Link to audio: https://youtu.be/KET8chWxG8Y

Scott L.: My Dad was the editor in chief of the local newspaper, and three times a week he would do a radio show on a local radio station interviewing people, talking about what was going on in our small city. He had a great voice. So I am going to try and channel that voice here in this interview.

Joan D. Okay. So tell me, how would this interview that photographs books, be more promotional of books than an interview that photographed our faces?

Scott L. Well, for one, faces are best seen up close in real life. Not on a screen. And books, anytime you see books, it's good. They have a kind of wooden but beautiful image. And they are an image of somebody's thoughts. While we are not an image of ourselves. So I'm a little leery about having my face in an interview. I'd rather...

Joan D. Okay, we'll photograph the books... So tell me how did this begin? How did you first get this bookstore and how did it become such a beautiful venue for writers and speakers.

Scott L. I was working in the woods and my body was blowing out. I knew at some point I had to change careers or become a cripple, so I started looking for things to do, things I knew about, and I was not real happy about my options for what I knew as far as making a living. I knew I could make a good living, but there were things that didn't interest me much. Both my parents owned bookstores for periods and our house, of course, was a house of books, so I came around to that idea. I went to work for Black Sun. In fact, when Peter Ogura first opened, I was his first employee and sold a lot of books there for a couple of years. Then he wanted to expand, he wanted to open a second store and he asked me, and I turned him down. I didn't feel like it.

I think it was '95. At that point, I had quit working for Black Sun and Peter asked David Rhodes, the guy who came in (to Black Sun). So he and David spent $1,000 and bought the guts of a bookstore that had gone belly up in Portland. The ladders were good, but the rest was press board and what they call "modern display items" from probably in the late seventies, early eighties. Kind of funky, but it was enough for the front end.

After a year it became clear they did not want to be partners and I'd come off a really bad couple of jobs where I was working and did not want to continue that anymore. So David suggested that I buy out Peter, which I did.... David and I worked twelve years together then, side by side. Only had one argument in those twelve years. Yeah, they were good years.

And David knew a lot. He was into theater, music, performance production. He understood all that. Plus, he had been a bookstore manager in Chicago when he was younger and he had the rap, he knew how to say things. You know, sometimes you have to assure people without even knowing yourself. And David had this thing. He'd go "Oh hmm. Hmm." (That sound, I've been working on that for twenty years.) So he mostly took the lead. I did a lot of the peripheral things initially: cleaning the books, going out, buying a lot of the books, bringing them in ... I organized a few events I would do the set up and tear down.

At that time we just had the front room [of the store] There was a little grand piano and very few books. It was kind of open, friendly, but not much of a bookstore. I oftentimes could not find a single book I wanted to read, which was sad. Maybe if I were in jail a lot and was let out, I would have found more interest in some of those books. But anyway, my reading wasn't that broad at that point either.

But we kept growing. We believed that energy equals capital. We were both politically radical. This was a period when capital was equal in capital only. "Capital equals capital." It used to be: to the worker goes to spoil. And then it became "to the people with money goes the spoil." And then, as things like hedge funds, etc. entered in it became a math equation where debt equals capital. And that was beyond our thinking. We both were skilled and could've followed those things, but morally they were empty and the arts were full. So we went with the arts.

We were both young, energetic... We figured, "This is America. You work hard, you're doing something ethical, you're going to make good living."

Well that didn't happen. I lost my house immediately. We worked for free pretty much for most of the first 12 years. And I wound up living in the bookstore for a while. Eventually, I think David was making a couple hundred a month and then maybe we were each up to $500 a month. It was pathetic. I mean we're talking 21st century, full time job. This is what we had, and we didn't have the money to grow.

Joan D. Then how did you grow?

Well. We just kept that energy thing going. We got better at trading. We got really good at buying used books, not shortchanging people in the store. Our theory was "pay more than anyone else in town and charge less." Kind of a crazy theory, but it was still a way to be ultimately fair. We couldn't buy a lot in the stores under that theory, but we'd go out, back then there were a lot of yard sales. Books were cheap in many different ways and we would find them. Plus, we enjoyed each other's company and really enjoyed the community of good people who came in. That was the thing. They were just unique. Rich, poor, didn't matter. They put on their best persons when they came into the bookstore. And I think that's one of the glories of bookstores.

