Character Work and Community Work with Paul Susi

This week we talk with Paul Susi, a theater artist, a social services professional, an educator, and a writer who is also so much more than any blurb could say. He's a person who's trying to live in the world and be fully open to its suffering and darkness as well as to the beauty that it holds. He's trying to reckon clearly with our past and to move toward a more gentle, patient, and just future. He's also trying to connect and to trust the power of connection. And in everything he does, he's working to bring more light. 

Show Notes

About Our Guest

Paul Susi is a writer, an educator, a theater artist, and a social services professional, born and raised in Portland. The son of Filipino immigrants, he has toured an adaptation of the Iliad to prisons all over Oregon, Wisconsin, Maine, and Vermont. He is the author of Character Work, published by Perfect Day Publishing in 2025. He is the Director of the Vendor Program for Street Roots, an independent, award-winning weekly street newspaper in Portland. His first book, Character Work, is available now from Perfect Day Publishing.

Paul also works with Oregon Humanities as a facilitator for the Conversation Project and Reflective Conversation Trainings, and he has contributed several essays to our publications.

• "Here Lies" (2022) about his experience playing Chee Gong. Paul also read from this essay in a 2023 episode of The Detour, "A Kind of Immortality."
• "Who We Really Are" (2025) about his work helping people recover legal ID
• "Beyond Capacity" and "Notes from Peace Shelter" about his time managing overnight shelters in Portland
• Paul appeared in a This Place episode talking about Lone Fir Cemetery.

You can read more about Paul's performance and community work on his website.

Transcript

Paul Susi: Father Zeus wills it that we suffer today, but take away this darkness, this mist covering the Greek eyes. Destroy us if you must. Father Zeus, but destroy us in the light.

Adam Davis: Hello and welcome to The Detour. The voice you just heard is Paul Susi's. Paul was sharing a passage from Homer's The Iliad. Because Paul does so many things in the world, it's difficult to sum up who he is or what he does. It is accurate to say in a familiar bio blurb form that Paul is a theater artist, a social services professional, an educator, and a writer.

But Paul is so much more than any blurb could say. He's a person who's trying to live in the world and be fully open to its suffering and darkness as well as to the beauty that it holds. He's trying to reckon clearly with our past and to move toward a more gentle, patient and just future. He's also trying to connect and to trust the power of connection.

And in everything he does, he's working to bring more light. Here at Oregon Humanities, we feel lucky to have worked with Paul on a number of projects over the years, including community conversations about housing and belonging, a magazine essay about Chee Gong and the Lone Fir Cemetery cemetery, and helping people in difficult straits recover legal identification materials.

Paul manages a program at Street Roots and his first book, Character Work, is due out in November.  He is performing in The Winter's Tale at the Artists’ Repertory Theater in Portland. We talked with Paul at our downtown Portland office on a rainy morning in October, 2025. Here's Paul now. 

Paul Susi: My understanding of life doesn't work without all of the dimensions engaged.
It doesn't feel good to me to just be a social services professional. It's not healthy for me to just be an actor, just.  These are things that are endeavors that require skill and professionalism and care and training and all the things, but they don't exist in a vacuum.

And it's not healthy or sustainable to just be a shelter manager.

And your entire life is dominated by those concerns  and those perspectives, those needs–staffing needs, scheduling needs, supply needs, resolving disputes and altercations, determining disciplinary actions, outcomes, budget. All that wonderful stuff. I have found that if I was just, for example, a social services professional, quote unquote, my emotional wellbeing becomes incredibly stunted and stale and reactionary and I'm a deeply unpleasant person. 

When I'm just doing theater, I can't make rent. I don't have healthcare. I have no sustainable future. I'm also insulated from the realities that we actually coexist with at all times. But by doing all of these things or by making good faith efforts to be engaged in all of those dimensions, I am able to be a whole human being in this moment in time.

It’s sobering to think in those terms, but that's what I'm rehearsing in The Winter's Tale right now, a Shakespeare play. It’s about an unjust tyrant who condemns his wife for supposed adultery and experiences in the middle of the play a moment of recognition and complete remorse.

And he's destroyed by this and embraces that immolation, that self-destruction of all of his assumptions and his tyranny. Spoiler alert, for people who haven't seen The Winter's Tale. And that is how I am able to live with the day-to-day tragedies and frustrations and horrors of our political moment and our social moment, and my work at Street Roots, which I love, but is really, really hard and really complex, and it's really hard to maintain a through-line of presence and consciousness and emotional truth without also practicing emotional truth by rehearsing it. 

