from Lambda Book Report:
April 2001
by amy neevel
Close WindowIf you’re political, smart, and funny, your photograph could have a place of honor in Alix Olson’s underwear drawer.
"I get crushes on a lot of people. That’s an important part of my personality I’m a crushed out chick. I have little pictures of women I have crushes on taped in my underwear drawer. I think I’m up to twenty-five."
But if her admiration is wide-ranging, Olson is rock-steady when it comes to politics.
Her parents were both political science professors. " They were always going to a protest or talking about the news or assigning me an article to read and report back on at dinner. It was inescapable that I was going to do something politically."
But Olson was also involved in theater. She started acting when she was 8 or 9, and has been in several theater companies and improv troupes. Her experience with spontaneous performance and adjusting to audiences has proved useful in the spoken word scene. In college she majored in government, with a concentration in theater. "I was an ingénue; I had long, blondish hair halfway down my back. I was ver effervescent, very emotional and enthusiastic and I got these parts that were—dumb girl roles, basically. I could do them because there is a part of every woman in this culture who is indoctrinated to know how to do that. So I would do that because I was acting, but it always felt wrong, it sat wrong, and I wanted to do something else. It wasn’t until I fully came out that I really embraced the idea that I could write my own work. I think I needed to have this piece of myself released in order to fully engage in what I believed in, and be able to put that into words, and take that next step to perform what I believe."
During her senior year of college, Olson’s poetry professor, Kate Rushin, was talking about Aloud: Voices From the Nuyorcian Poets Café, and mentioned poetry slams. Olson’s ears perked up. She thought she’d like to go to a slam—not really to perform, just to be in the spirit of things.
When she moved to New York City, Olson went with a friend to the Nuyorcian. She happened to have some song lyrics she’d written in her pocket, and the Nuyorcian happened to have an open slam. Olson won, and was invited back for several Friday night slams—winning some and losing some, But at the end she was on the Nuyorican team that went to the 1998 National Poetry Slam and took the title.
With her "political-and-lover-partner" Amy Neevel, Olson founded Feed the Fire, " a feminist enterprise dedicated to opening minds and empowering spirits via the art of the spoken word." Check her website, www.alixolson.com, for information about the debut of her CD, Built Like That, a collaboration with some of the musicians Olson has admired over the years, and to see if she’s performing at a campus, festival, or theater near you.
People sometimes ask the 25-year old Olson why she doesn’t write more about her personal life—her partner—love. "you wouldn’t know a lot about my life per se from what I write. You know what I believe and my ideology. For me, that’s the most personal theing, not what I had for breakfast."