Chora

Sandra Doller

An extended bio from the author

I share a birthday with Shelley Duvall and Ringo Starr and was born in Washington, D.C., about a month before Nixon resigned in the same town. More coincidences as follow: My father is a Republican; I love The Beatles and Yoko, Popeye and olive oil. Both of my grandfathers were Golden Gloves Champs; I have a fight to pick sometimes. One grandfather I met, the one who grew up a few miles from the Western New York hometown of my husband, who I also met, but much later, in Iowa. The other grandfather was born a day before me, but in the nineteenth century, also in New York, but in the city. One grandmother was French and Canadian from Quebec. I heart les commie fries and a Molson. The other grandmother was born in Missoula in 1903 where she played the cello for silent films in her family band. I drove through Missoula once and saw the “M” on a hill, played the cello as a kid, studied silent film for my Master’s degree, and am editrice of a magazine called 1913. The same grandmother was one of many sisters, and she grew up in Seattle. I finished college at the University of Washington in Seattle as a Women’s Studies major; I am the youngest of eight siblings, depending on how you count. And most of us are women.  

I lived in Virginia for seventeen years near a National Park. Then Kailua, Amherst, Seattle, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Ljubljana, Ocean Grove, Iowa City, Canandaigua, Granville, and back to Virginia. But this time Roanoke. Then San Diego and Denver and Encinitas and now nowhere. I live and have lived and will live with my man, Ben Doller. I have visited Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, England, Austria, Russia (via train from Germany, so I crossed through Poland and saw it out the window and was detained & interrogated in Belarus), Finland, Croatia, Estonia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and I’ve driven across the west-east stretch of Canada. I have been to every U.S. state except Alaska. I like locomotion.  

I have had the sorts of jobs writers & artists & vagabonds have: I was a dishwasher, a temp, a secretary, a waitress at Po’ Folks, an au pair, a baker, a barista, a cocktail waitress with a distaste for crowds and Mardi Gras. I was a maid on a motel on a boat. I wrote ad copy for a guy called Amp Man. I was a wedding bartender, a dancer, a substitute teacher, a photographer’s dark room assistant, a slang tutor. I taught subjects I didn’t know very well and coordinated internships for disadvantaged students in D.C. I taught college material to gifted & talented junior high kids. I tutored ESL and encouraged idiosyncrasy. I studied Russian and Ancient Greek and Labanotation. All have shocking alphabets. I studied theory, cultural studies, physics, anthropology, and Scandinavian Women’s Literature. Not English. I studied theater & dance, wrote plays, did performance. Sometimes with text. I write texts now, sometimes with performance.  

I love Harryette Mullen, Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono. Wallace Stevens, Lorine Niedecker, Oppen not Zukofsky. Mary Oppen. Williams and Ceravolo and Stein. I once loved an Auden poem because someone read it to me. Ben Doller. The Black Keys and The Dirt Bombs and The Knitters. Rae Armantrout and Fanny Howe. Anyone I publish, my many students, my few friends. Ronald Johnson and Kiki Smith. My dogs Ronald Johnson & Kiki Smith. I have bits of Keats and Chaucer and Dickinson memorized. I once memorized an entire John Ford play. Committed Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes. Dickinson on envelopes. I am thinking about how everything is an essay. I read what I am teaching. I teach John Keene, Claudia Rankine, Jerome Rothenberg’s compilations, Yelp, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Leslie Scalapino, Walter Murch with Michael Ondaatje, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, the Archive for New Poetry, My Life, Ubu Web, the Waldrops & Burning Deck. I teach some online. I teach too much. I write on trains and on vacation.  

I am the founder & editor of the arts mag 1913 a journal of forms; with 1913 Press I also publish books, mostly collaborative or visual books. I conceived the idea for the magazine during my MA at University of Chicago: everything I had studied (film, lit, art, book arts, futurist fashion, dance, linguistics, translation, performance) somehow congealed in the year 1913. I couldn’t get over it. I kept the idea until later in Iowa after my MFA I started the mag, with all forms congealing in it. I publish it slowly but surely. The third beautiful issue has recently appeared at long last. 

I try to translate. I just finished another poetry manuscript called Man Years and am working on a prose collection entitled either Color Me Sandra or What I Got or both. It is probably not fiction.