Adam Davis: Yeah. So you just talked about maintaining a through-line of presence and consciousness. You are so present both to suffering and to creativity and your own emotional wellbeing. And so I want to ask, like, as a kid, were you pretty intensely present as a kid, like when you look back, how do you see whatever kind of kid you were becoming the uniquely present adult that you are?

Paul Susi: Well, in all sincerity, I do credit my seven years as an altar boy at St. Mary's Cathedral on Northwest 17th and Davis. Father Joe Jacob Berger was the pastor there. This is the late eighties, early nineties, and Portland was very different, and Catholicism in America felt very different at that time, and it was. They were moderate, quiet, kind, intelligent, really gentle, really caring priests at that cathedral. And they were understaffed and it was like, if you've seen the movie, “Sister Act,” it felt very much like Sister Act. The cathedral was crumbling,the congregation was dwindling and aging, it felt like there were needles everywhere, and there was a lot of poverty and drug use and intoxication.

I remember some of the episodes of “Cops” were filmed on Burnside, right outside of the cathedral and those priests were so kind and positive and demonstrated that you didn't have to shout, you didn't have to be publicly passionate about your faith in order to practice your faith.

So that was really, really powerful for me. And then of course my mom was very sick when I was 13. She had a stroke and my parents split up, and so I was taking care of my mom from a very young age, and that quickly taught me that adulting is just a Ponzi scheme. Like, you know, grownups don't have all the answers, they just pretend that they do. We've been faking it until we make it since 1776 and we've never made it. We've just been faking it. So that lesson was really important for me to internalize and has led to who I am now. 

Adam Davis: Did you think about, or do you think about priesthood as a form of doing that kinda work?

Paul Susi: Briefly. But even then, and this is my own politics, but even then the logic of pro-life rhetoric did not square with the realities that I was experiencing and seeing. Especially then I learned that it was unwise to cloister or sequester yourself in one perspective away from the other realities that may or may not conflict with the values of that one perspective.  It continues to be really important to me not to deny that we live in deeply separated communities, segregated communities. 

Adam Davis: It's interesting. A minute ago you, you talked about not cloistering yourself. And I think you're one of the least cloistered people I've encountered, and I have some sense of how challenging that might be–cloistering oneself as a form of protection. How do you know what to be open to? 

Paul Susi: It is about being instinctive, about being open to your own intuition, to my own intuition. When I'm working on my lines in a Shakespeare play, the key for me is to connect the thought that each moment, each phrase or each insight is connected to a previous one and an oncoming one.

And the key is finding those connecting points. Some folks have photographic memory, some folks have auditory memory, or mixes of those things. And those are paths to the same destination. But for me, the most effective strategy is remembering that even the most isolated monologue or soliloquy is in fact deeply interconnected to other points throughout the play

And it's my task as an actor and an artist to find those connections, especially the ones, hopefully the ones that are least often found or looked for in other performances. That to me is also a recipe for, for day-to-day life.  When I'm in a difficult situation or I'm experiencing something really traumatic or hard or sad, it is a comfort to remember that this connects out of this, this isolated place. And that is what will help me survive. Whatever it is that I'm experiencing in that moment. 

Adam Davis: So you came from Street Roots to talk this morning and you're preparing The Winter's Tale. Are there lines from The Winter’s Tale that you feel connect strongly to your work at Street Roots right now?

Paul Susi: Oh yeah. That really puts me in a space. Because I am, I, I'll be frank, I'm nervous about this role. I'm playing Leontes, the king of Sicilia. Okay. So Leontes believes his wife to be unfaithful. He unravels just on that suspicion. And he starts seeing all around him reasons to run with this assumption.  Even when his friends and his family are saying, ‘no, hold up. Like, take a second. Everything's fine. What are you doing?’ It's just one monologue in which he goes from thinking his best friend is his best friend to thinking his best friend and his wife are cheating on him. And it just starts with,

“Too hot, too hot!
To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods.
I have tremor cordis on me. My heart dances, 
But not for joy. Not joy. This entertainment 
May a free face put on, derive a Liberty 
From heartiness, from Bounty, fertile bosom, 
and well become the agent. “T may, I grant, 
But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers
As even now they are, this is entertainment.
My bosom likes not, nor my brow.” 
He goes on. 

