Johnny Olson is the main creative force behind Mad Swirl, a community of poets, writers, and performance artists from all walks of life who come together to share their talents and nuture their various artistic ambitions. Founded with Lisa Carmen and Cheyenne Gallion, and currently boasting a staff which includes MH Clay, Tyler Malone, and Madelyn Olson, the Mad Swirl Open Mic convenes on the first Wednesday of every month at the Absinthe Lounge in Dallas. Now going strong for over seven years, Mad Swirl has become a local institution for spoken word and performance that reaches worldwide via its online poetry forum and print zine.
Johnny Olson: It was a gypsy kind of feeling that I'd get every spring in Chicago to wanna move, to get up somewhere, and I don't know if I was born with that or if it came from being in the Marine Corps, but every spring, especially when you go through, you know, four or five months of a hard winter in Chicago, you kinda get a feeling of wanting to break out of the shell. And every spring for four or five years I would want to do it and Lisa would say no and I'd get over it, and we'd make it through another winter, and the next spring I'd say it again. So really Dallas was gonna be a temporary one year, two year move to kinda get that itch scratched and then move back, and we just kinda started gettin' laid out and things started happening to where moving back just wasn't seeming like an option anymore. I don't know. Dallas was calling me (laughs).
PAO: What kind of poetic endeavors had you been involved in, in Chicago or elsewhere, before coming to Dallas?
JO: Nothing.
PAO: Did you write? Did you paint?
JO: I painted. I always wrote but I never wrote as far as thinking it was worth anything. As a teenager I wrote poetry . . . a lot of teenagers will write poetry just as a way to express [their] emotions, but I never thought it to be anything. And about a year before we moved down to Dallas we started a magazine called Lip. It was really Lisa's magazine. And I just did the illustrations and helped with some of the layout stuff, but that was hers, and that's when I first started looking at it as being something that, you know, I do have a voice, and I can share that. But it was never anything that I really pursued. I didn't have a mirror of what's happening here in Chicago at all. It was very unique to me and it . . . really, Dallas woke me up.
PAO: There's not much of an arts scene in Chicago?
JO: There's a huge arts scene in Chicago. I just never explored it . . . Never really looked to be a part of it.
PAO: When I was there, the art gallery [ed: Chicago Photography Center] had some featured photographer I'd never heard of. His work had no soul whatsoever, in my opinion. It didn't speak to me at all, but all these people were just all over this guy like he was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
JO: There's a very much a pretentiousness to the arts scene in Chicago, for sure.PAO: I say that because I see that a lot down here, too. That used to be my opinion of the arts scene - a bunch of snobs.
JO: I think that's where things like Mad Swirl and ArtLoveMagic, some of the other things that are out there, are a little bit more accessible to people who might not have thought it was accessible before. And instead of trying to put a foot into the door of some other circle, we kind of started Mad Swirl as our own circle. We created the door, so we could open it and allow it to be opened to people to be accessible, and to not have a pretentiousness about it or a closed off-ness to new people, new thoughts, new art. That's probably the number one feedback we get from people sending in poetry and artwork is that they like that we don't have a strict guideline of, besides, you know, no more than 1,000 words on short stories, but that's about the only real strict limit that we have, and that's . . . it's very open for that. It doesn't have that pretentiousness. Granted, we're not a big gallery, a big organization, but . . . and I think that's where Chicago, maybe I never did find them because I never felt like it was a door I could even get my foot into or walk into. I never felt welcomed. And I think that maybe that's where Mad Swirl might come off hopefully as a little bit more welcoming to people because I didn't like that feeling.
PAO: The Chicago scene being what it was, how did you connect with the Dallas arts scene?
JO: Obviously it must've been much better for me (laughs), 'cause it is what it is right now and I don't feel necessarily that it's all that welcoming, but we have our own scene, and we've created our scene with the people who are in our circles and who overlap circles. They're all great, cool people and, you know, Dallas is a much smaller city, but still a big ass city, and then once you start getting into circles and knowing people and connecting and collaborating and working together then I think it's very harmonious. I don't feel like there's any real competitiveness that's happening here as far as, in a negative competitive way. I think people are all supportive of the other things that are happening, and going out to the other open mics and it's not like, "Aw I don't go to Mad Swirl, I only go to this." It goes around because you're a community. A sense of community - you walk into the reading somewhere and you know almost everybody there, and it's awesome. You know, to walk in and have that, it's great. And if that's all the scene that it's gonna be, well man that's pretty damn blessed to have that, having all those people and to have that connection with them creatively.
PAO: Did you just stumble upon an open mic somewhere or did you find that maybe there was a void that you were going to fill with the Mad Swirl zine and open mic?
JO: I'd never done an open mic, never went to open mics. It wasn't my thing. The first open mic I went to was our open mic.
PAO: Really?
JO: Uh huh. I went to a poetry slam once in Deep Ellum. Clebo Rainey was hosting and it was at the . . . it was the one that had the four bars, like the Lemon Bar or something maroon. I didn't like the poetry slam at all. I thought, "This isn't cool." It's not because I [got] rated bad and I think that I did great - it wasn't so much how I got rated, it's just the fact that I was being rated that I didn't like. So I didn't really pursue it any further than that. I thought "well, if that's the way I'm gonna perform poetry, then I'm not gonna perform poetry." But Mad Swirl was already going as far as it was a zine where we'd done three, four issues. We did more print in the beginning, and then the website started growing, and as we got more print material I figured well we'll put that material online, we might as well. We already had content so why not make web projects? And so we had that going, and Kevin Christiansen, who owns Absinthe, was just opening Absinthe in 2004, and approached me in the summer of 2004 asking if I would want to host an open mic there. And when you look at the first ads we did for Mad Swirl, it's not in those issues I don't think, for Mad Swirl Open Mic . . .
