Conversation squared

This episode is so meta.

It was a dream come true to sit down with writer Peter Gaucys, co-proprietor of the delightful Orcas Paley in downtown Seattle, and one of my dearest friends, longtime mentors, and one of the most brilliant creatives I’ve ever known. Here’s a teaser:

This episode ranges widely, as is our wont, but we kick off with a conversation about conversations, and touch on all kinds of other topics, including eclecticism, multidisciplinary artistic practice, palimpsests, and ghosts. I absolutely adore talking with Peter, and when you listen, I think you’ll know why. Enjoy!

[ Teaser video transcript; dialogue playing over music bed ]

peter gaucys: So here you have, you know, a writer who’s phobic about penning an essay, and an artist who hates reading interviews.

allison arth: Now available on the Little Oracles podcast, a Creative Chat with writer Peter Gaucys.

pg: [chuckles] So we decided [chuckles] to come up with something that was neither an essay, nor an interview; it just opened this door that I have been walking through ever since.

aa: Would you think of yourself as conducting it? Are you a conductor, like, of this symphony of conversation? Or are you more of a player?

pg: Well, you know, it’s funny, because when you asked that just now, I thought of it as being a conductor, not with baton in hand, but more of being, like … of being a conductor — it’s more passive, right? It’s like, “The electricity is gonna shoot through me!” [chuckles]

aa: [laughs]

pg: And that felt— I could relate to that.

aa: I love that.

pg: “I’m the conductor”; where it’s like, “I can get the spark from your brain onto the page.”

aa: Right. ... It’s so empathetic and it’s so compassionate, and it’s kind of re-writing, in a way, the narrative of what it means to be an artist.

pg: I’m really interested in, um, what are the conditions, what’s the context that sprinkles that, like, magic dust on something, where it’s like, “Now this is special in that way.” And if you, you know, took the most exquisite thing and put it in the worst possible lighting, is it still beautiful?

aa: Yeah, yeah.

pg: You know what I mean? Like, it just— context changes everything.

aa: Find Little Oracles wherever you get podcasts.

xx, aa