Adam Davis: So that passage starts with “Too hot…” Hmmm. 

Paul Susi: Mm-hmm. 

Adam Davis: You're, you're in stuff that's pretty hot. Does it ever feel too hot? 

Paul Susi: Oh yes. My office at Street Roots at 281 West Burnside, I'm on the street level. I have a big plate glass window that's like a wall-height window, so I'm literally right on Burnside.

And I see the rapid response trucks. I see the maintenance and Clean and Safe. I see police and ambulances and fire. I see folks just trying to huddle away from the traffic and be somewhere where they're not going to be chased away. I have a neighbor who sleeps in one of our doorways, who screams profanities all through the day.

And when I ask him about it, he explains that he's getting the negativity out of himself and yeah, it's incredibly hard to concentrate. It's deeply unpleasant. It's inconvenient. It's difficult to experience every day and know that we have no acceptable tools to help this person, and I would rather that he screams to get his negativity out than do worse things.

But you can't put that in a data point and create a program for that, right?We don't have the budget, we don't have the political will, we don't have the facilities, we don't have the, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's, it is too hot. It is, it's too much to ask of my staff or my volunteers or myself or you know, to just be okay with the city as it is with this view of Burnside as it is right now.

I also have nostalgia and sadness. Like I'm right across the street from where X-Ray cafe used to be. And I remember when, not that things were better, it wasn't a golden age, but like there was, there was a little bit more gentleness and a little less immediate hostility, on a day-to-day basis, even just a few years ago.

And to be sitting in my tiny office and experiencing that, it's a constant reminder of how far things have gone now. It's not a war torn hellscape, but it is deeply sad. 

Adam Davis: Mm-hmm. Do you have a sense— this is an unfair question— but I'm gonna ask it anyway. Do you have a sense of what would be needed to move back in the direction of more gentleness and kindness for this city, especially downtown and Old Town?

Paul Susi: Yeah. Yeah. I've thought a lot about this.  I think with things like cynicism and cruelty, or gentleness and kindness, what's required is a critical mass of people showing up with this as their first response. Which is really, really hard to ask of us as individuals and to ask of us as communities because we've seen what we've seen and we've experienced what we've experienced.

So of course I have prejudice and judgment and poor regard for authoritarian law enforcement, and for myopic and amnesiac political leadership.  And it's hard not to walk into a room and see those uniforms, or see those faces, those familiar faces on the media, and not have those memories of those decisions that they made and those actions that they took days, weeks, months, years ago.

And I see it in business owners, longtime business owners and neighbors in Old Town, Chinatown, what used to be Japantown, right? The Skidmore area. These are people who have experienced all of these changes. Of course they're going to come with predetermined outcomes to neighborhood association meetings or to city hall or to elections.

I don't blame them for that.  And I, If I'm true to my values, my solution to all of this is, can we please be gentler and kinder to one another? Right off the bat? I don't have a big policy initiative or, you know, a budgetary proposal. It's just even this guy who screams every day, I have to remind myself to be gentle and kind with him first.

Adam Davis: I have so many thoughts in my head right now, so I wanna, first of all, thank you for that. Thinking about the fact that we're talking about some of the hardest parts of living in this city and really any city in this country today. And we're talking about Shakespeare. And your encouragement, and I think the example, the model you provide, which is to try to be better, to try to be kinder and gentler to each other. And so I've been thinking as you've been talking about tragedy. 

Paul Susi: Yeah. 

Adam Davis: Because it feels to me like you have often good people or people trying to be good, and somehow the situation overwhelms their capacity to be good. What do you think tragedy is, and do you see some of that in our situation now? 

Paul Susi: Oh yes. Oh yes. I think that tragedy began with the Greeks with a good faith attempt to atone and to, in real time, figure out how to get through an unbearable, moral, political, social, communal experience. So it was ritual, but it was also literally the city coming together and saying, let's figure this out, and we're gonna do it through poetry, through performance.

We have all these other processes. We've tried all of the other processes. This is the one way left to us to figure out and, to use metaphor, to use, poetic distance to actually achieve incredible intimacy with what it is that you're wrestling and all the dimensions of it. So to me, what makes a great tragedy, what makes a text so universal and ubiquitous is how an audience across time and space–this is now 4,000 years after the Greeks, or 400 years after Shakespeare–an audience is able to experience what the performers are performing.