Joan D. You became a kind of a center for the writing community...

We started with one great public read. It was frustrating that there were so many cliques. You know, I use that word very carefully here. We're talking to the Lane Literary Guild...

Joan D.: That's what we're trying to do with this LLG website, find a way to make a venue that's going to be good for all local writers to advertise their books that have just come out, readings, events, to create a site that everyone will go to. We're trying to open up that whole idea of not being cliquish ...

Scott L: It's needed here in town. The country needs it. But certainly the writers in Eugene have been cliquish forever. Lots of little groups come and go over the years. I remember how exciting it was when the Guild first got started. It was Jenny Root and Erik Muller and two or three others ...and they had a reading at the Hult Center. It was amazing. I think, "Why can't we do that again?" I think we can. But that's what we tried here (at Tsunami) when we first got started. I was from the woods and I did not see the difference in personalities so much that created these different groups. I did see the smallness that came out though, and it hurt to see that. Artists and writers who really were not being supportive of each other.

This was early '97. So Dave and I had a lot of downtime here at the store, think time. And we thought, "Let's just have the greatest reading this town's ever had." That was our ambition. We'd bring in all the genres in the poetry world: spoken word, University, the beat poets... just regular folk... And we got nineteen poets together. We had Garrett Hongo and Dorianne Laux, for instance, Tye Connor, who was sort of the polar opposite, Frank Rossini, Mike McGriff, Jenny Root, on and on, Celia Hagen , Erik Muller. Even I got up there. I had some pretty strong pieces at that point And it was an upfront packed house, everybody loving it. Up by the counter we had a little tiny table with a about 30 bottles of wine, so it was kind of poets drinking and listening , well over a hundred people in that little front room, all ages. Our bottom line was, "Give us the best five minutes you've ever given in your life." That's what we would come to people with and it was quite a reading!

Unfortunately, two poets from two different schools, we'll call them cliques... got drunk outside and challenged each other to a death match ... I don't want to go too far into that now. Anybody who asks can come and see me personally. It didn't happen, but a lot of people really lost the desire for doing a huge reading again.

At any rate, not long after that, we were told that we either had to take over the whole building or give up the bookstore. The landlords needed a tenant for the whole building. Dave and I came up with this theory: "Go for broke or go broke." We did go broke, but we kept working. Living in the store, living with our girlfriends, whatever it took.

And we built this back part (of the store) completely out of recycled wood. I was back in the woods, part time. I'd plant trees for six months and then I'd be laid off for six months. While I was laid off from tree planting, I would come into the store and just build, we didn't know what we were doing. We had a great builder helping us, but every day we would just think, "What do we want to do with this and what do we want to do with that?"

One thought we had was to have a little stage where we could have poetry books and a table area for a cafe, or just a place for people to come and write. Dave was seriously into music, and theater, so we thought, "Well, we could have some musicians up here, maybe some theater people."

As for the stage, that's a whole other story The main thing is, it's here. Yes. It's kind of a thousand years stage in many ways. It's really got a lot of heft, solidity built mostly from recycled high school and university gymnasium, bleachers and pallet wood from the Amazon. That turned out to be the highest grade wood in the world.... That's our stage floor and we have filled it with poetry. I think we've done somewhere in the neighborhood of 3000 events on this stage: theater, music, poetry, all forms of poetry.

Joan D. How did you get involved with the spoken word community?

Scott L.: When Sam Bonds just opened, it was a time when what they called "poetry slams" in America were just getting underway. Jenny Root wanted to do it. She was hanging a little bit at Sam Bonds as many of us were. She wanted to get a slam started and David and I said we'd sponsor it, give $100 to the first prize, which was a lot of money back in '97 and maybe $50 for the second prize.... $25 for third. We did it two or three times, had some excellent MCs. Some (presenters) have really good poetry, some bad, you know, poetry slam runs the gamut.

When it finished there, Marietta Bonaventure, who had worked here and liked it here and started her own bookstore, Foolscap on Eighth and Polk, picked up the slam for a few years. She had a lot of energy for the spoken word. And I was very excited about it. I had a lot of sounds that came out of me. So I would write these little stories that could become narrative poems. Spoken Word is a wonderful process for workshopping. When there's a hundred people staring at you while you're reciting a poem in any format, their reactions affect your rewrite.

