Shopping Bag
My AccountTomorrow’s Featured Book Event:
Writing Abraham Lincoln (Central Library, @2:00pm): A reading and discussion with professor Tony Wolk and his students from a recent Portland State University course entitled “Lincoln and Literature.” In addition to reading from their stories — which feature an imagined Lincoln — they will briefly discuss our obsessive fascination with Lincoln, especially in this the year of his 200th birthday. Wolk is the author of three novels featuring Lincoln: Abraham Lincoln: A Novel Life, Good Friday and Lincoln’s Daughter.
Other Book Events Tomorrow:
What’s Your Story (Sellwood-Moreland Library, @1:00pm): There are only a couple months left to capture your Oregon story and add it to the State archives. What brought your family to Oregon? Do you love the rain? Do you savor Oregon summers? This workshop will give you the storytelling and improv skills to share your unique tale. We’ll capture it on podcast and help you upload it to the Oregon 150 site. Be a part of Oregon’s birthday celebration and don’t miss this opportunity to tell us your story!
Mini-Sledgehammer Writing Contest (St. John’s Booksellers, @2:00pm): Indigo Editing, the creators of the Sledgehammer Writing Contest, invite you to hone your writerly muscles in a 36-minute variation on the annual 36-hour story competition. Meet Alan Dubinsky, author of this year’s winning story, and then get ready to rumble! Participants will be given writing prompts, which must be used to produce a short story within 36 minutes of start time. The winner will receive a copy of Ink-Filled Page and a St. Johns Booksellers gift certificate. All participants will receive a Moleskine mini-journal. Check out Reading Local’s preview of this event for further details.
Radium Cowboy Opening Party (Ampersand, @6:00pm): Drawing its name from a Seattle portrait studio operating in the 1910s, our current show, Radium Cowboy, features a selection of thirty original real photo postcards. All dating from the second decade of the 20th Century, these photographs were made in portrait studios situated on the main streets of small towns or the bustling avenues of American cities. They are battered emblems of an era when cowboys were being branded on the public’s collective mind as American archetypes. Shot on the cusp of the nuclear age, amid a culture that was increasingly defined by industry, these photographs show men enacting a role appropriated by the rodeos, roundups & wild west shows that were, at the time, romanticizing the life of cowboys. Clad in the wooly trappings of an imaginary West, these cowboys might initially strike you as laughable. And yet, on a deeper level, the photos inadvertently capture the idea of spiritual solitude & intimate camaraderie that is at the heart of our obsession with American cowboys.