And connect it intimately with themselves. So it kind of doesn't matter what the details are. What matters is the emotional truth that is transcending those obstacles. So if it's Othello, or if it's Lear, or if it's Hamlet, or if it's Romeo and Juliet, or if it's Hermione or Portia, these figures carry with them some aspect of a skeleton key that can unlock something that any human being can relate to and say, oh my gosh, that's how it feels. That's what that looks like from the outside. I had no idea that's how to navigate those conflicting loyalties or those conflicting passions. It's a way to do that. And the beauty of these things is that they're not dogmatic.
They're not prescribing answers or strategies that cannot be deviated from. They're simply opening doors and showing later audiences and later communities this is a way to navigate this. 

Adam Davis: I feel like when what you just said, I started thinking again about your ways of being in the world, and I said ways, but I could have said way, even though it includes multiple forms, one of which is that you've written a book which is coming out around now. And the reason I think I'm thinking about that is because you've just suggested that there might be many ways to navigate the challenges that the world presents us with. The book is called Character Work. Yes. So on top of all the other things you do, you've been working on this book that's about to come out.

Paul Susi: Yeah. Yeah. I want to give huge thanks to Oregon Humanities over the years. It began as essay I wrote about playing a man who we know as Chee Gong, a Chinese migrant laborer who was hanged for a crime he did not commit in 1889 and buried in a then unmarked grave at the Lone Fir Cemetery, a pioneer cemetery, a historic cemetery in Southeast Portland. I played him at a community event. I'm actually gonna be playing him again this coming Halloween at the Tour of Untimely Departures. And I wrote about the experience of playing him and that essay became the nucleus of this book. And then much of the rest of the book is about searching for lost graves of my family members in the Philippines and doing the work of the Idea Assistance Project and Portland Street Medicine and other theater work, touring The Iliad to prisons. So it's not a map for how to live a better life so much as it's a play by play of my best efforts at being in the world and maintaining some semblance of balance internally while everything else is unbalanced. 

Adam Davis: What makes an effort a good effort to maintain that balance? What 
is a best effort? And how do you know? 

Paul Susi: It’s connection. It's connecting. It’s knowing that I've achieved the same wavelength vibe, if you will,
with other folks, with other people, even when it was really hard to.  When all the other metrics are compromised, I have to actually be detached from outcomes, which is really, really hard. 

Adam Davis: Can you say another word about that, what do you mean, ‘You have to be detached from outcomes?’ 

Paul Susi: I can't hang my personal self-worth on whether I've, quote unquote, helped someone get into housing.   the infinite obstacles, the intricate obstacles that every individual faces, you can't design a program that is gonna be universally applicable for every individual circumstance. And when I was a shelter manager, I used to tell my staff like, we can't be riding around on white horses pretending like we're the cavalry. Our job is to turn on the lights when we say we'll turn them on and turn 'em off when we say we're gonna turn 'em off. And to keep the coffee pot brewing all day long. Everything else. For the individual to own their success, their failure, their tragedy, their glory, their achievements, they need to define those things for themselves, and it's paternalism and white saviorism to pretend like we are essential to them in that way.

Now it's a noble intention to be essential in the world. It's a noble thing to try to create organizations to do this work from an organizational, strategic, point of departure. But for the granular experience of our reality, it becomes really objectifying really quickly if you carry that to the personal relationship level.

Adam Davis: In a way, I feel like what you're doing is you're being deliberately modest, maybe modest is the wrong word.  Realistic about your ambition for how to proceed in the world. You have identified connection and maybe even the sense of connection because you can never fully know what's going on on the other side.

Paul Susi: That's right. 

Adam Davis: You've been sending letters to a group of people. I don't know how big the group is, or who it includes. I receive those letters often. Those letters first, I wanna say thank you. 

Paul Susi: Yeah. 

Adam Davis: Those letters often are chiefly about people you encounter in the kind of work you've been talking about.
Why are you writing about them and sending those to this group of people, whoever the group may include? 

Paul Susi: I'm writing those letters, number one because writing letters is cheaper than therapy. That it is a way of grounding.  I mean that in the sense of electricity being grounded in the earth.  As anyone who works as a social services professional or a caring, a nursing professional, or a medical professional, knows it is a huge amount… It's like working in a nuclear reactor. I imagine you're irradiated with trauma and vicarious trauma or personal trauma. And you have to find ways of getting that energy out of the full container that it's inside of yourself.

