A conversation between legendary composer and sound-gatherer Stuart Dempster, and artist Tonya Lockyer, celebrating the Cistern at Fort Worden State Park and its part in Deep Listening and new music development.

“Our conversation is about deep listening and creative friendships and lost sounds, the intricacies of harmony and reverberation, how parks should protect their sounds as much as they protect their fauna, and what it's like to create seminal moments in music. We travel from the streetcars of San Francisco to Carnegie Hall, but it begins right here at Centrum in the sonic depths under Fort Worden, in the Cistern.” – Tonya Lockyer

Hosted by Tonya Lockyer

Produced by Tonya Lockyer and BC Campbell

Engineered and mixed by BC Campbell

Recorded: Summer 2023

Length: 55 minutes

Special thanks to Centrum, Michelle Hagewood, Renko Dempster, Shin Yu Pai.

Mentioned in the Podcast

* indicates recorded in the Centrum Cistern

One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest to Preserve Quiet by Gordon Hempton and John Grossmann

Pauline Oliveros Official Website

“7-Up” from The Ready Made Boomerang by Deep Listening Band*

“Lear” from Deep Listening by Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis*

“Trog Arena” from Troglodyte’s Delight by The Deep Listening Band

Courtesy of The Pauline Oliveros Trust and The Ministry of Maåt. Members ASCAP (PoPandMoM.org)

“Balloon Payment” from The Ready Made Boomerang by Deep Listening Band*

“Melodic Communion” from Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel by Stuart Dempster*

“In C” by Terry Riley

“Standing Waves” from In The Great Abbey Of Clement VI by Stuart Dempster

Overlaps and kinship abound in this nourishing conversation between Christi Krug and Alyssa Graybeal, whose respective careers in writing, memoir, and coaching yields a generous conversation full of juicy advice and heart.

Alyssa Graybeal

Alyssa Graybeal (she/her) is a queer writer and cartoonist whose work explores chronic illness and disability. In particular, she is fascinated by questions of creativity and entrepreneurship, and how navigating the world in a disabled body increases creative capacity. Her first memoir, Floppy: Tales of a Genetic Freak of Nature at the End of the World, explores the emotional landscape of connective tissue disorders Ehlers-Danlos and Marfan syndromes. This book won the 2020 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Book Award and will be released in spring 2023. She lives in Astoria, Oregon.

Christi Krug

Christi Krug (she/her) experienced invisibility as a child in foster care, and today helps writers of all ages to feel seen. In poetry, memoir, fiction, and creative nonfiction, she honors the inner human experience. She blends modalities as a poet, presenter, visual artist, outdoor enthusiast, and yoga teacher, and is the author of Burn Wild: A Writer’s Guide to Creative Breakthrough. A Pushcart nominee for poetry, she has performed in vineyards, libraries, ballrooms, Portland’s Alberta Rose Theater, Waterstone Gallery, and Yosemite National Park. She served as Creative Resident for North Cascades Institute in 2019. Recent writing has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Kosmos Journal, Halfway Down the Stairs, Nightingale & Sparrow, Nat. Brut, Griffel, The Good Life Review, and The Sun. For 25 years, she has been teaching writers at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington and continues to do so virtually after a recent move to the Oregon Coast.

Ari Mokdad and Frank Abe discuss the poignant ways that their respective family histories have played significantly into the themes and approaches of their work. Both residents discuss their range in processes to screenwriting, poetry, and the multiple disciplines they’ve each engaged with over their careers.

Frank Abe

Frank Abe has worked to reframe the public’s understanding of the WW2 incarceration of Japanese Americans ever since helping create the first Day of Remembrance for the camps in the campaign for redress and reparations. He is co-author of a new graphic novel, “WE HEREBY REFUSE: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration” (Chin Music Press, 2021) and wrote and directed the award-winning documentary “Conscience and the Constitution” (PBS, 2000) on the largest organized resistance to the camps. He won an American Book Award as co-editor of “JOHN OKADA: The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy” (University of Washington Press, 2018) and is currently co-editing a new anthology of camp literature for Penguin Classics. For his Centrum residency he will be working on a project to to bring those stories to the stage. He’s contributed to Ishmael Reed’s Konch Magazine, The Bloomsbury Review, and others, and is a past attendee of the Port Townsend Writers Conference. He blogs at Resisters.com.

Ari L Mokdad

Ari L Mokdad is a Detroit-born poet, choreographer, dancer, and performance artist. She is a first-generation American and daughter of Lebanese immigrants. Ari graduated from Grand Valley State University with a BA in Dance, English, and Writing. She received an MA in English from Wayne State University and is currently completing her MFA at Warren Wilson College. Ari’s creative work coalesces around nature, identity, place, and embodiment. She is an active naturalist and maintains an apiary, greenhouse, and heirloom garden. Ari lives with her partner in Northern Michigan on the ancestral and unceded land of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Pottawatomie people, The People of the Three Fires.