Press contact: (337) 349-8116 – heathcliffonpowellstreet@gmail.com

P R E S S R E L E A S E

For immediate release: New 1978 memoir/archive by Slough Press
Release date: 3/30/08
Categories: Books, Austin History 1978, Theater, Memoir, Art, Avant-Garde
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Book also now available as an Ebook $ 4.50 on Amazon.com

Visit Hedwig Gorski Homepage
(The name "Hedwig Gorski" is a registered trademark. Those who pirate it will be prosecuted.)
http://Hedwig.Gorski.Site.googlepages.com
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THE BOOK INTOXICATION: HEATHCLIFF ON POWELL STREET
PAINTS A PICTURE OF AUSTIN THAT IS NOT
THE TEXAS OF GEORGE BUSH!

ABOUT THE BOOK

Slough Press, a decades-old Texas small press known for taking risks, published a new book that has been in the works since the mid-1980s. Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street documents the experimental poetry-theater of Hedwig Gorski. The book includes memoirs and photographs from the five months during which the events surrounding one production took place in 1978.

The conceptual art process behind Hedwig Gorski’s 1978 avant-garde literary art, the verse drama Booby, Mama!, seems impossible to pull off. There was no money, and it used “found” text and “street” actors who were drunk, stoned, or filled with existential angst living on the fringes of society. The troupe members spent spring and summer in an abandoned house on Powell Street near Spellman’s Bar, a local hamburger joint where Lucinda Williams and other gravel-road stars performed.

Joy Cole, embodying the performance poem’s character Red Light, became artistic soul-mate, nemesis, and, eventually, Gorski’s dearest departed friend. Portions of inebriated Cole’s epistolary journal document with candor and compassion how such mythic creations materialize and survive. Images by award-winning photographer, Lauren Piperno, letters, and other texts complete a performance artwork that stunned even the infamous world-weary bohemians and individualists engaged with Austin’s anything-goes Romantic Period. Altogether, it paints an atmospheric landscape of the town that summoned and intoxicated so many beloved dreamers and artists of the time toward intense self-actualization.




ABOUT THE AUTHOR’S UNUSUAL TRANSFORMATION

Hedwig Gorski’s story can fall into a social rags-to-riches category. The problem with that analogy is that the riches have nothing to do with money. Her wealth is more like a wealth of knowledge and experience. In 1978, she lived with her troupe of actors in an abandoned house near West Lynn and West Fifth streets.

At age 28, she gave up everything to direct her experimental verse drama. She divorced her husband, sold her white Dodge van for $ 100, moved in with a troupe of pedestrian “found” actors, and directed them to embody the unique symbolic characters she wrote into being. The dialogue is abstract and poetic, and the movements are a pedestrian choreography written into the script.

The found actors are real characters themselves who are misfits and rebels, ahead of their time, and as surreal as the scripted ones. They challenge gender stereotypes, exploit feminine wiles, reject traditional theater, and rely on each other for everything. Together, they define an avant-garde theater for a rather sleepy but open-minded Texas capital city in 1978.

“I tried to create a real, not necessarily realistic, context for theater with the type of intensity Jerzy Grotowski required of his Poor Theater actors,” Gorski, the director and author of Booby, Mama!, states. The troupe would often perform the verse drama in the streets or in bars, together, or they would recite their lines individually. “I loved listening to them burst forth with my lines,” she adds. “You have to judge for yourself whether we succeeded or not.”

Here comes the riches part. Many who knew Gorski then would not have predicted that she would become an academic and scholar. She explains her philosophies and background well in the book’s prologue and afterward. After earning a Ph.D. in creative writing at the age of 51, she received a Fulbright Fellowship to lecture at the University of Wroclaw in Poland.

Gorski explains the unusual transformation in this way: “There are two different types of self-actualization. The first is raw life intensified by self-inflicted art. The second is learning the canon of masters from experts and becoming an expert oneself. I have wanted and got both sides of the coin. Now, I can do anything.”

The Austin this book’s memoir portrays is unknown to most, but there was a time when these types of attitudes and lifestyles prevailed there. Gorski labels this period from 1978 to 1993 as Austin’s Romantic Period. “It is a time when nothing was more important than self-discovery through any means possible,” she states.

Intoxication: Heathcliff on Powell Street is a perfect bound paperback, 132 pages of text with black and white photographs, ISBN: 1-4276-0475-4. It is available for purchase on Amazon.com.



WHAT OTHERS HAVE WRITTEN ABOUT THE AUTHOR

“To capture again the magic that is our inherent being . . . wafts in the air of Austin.”
Ric Williams, The Austin Light

Gorski and Cole “share the same ethereal lineage”: “alien, gypsy,” “expressing a spontaneous exchange with the art of living,” “surrealism, outrageousness.”
The Austin Chronicle

“The female muse for another female artist is not something much discussed.
Joy Cole is very much the same kind of muse for Gorski as Neil Cassady was for Kerouac and Ginsberg. For a mostly heterosexual woman, probably, Gorski’s muse/ most powerful influence has been a crazy woman, crazy as good ol' Neil Cassady was crazy. Why would a woman artist pick a muse like that? Beats me!”
Dr. Chuck Taylor, Texas A&M

“All that is left is the chaos and brilliance of Powell Street.”
Pat Littledog, Texas author


BRIEF BIO
Hedwig Gorski, first generation Polish-American, is a conceptual literary artist who believes any medium or style--scholarly, creative, or mundane--can be elevated to art. She has been a Fulbright Fellow and a Louisiana Media Arts Fellow receiving awards for poetry and drama. Her career as a performance poet during the 1980s helped to enliven the literary and art scene in Central Texas. She was also a founding writer for the Austin Chronicle. She lived in Austin, Texas, from 1977 to 1993 where she met her musician husband, D’Jalma Garnier. He wrote original music for her poetry. They performed the results with East of Eden Band, considered one of the most successful spoken-word bands of the time. Gorski is credited for coining the term “performance poetry” in the Austin Chronicle “Litera” column she initiated.

ONLINE PRESS KIT URL:

http://home.bellsouth.net/p/PWP-IntoxicationHeathcliffonPowellStreet

More about the book and author

http://HeathcliffOnPowellStreet.googlepages.com/home

For more information about purchase or--
The press: Slough Press sloughpressbooks@gmail.com
The author: heathcliffonpowellstreet [at] gmail [dot] com (337) 349-8116
Purchase of this book and other material by Hedwig Gorski: Amazon.com

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