And I change names and I remove identifying information. But, and this might be a Catholic thing.  Now, I'm just thinking of that from the beginning of our conversation. The confessional piece is deeply rooted in my psyche. Like it's important for me to say what I've seen to someone and not just sit with this in a dark room, which is not to say that I'm disclosing any personal information, it's just that the emotional truth of seeing and witnessing and experiencing people that now I've known for all my adult life.  I see them almost every day now. And I have personal relationships with them and I see them suffering and, I'm limited, I'm bound in what I can do to help them. I'm not this person's father or doctor or therapist or anything. But I care about this person.
And when I've tried all of the other things, at the end of the day, I can only write about them. 

Adam Davis: Can I ask how you think some of these folks see you? You just said, ‘I'm not their father.’ What, or how, what do they see you as? 

Paul Susi: I don't know. I think many do see me as an authority figure, as someone who has approved or denied care or case management or access to services in some way.

And then now as they see me in a new role, they still carry some of those assumptions about me. Some people see me as the son of immigrants that I am, as someone who's taken somebody else's job and who doesn't deserve to be in what positions of power and privilege that I have. So I do experience that.

Some people see me as a peer. I've heard the phrasing, in infinite permutations, ‘If I had just done this or if I had just done that, I would be in the job that you're in right now. I would be in your office right now.’ Or I used to be you. At one point I was the guy running the thing,’ or ‘driving the van,’ or whatever I was doing. And now I’m here.

You talked about your essay about Chee Gong and playing Chee Gong. You talked about something I know less of, which is your work finding graves in the Philippines. And you talked about how Portland used to be. Those are all memory work of some kind. How much are your memories core to what you're doing tomorrow and why?

Paul Susi: Yeah. Well, memory–again with the connection piece– memory is what allows me to give some. scaffolding of what tomorrow can be. So I, I would not know where to begin if I did not have memory. What memory I have, regardless of how tomorrow unfolds, memory becomes a comfort or a source of healing or strength when tomorrow goes sideways and I have to regroup and reassess. So I do rely on memory a lot, but it's also really subjective. We're all storytellers to a degree and I am creating a story out of my memories. And I am, you know, carefully sculpting the facts too, to make myself feel better or to make myself look a certain way in a certain light, when really I just fell flat on my butt in that one interaction, and I would rather not remember that, you know?

Adam Davis: But to cross national borders, to go look for the sites of ancestors. 

Paul Susi: Yeah. 

Adam Davis: It takes a powerful commitment to go back and do that, that you have an idea about what's going on there. 

Paul Susi: Yeah, when I had the opportunity to travel to the Philippines in 2022, I had this grand adventure in my head of like, I'm gonna look for great grandparents in the Philippines and try to learn more about who I'm connected to. But the actual narrative of that was number one, I'm only able to find the really immediate aunts and uncles and cousins and my half brother's mother, and just really close steps in the sort of infinite pyramid of ancestry.

And number two, connection is subject to inflation. Like when you have over 80 cousins, everybody's a cousin, and everybody's family, so it's almost like nobody's family. It's very dear and very sweet, but we're strangers. We love each other. We care about each other. They feed me and clothe me and  make me feel welcome.

But we don't really have the opportunity to deepen those connections because I'm flying away in a week. I live a life that is worlds away from the subsistence farming, the market stalls, the street food, the–what we would call abject poverty– they call a comfortable-enough life.

So it's really hard to relate across those boundaries. I find a grave, I see the name, I take a picture. I wipe away a little bit of rubbish, and then I kinda walk away and it's a little anticlimactic. And it made me think about how we remember, like why and how we remember ourselves and our loved ones.

Metro put a marker down in the last two years for Chee Gong, where they think Chee Gong is. And then according to some records I found, that's in the wrong spot. Chee Gong is an Americanization, an Ellis  Islanding of his name. We don't know what his name actually was. It's just what was transcribed in the Oregonian in 1889.

So what is it that we really remember? Who are we really remembering? I think what we're really remembering is that we are trying to be better. We, the living, are trying to be better now than we, than our ancestors, were then. So it's really for us that these markers even exist. It's not for them, even if that's what they wanted, it's not necessarily for them.

Adam Davis: Do you have a sense of how you'd wanna be remembered and by whom? 