Marietta closed the Foolscap, where the slams were occurring, and the people who wanted to keep (the slams) going eventually came here to Tsunami. There were three women: Jon LaBrousse, Roxy Allen and Jorah Lafleur. Jorah was quite a young woman at that time, and, she was the dynamo. They were all three leaders, but she was the leader of leaders. So it was like, "Okay, if George Hitchcock is going to get up on the stage, we'll get a crowd." Because one thing we know here at Tsunami, is what not making money and paying rent is all about, and it's Hell. In America it's the worst Hell. It's worse Hell here than anywhere else in the world because this is the land of so much money ... But Jorah could bring in a crowd -- and a paying crowd! She also could write a grant and we set up grants where almost anyone could write one and get a little money to help out. We figured out if we got a hundred people in here for an evening and were very cheap and we paid a lot of people to perform and to help, we won. We thought that artists needed to actually make a little money even if the store didn't. So, it just kept growing. Her energy was very good and strong. Actually, we just finished that series. It was nine years.

While that was going on, of course, the (local community) continued to have readings here. That was a wonderful thing. We also had people like Robert Bly.

Joan D.: I remember that reading.

Scott L.: Yeah, right here on this stage all day.

Joan D.: What I never forgot was him reading every poem twice. I loved that.

Scott L.: That was real important. It was a little pedantic, how he laid it out, but the theory was extremely sound and other people have done it and it makes a world of difference.

Another thing: Erik Muller with Traprock books was great. He published thirty-five or forty different Oregon poets... nice books, well laid out, really high quality paper, much better than you can get on the modern print on demand. And they were all affordable. He sold out most of them. He didn't make any money, but it paid for his love for eight or ten years of doing it. ... Every time a new poet would come out, he'd get in touch. We'd have an event here and we'd bring in two or three other poets, always good, always well received. And people would buy the book to show support for each other... And the other thing very interesting about poets (and their audience), is their reading abilities are very broad. They're not just reading poetry...When we'd have one of these readings, that would be one of our best sales days of the year. We loved it

Well, we closed down a couple of performance poetry series here recently. We had an "every third Saturday" that had different incarnations; it sometimes had open mike, sometimes didn't, and was off and on for several years and is no more here. The poetry slam, likewise, is not here now, but we do have a women's open mike once a month, January through May. We got some big grants to do it and we're very happy about that. Bailey Fisher, who's been here a little over a year is very excited about, this "Women's Stage", I think it's called, because you are allowed to do anything you want for seven minutes. Predominantly it's poets, mostly poets, but comedians too. Some very good musicians have stepped up, like Haley Lauren who she just won a Grammy. She lives in the neighborhood and she stepped up often...

I'm going to describe briefly an experiment that we tried last March: The idea was, "Let's get two hours of poetry where every single piece moves everyone in the crowd." That was the idea. So it was almost back to that original nineteen folks. It was Charles Goodrich, Clem Stark, who just had a collected works, and Erik Muller, and then Jenny Root. We got an email chain going between us all. It was a wonderful process because these were pros who knew what they wanted and how to do it. I just kind of directed things a little bit, so it kept me pretty much out of the real organizing. We called it "The team Stark." We did (the presentation) on a Saturday afternoon, starting at three. It was beautiful with a little musical interlude, you know, to kind of mix it up. Some very nice acoustic musicians, friends of Clem's performed. All kinds of people came There were seventy people! All ages, all walks. It was great. And that's what we deserve in this town because we've been here for a long time, most of us... or at least on the planet. And, it's just such a personal thing when somebody comes up to you and says," I loved that poem you wrote about this."

(As for future events) we've been talking with various individuals from the Lane Literary guild, and with a lot of different groups of people in different circles in Eugene. I want things to work well.... like when Jorah came in and she was with Jon LaBrousse, who's a very well loved teacher in town now and Roxy Allen who does a lot of the makeup and dress for the Hult center. I mean these are people of real talent. And as they came in, they'd already had practice and they were like, "This is what we want to do. This is how we're going to pay for it and you know you can pay your staff and the building will actually get rented." The important thing is to get something up on the stage with the idea of giving people something right-- really giving them something while turning it on my books. It might be people with single event ideas and that's fine. Or, you know, a series is nice because people get comfortable with it. I'm looking for someone with a real idea, something rather fully formed like that, to just come in.

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