Front Page

(Photo: Austin Young)

Date: March 12, 2008

Location: Seminar Room, Butler Building, CalArts Visiting Writers Series

Los Angeles-born and -based writer Lisa Teasley is fearless. A risk-taker, at least. Or so it would seem. She skateboards, she paints (“a physical working out of the imagination through color”), and she writes about subject matter that many might think of as taboo. An audacious spirit tempered by an amiable nature, Teasley is a profoundly engaging performer, able, almost effortlessly, to command the attention of her audience.

On this particular March evening, Teasley is sharing her work and her magnetic presence with a rapt audience of CalArts students, teachers, and friends. She flashes a warm smile at them, and then gets to work. She immerses herself and her audience in a gripping story whose main character is a less than savory type—a not quite reformed offender who will become disconcertingly familiar by the end of the evening. Teasley reads with a calm that is nothing short of hypnotic. From the audience, there is none of the usual restless shifting in seats or fumbling through bags. The room is a collective hush, all eyes on Teasley.

There is a kind of intimacy to Teasley’s delivery, as if she’s looking into the cards to read each audience member’s fortune. But it is an intimacy marked by a unique maturity and complexity; these are not bedtime stories. They are enacting, disturbing, surprising in their quiet way of drawing you into ethical dilemmas and philosophical considerations. And Teasley accomplishes this all through a measured, steady delivery.

Ascending the road through the desert hills past the windmills, approaching the first peak, Jay pictures the arrogant young head of Kayla, Abel’s girlfriend, her hair platted tight to her scalp, making her look like a basketball star or boy hoodlum. It could be that her hairdo’s name also recalled for Abel, as it does for Jay, the cornfields of the kibbutz. Abel got food poisoning there that left him bed-ridden for two weeks. Something must have happened to Abel’s brain then. Some measure of the illness: their mother’s disagreeable blood, their father’s closet proclivities, and all that Paganini he’d listened to as a child. Like the fabled three hundred hospitalized after Paganini’s Paris concert, all diagnosed with “over-enchantment,” Abel escaped sanity.

– From “Heathen” by Lisa Teasley

When Teasley first started reading her work in public, she “was in the piece, but very aware of the audience. Now, I enjoy the story and get into it—inside the story—the way I was when I was writing it. I need to concentrate on whose skin I’m in.” This embodied way of reading translates to the listeners, who experience the story as if the words are absorbed through the skin. Mediation between audience and text seems to disappear as the listeners enter the story.

Writer Wanda Coleman has long been a source of inspiration for Teasley when it comes to performance. When Coleman reads, “it’s song. It’s all primal. She’s not reading. She’s channeling. She’s such a goddess of poetry and song. I feel like I’m hearing opera—a siren.” Teasley seems to channel as well, but in a profoundly disarming manner.

Teasley’s work has been dubbed sensual but gritty—a body of psychological noir that examines crimes of passion, violence, and vengeance. Her narratives approach and rub shoulders with characters impossible to like, but just as impossible not to view with fascination and consider with, is it…empathy? Teasley’s characters are damaged goods, and yet she manages to treat them with an even hand, incredible humanity, and a complete absence of idealization.

After coming into contact with Teasley’s characters, one can’t help but leave the encounter feeling a little uncomfortable, a little thoughtful, and a little more open-minded. She often creates narratives that enter the consciousness of a perpetrator to explore his or her “raw interior state of mind.” In the process, Teasley’s work, while deeply concerned with revealing, creates genuine mystery. And one of the most generative mysteries this author’s work provokes is: “how did she do that?”

Whose mind wouldn’t wizen to a weed here in this blasted terrain of faults and folds under foot? Jay asks himself driving between hills of sand. Soon enough it would be the desertification of the whole world, anyway. A global warming into one dust bowl.

– From “Heathen” by Lisa Teasley

Teasley’s characters display the nuances of real-life individuals, with a wide and often contradictory scope of human characteristics—from frailty to monstrosity. One suspends judgment for the sake of story, following Teasley into a closet of horrors, trusting the hand of the author to guide him or her through the sometimes murky and unkempt recesses of the human psyche.

On this March evening, Teasley’s deliberate, blunted rhythm, with its offbeat syncopations and resonances does not betray the sins of her characters, but instead probes the depth of the human condition. As much of her work does so evocatively, this material dwells in that vulnerable, extraordinary, and sometimes frightening territory that is the landscape of being.

---

Laura Vena is a writer, photographer and translator from Long Beach, California. An avid research junkie and literary cartographer, Vena is currently working on a hybrid manuscript that incorporates maps, original art, poetic fragments, disastrous prose and found text.

Keywords:
CalArts | Character | Laura Vena | Lisa Teasley | Reading | Visiting Writers Series | Wanda Coleman