Paul Susi: I think I don't want to be remembered. I want to be able to hand off to my successors in post a thing that is understandable and makes sense and is graspable and has clear boundaries. That I think is what I want my legacy to be in any of my things as some version of here is what I did.

I did the best I could. You get to now make decisions. 

Adam Davis: Something I haven't asked you about yet that I've been wondering is actually some of the work you've done with Oregon Humanities over the years and that's conversation work around the state. Related closely to the work you've been describing at Street Roots and other organizations.

You've led a lot of conversations and even a cohort of people leading conversations around housing and belonging. How's that work looking to you now? What does it feel like to you? 

Paul Susi: Yeah, I started doing that in 2020 and I love it. One thing that I've seen change in the five years is that I have this sort of the same scaffolding of questions, and I ask the question, what does home mean to you?

Or what do you think of when you think of home? And at the beginning in 2020, ‘home’ connected directly to safety. People immediately went to ‘this is where I feel safe.’ So my next question naturally became, ‘what do we mean by safe? How do we know when we're safe? What does that look like in your body? How can I tell just by looking at you that you are safe?’

And then that would emerge into, ‘I know when someone else does or does not belong.’ The answers around safety would generate the belonging piece. And then the final question in those early years was, well, ‘how do you know when you belong?What does that look like?’ So those were really rich conversations. I've noticed in recent years that it's much more likely that people let go of safety entirely. They have accepted, either explicitly or implicitly, that there is no safety. There is no safe. We spend a lot more time now about belonging–around belonging. Who belongs in this community? It's less about housing now.

I mean, housing is the challenge that is confronting Oregon as a whole, and in some ways housing is just window dressing for a deeper conflict about who belongs and why they belong in the state. 

Adam Davis: I mean, to ask you a version of the question you ask, where do you feel or when do you feel like you belong?
How do you know? 

Paul Susi: Uh, yeah. It is an elusive feeling. It is transient. It is specific to moments, it's acting. I feel the most explicit belonging when I'm performing an Iliad in a prison. There's a line or there's a moment where there's a breath in the room, a collective breath, and everyone has forgotten for, for five seconds, that they are incarcerated or that they are corrections officers, or that they are visitors to a prison.

And we're considering a phrase or an image together with fresh senses. That is the moment when I feel the most kinship with humanity. 

Adam Davis: It's kind of amazing that you feel the most kinship when you're reciting words that were written by someone else. Yeah. In a place where you will not lie down to sleep that night.

Paul Susi: That's right. 

Adam Davis: Yeah. 

Paul Susi: Yeah, yeah. And I think it's because, well, Hamlet says ‘All Denmark is a prison.’ The whole world is a prison. We're all, we're all imprisoned right now. We're imprisoned by our circumstances. We feel that. We feel that imprisonment. Uh, and, and so liberation, the joyfulness of liberation, the aspiration of liberation is a universal aspiration.
So I think that that translates to really granular specific experiences of wanting to bust out of this, wanting ‘I want to get free of this.’ Whether it's your home life or your city, or the politics or you know, like social media, like the routines that constrain us and the obligations  of that debt, right. All of that feels really, um, palpable at all times, I think. 

Adam Davis: This is the second time I'm gonna ask this. And this question is about lines from The Iliad.  Where do you feel that collective intake of breath?  Is there a passage that you would be willing to sort of share here?

Paul Susi: Oh God. Oh, a play I have not visited in a year. There is a line from The Iliad that is not in the play, but I wish that it was, I really wish that it was.  It's Ajax’s prayer to Zeus. At that moment, what is happening is that the Trojans are somehow winning and it looks like the Greek ships are about to be burned and that no one has told Achilles that his best and dearly beloved friend has died.

And Ajax, who is the biggest dumbest warrior in the Greek army–who I really, I really love Ajax actually–he kind of stops in the middle of the battle and, he says some version of, there are many translations, some version of the following lines. He says, ‘I don't think anyone has told him that his friend has died.

We must send someone to tell him.  Clearly father Zeus wills it that we suffer today, but take away this darkness, this mist covering the Greek eyes. Destroy us if you must, father Zeus, but destroy us in the light.’ Something about that acceptance of the impossible that I would rather know, I would rather see it and know it than be destroyed in darkness, is really, really powerful to me.

Adam Davis: It's a hell of a prayer, and you have an unbelievable capacity to go to what you just described as the dark or the suffering. It seems to me you are, like it or not, you are pushing us to at least recognize where we are or are not stepping forward towards suffering. 

