona got up to read, Terry mouthed, “I’m going.”
Mona’s story had to do with a married couple who no longer knew how to communicate. The romantic spark of their youth had burned out. The husband created a promiscuous mistress in his mind that satisfied his sexual desires whenever he wanted. As Mona said, “They fell into a pattern where they didn’t treat each other with even the respect they might show a taxi driver.” The couple went to a marriage counselor where they talked about their feelings and how they felt about their feelings. They then fell right back into old established patterns of behavior. The husband hinted at his wife’s weight when he suggested she shouldn’t have ice cream. She tortured him by licking the ice cream cone with pornographic delight. The only exchanges the couple seemed capable of were clandestine attempts to destroy each other’s egos.
After the reading was over, Mona confessed that she needed help resolving issues in the story. I hadn’t realized that the man’s mistress was imaginary. The sexual exploits were so vividly descriptive, that it seemed more real than the bickering. A discussion followed, but little insight was offered on how things might be structured better. In the break that followed, Rachel Kapitan, who had been serving tea from behind the counter, walked up to Mona and started offering suggestions which the author listened to intently. She was delighted, shouting, “This is much better advice than what I have ever gotten at writing workshops.” She jotted down Rachel’s number so they could get together and chat some more. Mona’s play “The Mason Jar” will be read by the Bleeker Street Theater Company in Greenwich Village in NYC on Monday, October 4th. If you happen to be passing through NYC be sure to check it out.

Emily Carr

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Emily Carr read from her book, “Directions for Flying: A Young Wife’s Almanac” at Cavanagh’s Fine Wines (1215 Edgewater Drive). I rather liked the intimate warmth of Cavanagh’s. There were a few tables nestled between the free standing wine racks. I ordered a house white wine and blocked in the background before Emily started to read. The proprietor bought a bowl of popcorn and placed it on my table. Most of the people who came for the reading were still crowded around the bar located in the far corner of the establishment. Darlyn Finch, an amazing poet in her own right, said hello and joined me at my table.
When Emily stood up on a small step stool to reach the microphone, she seemed small and delicate. Her right arm is decorated with a poem she wrote over time line by line, each line being tattooed in a new color. The upper part of the tattoo has a tree branch and a lone sparrow. This collection of poems she explained tells an ongoing story which changed with the seasons. The book of poems is broken up into months from April to March with three poems per month. One poem involved thoughts behind sitting in an abortion office and realizing that she must follow through. The myriad of thoughts and rationalizations hit a deep human chord. Many of the poems were dark and brooding yet a sparrow seems to light up each unexpectedly. “Directions for Flying” won the 2009 Furniture Press Poetry Award.
Emily is the current resident author at the Kerouac House. At the Kerouac House I got to see “The Nest” which is a spot in the corner of the living room where Emily placed a mattress on the floor . She surrounded this spot with knick knacks she has gathered in her travels, a heart shaped snow globe, an Elvis post card and tiny glass figurines. The nest made for a cozy little artistic fortress.

Beyond Beat – David Amram

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David Amram returned to Orlando to be a part of, “The Turning Point, a Symposium on Jack Kerouac in Florida.” This multi day event took place at different locations around Orlando like, The Grand Bohemian, the Kerouac House, and as pictured here , the White House. The wite house was built by the music director for Circue Sole and he opens his living room each month so people can listen to talented musicians for free.
David played piano as authors got up on stage and read from excerpts from Jack Kerouac books. The performances ere part jazz and part smooth unexpected improvisation that flowed with the words lifting the spoken words to a heightened meaning. A drawing hung on the wall behind Dave as he performed playing a Peruvian wooden flute. Jack though always vibrant seems to always have a sad searching gaze. I had to keep drawing Kerouac even thought he was located behind the spot where Amram was standing. I enjoyed watching the painter on stage as she worked on a painting of Kerouac for the duration of the set.
I feel Kerouac would have likes this event. He would have jumped up on stage with the rest of the authors and shouted his words out to the waiting audience slipping his syntax to the slippery beat.

