Please join us Tuesday, March 16 at The Writers’ Dojo for Read to Rebuild: A Haiti Reading Benefit, featuring six outstanding Portland writers. This is the first in a special series of interviews with each of these readers. Look for more Read to Rebuild interviews in the next few days.
Laura Moulton earned an MFA from Eastern Washington University. She has taught writing workshops in 
prisons, universities and a shelter for homeless teens. Her zines and art projects have featured postal workers, immigrants and artists. Her public art project, Object Permanence, was commissioned by Portland State University in 2009, and is installed permanently in the Smith Student Union Building.
Laura currently teaches writing residencies at the Portland Art Museum for Writers in the Schools. Her work has been featured in Hip Mama, Nervy Girl, Portland Tribune, and Brain, Child. She is at work on a novel set in Provo, Utah in the early 90s.
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Portland author/illustrator Johanna Wright paints hidden worlds that only she (and children) can see. ‘Little people’ reading books atop mushrooms. A family of birds snuggling on a telephone wire. Babies swaddled in quilted cocoons. Family bands making music while straddling tree branches. Her disarming style evokes comfort and luminous warmth found only in secret hideaways and the realm of imagination. Last year, her first two children’s books, The Secret Circus and Clover Twig and The Magical Cottage, were published to great critical acclaim. Oregon Art Beat profiled Johanna’s work last autumn after one of the show’s producers discovered Johanna and her work at a local art fair.
Johanna stopped by to talk with me about her books, her artistic process, her upcoming art shows, and the magic of working with a timer.
Q: Please tell me about your two books that were published last year.
A: The Secret Circus (Roaring Brook Press, 2009), which I wrote and illustrated, is my first published children’s book ever and came out last spring. It’s about a circus in Paris, under a carousel near the Eiffel Tower, that is so secret, only the mice know how to find it. I painted it using acrylics in 16 spreads. The second book, Clover Twig and the Magical Cottage (Roaring Brook Press, 2009) was written by Kaye Umansky and is a middle grade fiction book. It’s about a sensible, reliable and always tidy girl named Clover Twig who goes to work for a messy witch and discovers that the witch’s cottage has quite a few secrets hiding inside of it!
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Jennifer Richter is a poet and author of a prize-winning poetry collection appearing shortly from Southern Illinois University Press. Keith Scribner is a novelist and director of Oregon State University’s MFA program. Dao Strom is a novelist and singer-songwriter with both books and albums to her name. Together, they’ll respond to the prompt, “Patient,” at tonight’s Loggernaut reading at Urban Grind East. Catch them there, starting at 7:30. But catch them here first, with us…
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Arthur Bradford is the author of the story collection Dogwalkers, and creator and director of 
How’s Your News?, a documentary and traveling news show. Nathaniel Boggess is a storyteller and performer currently refining a one-man show about his terrifying dating experiences.
This Thursday, 2/25, they’ll both be part of the star-studded cast of Entertainment for People, the live performance event brought to you by the fine folks of Back Fence PDX. You can grab tickets here, and you’ll get not only fine storytelling, but also a free saintly cupcake and some awesome libations. What’s not to love?
We caught up with Nathaniel and Arthur on their way to the show…
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Heidi Durrow’s Bellwether-prize-winning debut novel, The Girl Who Fell From The Sky, is the story of Rachel, a girl who loses her Danish mother and African-American father in a tragic accident. Durrow, a native Portlander, will be in town for two readings in the next few days. You can catch her this Friday 2/19 at Powell’s on Burnside (7:30 pm), and next Tuesday 2/23 at the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center (7 pm).
We caught up with Durrow to learn more about the book before she hits a microphone near you.
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Jedediah Berry is the author of The Manual of Detection, just released in paperback by The Penguin Press. Part Calvino-ish fantasy, part Doyle-esque mystery, Berry’s debut novel has been lavished with praise and awards. (The New Yorker said that it “weaves the kind of mannered fantasy that might result if Wes Anderson were to adapt Kafka.”)
Berry is an assistant editor at Small Beer Press and an admirer of umbrellas. You can read the first chapter of The Manual of Detection here, and you can hear Berry read from the book at Powell’s on Hawthorne tomorrow, Thursday 2/11, at 7:30 pm.
We caught up with him in the middle of his reading tour to talk about glögg, Gore-Tex, and the mysteries of genre.