Paul Susi: Yeah. Yeah. 

Adam Davis: Are you comfortable sort of saying, yes, dammit, that's what I'm doing?
Like, is that something you are deliberately doing? 

Paul Susi: I'm not trying to inflict suffering, but insofar as suffering is inevitable, I am trying to, I guess, encourage myself first, but also others around me if able. I'm encouraging us to see it for what it is and to be able to survive it and overcome it too, so that at worst we encounter it with dignity, with self regard and self respect instead of deceiving ourselves if that's what we're choosing to do.

Adam Davis: I'm gonna go back to Street Roots for a second. 

Paul Susi: Yeah. 

Adam Davis: You're fairly early in this particular job. 

Paul Susi: Mm-hmm. 

Adam Davis: You have a question that's sort of rising regularly for you in that job as you're in it now?

Paul Susi: I've always been a fan of Street Roots. It's a wonderful newspaper. Some of the best reporting right on the coast, on the West Coast. The question that comes up for me, the longer I'm there is how come we're the only ones doing this? Like we used to have– I don't know– I, I don't know enough about the media landscape, but obviously we've been decimated, right?

Like there's no, there's very few print publications anymore. And I'm a little bit shocked because as there's fewer and fewer, there's also what seems to me, so much more focus, such better writing, such better journalism now in these pockets that are beleaguered and shrinking and yeah, I don't know why that is.

How those who have survived have survived and gotten so good. And this is a really scary time. Like, I don't know whether to put up posters saying ICE isn't welcome, or to put up a poster saying we're a newspaper. Or will posters just make us more of a target no matter what we put up. Street Roots is unique because we're first and foremost, we are a newspaper, but we're also a service provider. We have a vendor office that serves at any given time probably about 300 or 400 active vendors. The vendor office is a space where people can charge their phones and have a cup of coffee and get some survival supplies and hygiene supplies and take showers and do laundry.  There are writing workshops. We're right on Third and Burnside. Everybody. It doesn't matter if you're a vendor or not. Everybody keeps trying to come into the building and, and that just underscores the need. We have such robust neighbors all around us, and yet there's still more and more need than these organizations are able to sustain.

But again, this goes back to how in the last few years, it seems that the first response of everybody, whether you're on the streets or you're a service provider, or you're a donor, or you're a community member or a police officer, your first response is no longer the kindness or the gentleness that I remember from 10 or 15 years ago. Now, the first response is, what are you trying to get away with? What is it that you're taking advantage of? What's your game here? You clearly have something figured out, whether you're feigning illness or you're feigning suffering, or you're claiming that you are disabled or you're claiming that this is your emotional support dog or whatever it is, like you're clearly trying to get away with something.

What are you trying to get away with? You have felt that shift over the years. Yeah. And I feel it in myself too. The cynicism is easy to do, because we have active memory, because I've known this person for 20 years, so I've seen this person's trajectory from my perspective. So I'm assuming that, oh, you're still here.

Adam Davis: Hmm? 

Paul Susi: You are still here. You've, we've, we've gotten you into this program or that program however many times, and now you're here again. What is going on? I don't have all the answers, but I have that specific perspective of this person. So I'm immediately jumping to that assumption. What are you trying to get away with?

Adam Davis: So what do you do with the feeling you're still here? What do, how do you do your work wholly while having that feeling? 

Paul Susi: Yeah, I have to slow down. I have to take my time. I have to remind myself to slow down and take my time and that I don't know. While I may have known this person for 20 years, I have not seen them every single day of those 20 years.

And it may be that within those 20 years, that person achieved sobriety, housing, family reunification, employment, a, a clean bill of health, and then something else happened, and then something else happened, and then something else happened. And now here he is. I don't get to know that. I'm not privy to that information and I have to remind myself that even though I know his tics and his mannerisms and the language that he uses.

Even when I feel how hurt I am by the language that he uses towards me, I still have to treat him as though he's at the beginning of that 20 year journey. Maybe this is Act Three in the play and he's gonna have an amazing Act Five. I don't get to know that. Act Five. I'm just here for Act Three.

Adam Davis: That's, that's actually really beautifully said, and it feels really helpful. I'm gonna ask a third and final time about lines that stay in your head from wherever– Shakespeare, could be The Iliad. You just pointed back to understanding this incredibly powerful and demanding work with an analogy to theater. And so I want to ask you, any lines that are prominent in your head recently or that with the invitation you'd wanna summon and share? 