Writers Workshop – Non-Realistic Writing

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Alicia Holmes, writer in residence at the Jack Kerouac House, held an abstract writing workshop. This workshop was organized by Mary Ann de Stefano of Mad About Words. When I arrived at the Kerouac House, the writers, all of them women were already hard at work. They had been encouraged to incorporate some element of the mythical into a short story. I started sketching as everyone was writing in the living room. When I was half-finished with the sketch, Mary Ann called all the writers into the living room to share their work.
One woman wrote a story told from the point of view of a modern day Medusa. She complained of all the statues that littered her front lawn. Neighbors would stop over and admire how lifelike the statues were. Medusa, of course knew they had all been alive. She considered a plane flight to get away from her troubles, but imagined getting upset with fellow passengers and turning them all to stone so that mode of transportation was not an option. If she got upset, the plane would certainly drop from the sky like a meteor.
Kathryn Sullivan, wrote a haunting story about looking at a painting in a museum. Her mind wandered and she felt at peace as she approached the work. In her mind she imagined the work as peaceful and violent all at the same time. She felt that if she reached out, the painting might heal her. She was transfixed and drew closer. Suddenly alarms sounded and a guard asked her to step away from the painting. She had reached out and touched a Jackson Pollock painting. The painting was titled “Lavender Mist.”

TheDailyCity.com Mobile Art Show #7

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Mark Baratelli of TheDailyCity.com and I discussed the idea of exhibiting my work downtown for some time, and on the third Thursday of March everything fell into place to make this event happen. Mark rented the truck and drove it to Frames Forever & Art Gallery, owned and run by Katie Windish. Katie offered advice on how to hang the work in the truck. I did a huge version of a previous Mobile Art Show sketch and I blew it up so it covered the side of the truck facing the gallery. It was a fairly easy job to tape the large sketch to the truck. I used a hanging strategy I created at FRESH where the sketchbooks were framed in shadow boxes and hung from the ceiling. The plan then was to wallpaper as much of the inside of the truck as I could with prints of sketches I had done over the last year. Hanging this work simply involved two pieces of scotch tape for each sketch; not really as much of a task as I had figured it might be.

When six o’clock rolled around, I met Mark down at the CityArts Factory parking spot. He pulled up and honked. We quickly started taping and hanging Christmas lights, wires and sketches. I managed to drop one of the shadow box frames and it shattered on the floor of the truck. I had to use scotch tape to hold it together for the duration of the show. People started entering the truck and looking around even as we worked. The prints started selling immediately. Every time I walked in the truck I sold one or two prints.

Through Facebook, I arranged with Tamara Gray to get a model who works at Universal Studios dressed up for Mardi Gras and on stilts making her nine feet tall. The idea was that the model, Lyn Sky, would grab people’s attention as they walked down the street towards the CityArts Factory openings. We invited artists to come out for a free sketching session right on the sidewalk and perhaps five or seven artists in all came out and took advantage of this free modeling offer. I started this sketch, but kept getting pulled away for radio and TV interviews. There was a Kerouac House fundraiser going on at Urban Flats right up the street. Summer Rodman and Kim Buchheit both from the Kerouac House stopped by and admired the show. Emma Hughes stopped by to pick up an original sketch I had done for her parents. It seemed like my attention was being diverted every few seconds. The sketch of Hannah Miller in her wedding dress sold while Hannah was in the truck looking at other works. She wondered aloud, “Why would they want a sketch of me?”

Just as I sat down and started putting on some final washes on this sketch, I realized the evening was over. Now we had to break down the show and load everything into my truck. After everything was packed away, Mark, Brian Feldman and myself went to IHOP for some pancakes and some lively late night discussion. The whole quirky show was an exciting whirlwind of activity, a once in a lifetime experience.