Wordstock is for Lovers!

In preparation for his appearance at the Wordstock Festival in Portland on October 11, SLOW author Douglas Gayeton offers his comments for their blog:

YOUR WRITING PROCESS, ESPECIALLY AS RELATED TO YOUR CURRENT BOOK:
SLOW is a literary puzzle; it starts on pages of text, travels across the surface then deep inside photographs, becoming a non-literal and purely symbolic narrative, and finally re-emerges on the page as words. This process continues throughout the book. It's a narrative method which evolved organically over the five years I spent on the project. Initially, I wrote directly on photographs in a furtive attempt to explain the complex motivations and the cultural realities which created the Slow Food movement. But on a subconscious level I was writing another story, one of my own experience as I shed a fast-paced life spent eating processed foods and fully immersed myself in the life of a typical Tuscan town. The result is equal parts memoir, art book, and graphic novel.

THE INSPIRATION FOR YOUR CURRENT BOOK:
I was drawn to the slow lives of people living in Pistoia. I wanted to apply their insights and experiences to my own life.

ONE ASPECT OF YOUR CURRENT BOOK THAT INTERESTED YOU THE MOST (e.g., A CHARACTER, SCENE, PLOT ASPECT, RESEARCH TOPIC, INTERVIEW SUBJECT, etc.)
Films tell stories that move though time. They have a beginning, middle and end. I wanted to introduce this idea of a story, of time, into a photograph. I did this by creating images that are actually taken not in the fraction of an instant but over the course of minutes, even hours, not as a single photograph, but at times hundreds that are later composited together. I then wrote down all I had seen and heard on top of them. Some critics have dubbed the resulting photographs "flat films".

A CHALLENGE YOU FACED WHEN WRITING YOUR CURRENT BOOK AND HOW YOU OVERCAME IT:
Ironically--given the book's title--the greatest challenge I faced in making SLOW was time. Each photograph is a collage consisting of up to a hundred images. The text is written by hand. It takes up to a month to produce a single image. People often wonder why I don't create a computer font and do it all digitally, but I actually like the slowness this process imposes on me. I commune with the image as I make it, and deliberate carefully over every word.

ANY CONNECTION YOU HAVE TO PORTLAND OR THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST. HAVE YOU BEEN TO PORTLAND BEFORE AND, IF SO, WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE THING ABOUT IT?
I love Portland. A few years ago I stayed at Kennedy School and can't wait to return.