Paul Susi: Well, when I say yes to theater projects, I always say yes with the hope that the next thing I do is going to be the reason why I am here. Of all my work, I am proudest of The Iliad.

Like that is the thing that if I die tomorrow, I'd be like, I'm cool, everything's fine. I did the things, checked all the boxes. But, working on The Winter's Tale right now, in this moment in time, it's not a line actually that is sticking with me. It's a moment in the play that we are working on.

The king holds a trial and the crux of the trial is that there is an oracle from Apollo that is going to say the verdict, like the king is accusing his wife of treason and adultery. The sentence is gonna be death, but to observe due process, The king says, ‘I'm gonna let the oracle from Apollo tell me what to do.’

And so they open the oracle and it's really clear–The oracle says Hermione is chaste. Pulis is blameless. Camilla was a true and honest servant. Leontes the king is a jealous tyrant.  The oracle explicitly says it out loud. And the king will live without an heir until that which is lost is found. It's a mic drop moment.

Everybody stops and looks at the king, and the king chooses to say in that moment, ‘there's no truth in the oracle.’ The trial will continue. As soon as he says that, a messenger runs in and says, ‘your only son has just died.’ And then Hermione collapses and more things happen. Hermione is carried off stage. He has a moment of remorse. He's like. I was crazy that God is angry. ‘I need to now publicly say, ‘The god's right. I was wrong. I did that. I did all the things that the apologist told me that I did.’ And Paulina comes back on stage and she very elaborately, beautifully, powerfully indicts the king.

All these things have now happened. Your son has died. You left your baby daughter on a beach. Your wife has now just died. The sweetest woman ever, your wife has now just died. And by the way, you did all of these other awful things. And he has to stand there and take that. Knowing that he did it, knowing that he committed these crimes and, and the magic of the play is that you're telescoping the process into one moment in time where he comes to all that recognition instantaneously.

That instant recognition is what I'm obsessed with right now. How do you traverse that territory in moments? Going from being so convinced in your awfulness to seeing your awfulness for what it is instantaneously in the space of some speeches. 

Adam Davis: Yeah. It feels to me like you've talked a lot about the importance of seeing clearly. Both seeing our situation clearly and seeing ourselves in it clearly. I think your example and your words also push us to and then what? What do you do on the basis of that seeing? We're moving toward a close here. I will tell you that that choice of moment made me think of something from one of the books that shows up in some of your upbringing. And that is in Second Samuel. And I think it's chapter 12. After David doesn't go out to war when he's supposed to go out to war, and then he stays back. And he takes Bathsheba and impregnates her. Then has her husband, Uriah come home from the front where the fighting is tough. Tries to get him to go home. He won't, 'cause he's loyal to his fellows. So then David sends him out with Joab to be killed in war. But David doesn't know he's doing any wrong. He's just trying to do it. But what follows is that Nathan shows up and tells David a story. 

Paul Susi: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam Davis: About a poor man, a rich man, and a ewe. David hears that story and somehow in that moment he sees himself.

Paul Susi: Yeah. Yeah. The power of story to be a mirror when you're not ready to see yourself, but story can open that mirror for you. I mean ‘my heart dances, but not for joy' was a direct allusion to the Book of Common Prayer and to, I'm not sure which biblical verse, but, um, it is another connector to that.

Adam Davis: I wanna leave it because you said connector again, and I feel like so much of who you are and how you help us see how to be in the world is around connection. Paul, I wanna say a huge thank you for who you are in the world, for taking time to share it with us, and in lots of different ways. So just, just thank you.

Paul Susi: Thank you so much, Adam, it's an honor and a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Adam Davis: Paul Susi is a writer, educator, social services professional, and theater artist living in Portland. Paul shares about all of these experiences and more in his debut book, Character Work. Paul is a conversation project facilitator with us at Oregon Humanities and he's the director of the Vendor program at Street Roots.

You can see Paul perform as King Leontes in The Winter's Tale at Artists Repertory Theater later this year. And learn more about him in our show notes at oregonhumanities.org. Thanks for listening to The Detour from Oregon Humanities. Anna McClain is our producer, and Alexandra Silvester, Karina Brisky, and Ben Waterhouse are assistant producers.

This is Adam Davis. See you next time.