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Allison Cobb is the author of two volumes of poetry, including the recently-published Green-Wood. (You can read an excerpt here.) She’s a native of Los Alamos, NM, and came to Portland by way of Brooklyn, NY. She’ll read for the Spare Room reading series with Jesse Morse this Sunday, Feb 7 at Concordia Coffee House on Alberta Street. We caught up with her to talk about poetry and places, among other things.
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Yesterday, OPB’s Think Out Loud ran an interview with Olympia-based artist Nikki McClure and her co-author Cynthia Rylant. McClure and Rylant won a 2010 Pacific Northwest Bookseller Award for their beautiful children’s book All In A Day.
RLP also interviewed McClure a while back, and she was kind enough to remember that interview, and mention it on the air. Thanks to Amy Baskin, who did that great interview for RLP–and thanks to Nikki for the shout-out!
Today’s Reading Local Portland interview is with writer Margaret Malone. Margaret’s work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Swink, The Wordstock Ten Anthology, Rhapsoidia, Tablet, Too Much Coffee Man, on latimes.com, and elsewhere. She is a volunteer facilitator with Write Around Portland and a co-host of SHARE. Recently, Literary Arts awarded her one of eight writers’ grants in recognition of literary excellence. You can catch Margaret reading tonight at Mississippi Studios as part of the True Stories show.
Click through to read the interview with Margaret Malone.
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Today’s interview is with Sid Miller, the founder and executive editor of Burnside Review, which has a new issue due out in April. In addition to his duties with the journal, Sid has two new poetry collections out, one entitled Dot-to-Dot, Oregon (Ooligan Press) and the other Nixon on the Piano (David Robert Brooks). In reading Dot-to-Dot, Oregon I found Miller’s poetry provided an entry point through which I could relate to a genre that has escaped me nearly all of my life. I immediately skipped to the section on Northeast Oregon and began to experience the places I grew up through anothers eyes. And although the language is beautiful enough to gain appreciation from the most seasoned critic, it was this context that allowed the poems to find a home within a novice like myself. I highly recommend you pick up both of these new collections, I promise they will not disappoint.
Sid will be reading from Dot-to-Dot, Oregon tomorrow (1-21) at 7:30pm at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne.
Click through to read the interview and an excerpt of Sid’s work.
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Building on the success of the 2nd annual Sledgehammer Contest held this past August, Indigo Editing & Publications decided to bring back the event if only in a slightly more “miniature” way. Instead of 36 hours to come up with a story, participants have 36 minutes, which in some ways that might actually be a larger “sledgehammer” with which to break ones writers block.
The first Mini-Sledgehammer Contest was held this past weekend at the Cloud and Leaf Bookstore in Manzanita and was declared a hit! Tobi Nason’s winning story “You Better Watch Out” can be read here. The second Mini-Sledgehammer Contest will be held this Saturday (12-12) at 2:00 at St. John’s Booksellers. Here are the official contest details:
Participants will be given 4 writing prompts: a character, a fragment of dialogue, an action, and a prop. A timer will be set for 36 minutes. Each participant will produce a new work of fiction on the spot, using the prompts provided, before the timer runs down. All work must be new, and produced especially for this contest. There is no minimum or maximum length. At the end of 36 minutes, participants will read their stories aloud for the audience and our panel of judges: the current Sledgehammer titleholder, a representative of St. Johns Booksellers, and a representative of Indigo Editing. Entries will be judged for completeness, overall quality of writing, and best use of all prompts. Judges’ decisions are final.
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This interview with children’s author/illustrator Nikki McClure is provided courtesy of Amy Baskin. Ms. Baskin is a children’s writer, and maintains the fantastic blog Euphoria, which she uses as “a spot for author and illustrator interviews, thoughts on favorite children’s/ YA books, and musings on my foray into writing for children.”
For years, Nikki McClure’s self-published calendars have graced my office walls. I love the intricate beauty of her paper cuts and the ways in which she pays yearly homage to the nuances of each season. Her art is often peppered with words that challenge the observer to act with intention.
As are her many books. Her recent collaboration with Cynthia Rylant, All in a Day (Abrams, 2009) offers children and families a poignant reminder of the simple wonders that a day can have in store for us. I was thrilled to learn it landed on the NY Times bestseller list last spring, and that there are more books to come.
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prisons, universities and a shelter for homeless teens. Her zines and art projects have featured postal workers, immigrants and artists. Her public art project, Object Permanence, was commissioned by Portland State University in 2009, and is installed permanently in the Smith Student Union Building.
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