PAO: These are issues 5 and 6.
JO: Yeah, in 4 we had one in there saying, "You know, Kevin's asked me to open the microphone up at the Absinthe Lounge and we don't know the first thing about it." And we had this little schematic thing in there: "Here's what we found out when we opened up a microphone," you know (laughs).
PAO: Literally?
JO: (Laughs) Yeah, literally. So we were gonna try our best to put this mic back together and see what we can do at Absinthe Lounge 'cause we had no clue, we had nothing to go off of. And Kevin asked me to go to other open mics and I said, "Well nah I'm not gonna go, I'd rather just do it our way and just see what happens, I'd rather not have any preconceived notions of how this is supposed to be run. We'll just run it the way that we're gonna run it." Then it was very sparse to begin with.
PAO: Five or six people the first night?
JO: Yeah, I mean the very first night, it was probably . . . we were gonna invite all of our friends. It was gonna be every Wednesday night, and we did that for two weeks (laughs). [By] the second one I'm like, "I can't keep asking people to keep coming."
PAO: It's hard to do it every week.
JO: Oh, for sure. So that's when I told him I would do it once a month. And in the beginning it was a little bit more, and then I think at the lowest times we've had four or five, six people on the mic, on the list for the whole night. The place would be pretty bad. People weren't really coming to Absinthe Lounge anyway except the people who lived there, and it was great, it had to be that way. If there'd have been a lot of attention put on it right away it probably wouldn't have become what it's become, because there would've been a lot of pressure on it. We had to grow into our roles as a space builder. It just started growing, we were growing with it, as far as Lisa and I, Cheyenne, of course on me. I've always been the host but it's been our space that we opened up, and we learned. You know, it's easier to learn and make a mistake with seven people in attendance as opposed to having forty, fifty people in attendance. So it grew organically, and that's the way Mad Swirl has always been, it's always been an organic growth. That sounds like it's something that you would go to the doctor for. "Doc, I have an organic growth on my arm" (laughs). But it's grown organically, and that's the way it's always gonna happen and nothing has happened that hasn't been serendipitous with it. And that's the way I like it. I'm not forcing anything or pushing anything - none of us are at this point - to go anywhere where it doesn't seem natural to go to.
PAO: There were three issues of Mad Swirl before you began the open mic. When was the first one published?
JO: We did the first one in 1999, Mad Swirl 1. We didn't know there was gonna be another one but we did put on there "first edition," you know, volume 1 (laughs), with the hopes that there was gonna be more than one. I met Cheyenne in December of 1998 through a mutual friend. When Cheyenne and I first met we just had an instant kind of a . . .
PAO: Rapport?
JO: Absolutely, right away. He's like my little soul brother from another mother. I never had a little brother and he never had a big brother, so it was kind of a very brotherly connection that we had right away. Cheyenne's ten years younger than me, so this is 1999, 1998. I was 28 and he was 18. Big difference between a 28 year old and an 18 year old. At this point, you know, being 41 and he's 31, there's not that big of a gap anymore, but as far as maturity at that point we were at two different places. But I loved his energy; he had a great creative energy. He was really excited about doing things, wanting to draw and paint and write and do everything else, and he saw Lip, which is a magazine that was Lisa's and mine in Chicago.
PAO: Was that just one issue?
JO: We did two issues. In '97 . . . '96, '97. We moved here in '98, and I met Cheyenne. That's when I feel like I was awakened more. I've always drawn, it's always been a passion of mine, but never to the point of what it's become now in my life and that's what I feel was the pivot point, with meeting Cheyenne and discussing those things and doing those things. And he really pushed it to start a project together. He always wanted to start a project with Lisa and I . . . hangin' out in the living room, doin' our thing, gettin' mellow and pushing the envelope with, you know, I wanna do this, I wanna do this. And I had On the Road right by me and I was reading it for like the third or forth time and had highlighted different parts in it the various times that I'd read it, and since we were talking I was flipping through and looking for a name that might pop off the page that's got ideas or things I wanted to share as far as just hanging out and talking. And "the whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then" jumped out at me. And I saw "mad swirl" and like, oh my god, it's just a . . . wow, that's exactly how I feel. I think that was quite a pivot point for us, was coming up with the name. We always thought that it jumped out at me.
PAO: "The whole mad swirl of everything to come." That characterizes the philosophy behind Mad Swirl.
So when I read that, it totally struck a chord of this is our own miniature little beat movement, and at the very least, "Hey I recognize there's a madness in you and there's a madness in me and we kind of share that in common so why not create stuff together and just see what happens?" You know, what one person can do with one vision of their own can be very powerful, but for the most part it has its limits. When two people are looking at the same thing and having the same vision it's even stronger. When three do it it's even stronger. And then it keeps growing exponentially. You find that more people are looking in the same direction and seeing this passion, or seeing this vision, and then having the passion put in them to want to contribute to it. And that's what it was, and that's what it's been, and that's what it is, and that's what it's gonna be.
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