Reading Local: Portland

The themes are all too common.  Greed. Corruption. The evils and indifference of capitalism.  The zealousness and righteousness of environmentalists.  But they are common because they make for a good story, and one that we all love to read.  And so it is with Daniel R. Cobb’s debut novel The Mine.

The Mine follows the story of Ryan, an eager underling at the Oregon DEQ charged with examining the applications for an expansion of a gold mine in Northeast Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains.  The gold mine is at the center of an extremely heated debate (CNN camera crews and all) between those that tout the jobs it brings to a destitute area, and those that point to the environmental destruction left in its wake.  After reviewing the expansion proposals, Ryan concludes that the request should be denied based on a myriad of alarming environmental concerns.  Unfortunately the final decision is not up to him, and this is where the story turns.

Ryan finds his boss, and the closest thing he has to a father, shot dead in the mans garage.  Shortly after this the gold mines expansion request is granted, furthering Ryan’s state of despondence, and lurching him on a course that will put his life and that of his beloved wife Meagan at risk.  This frenzy carries the rest of the story through the twist and turns that come from Ryan’s valiant if reckless pursuit to right the wrongs he sees in the world.

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Portland Noir is a collection of original short stories that is all over the map — if the map is of the Rose City. The stories are set in different neighborhoods that collectively make up the seedy underbelly of Portland.
The anthology, edited by Kevin Sampsell, is part of the Akashic Books Noir series — “a groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.”

The Portland stories take readers to many a gritty, greasy corner of Portland, where junkies break into the wrong houses, lesbians fantasize about strangling the men in their beds, and love gets strange. The stories come in many shades of dark, from creepy (“Baby, I’m Here”) to clever (“Shanghaied”); violent (“The Wrong House”) to sadly sweet (“Alzheimer’s Noir”).

If there is anything generally missing, it is high-end noir. The stories do not venture much past seedy motels, dive bars, and strip clubs, although there must be plenty of noir to be found in tonier venues. There are a few references to the trendy Pearl District, but a story or two involving the residents of Portland’s ritzier neighborhoods would have enhanced the collection.

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[ The Butterflies of Grand Canyon | Margaret Erhart | Plume | $15.00 ]

Set in the 1950’s Southwest The Butterflies of Grand Canyon tells two intertwined stories. The first story is of Jane Merkle, a young woman married to a much older man, who comes to visit her in-laws who live near the Grand Canyon. The second story focuses on Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, botanists turned sleuths, who arrive in town on the same day as Jane to explore a 13-year-old unsolved mystery revolving around a skeleton which has recently materialized in the garage of a local resident.

Jane begins to undergo a transformation almost at once. Arriving in Flagstaff on a June day along with her husband, she symbolically sheds her past upon discovering that all of the luggage she has brought with her, save for an inexpensive turquoise ring she has purchased en route, has been lost. She soon dons blue jeans, and introduced to the hobby of butterfly collecting by her brother-in-law, falls not only under the spell of the Grand Canyon, but also under the spell of a park ranger who is much closer to her in age than her husband.

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Peaches & Bats is a hand-bound poetry journal produced semiannually by Portland’s own Sam Lohmann.  The latest issue includes work by Emily Kendal Frey, Sheila Murphy, Allison Cobb, Robert Kelly, and many others–all for the low, low price of five bucks.  You can pick up Peaches & Bats issue 5 from the journal website or from Powell’s.

But what will that five bucks get you?  Good question.  We took a look at some of what you’ll find in the latest issue.

Click through to read more about the latest issue of Peaches & Bats.

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This review is provided courtesy of Reading Local contributor Gilion Dumas.  You can read more of Gilion’s reviews and other book musings on her fabulous blog Rose City Reader.

The Snake River divides the northeast corner of Oregon from Idaho and carved Hell’s Canyon, the deepest canyon in North America. In 1887, Chinese immigrants followed a trail of gold dust into the canyon to Dead Line Creek, a stream flowing over a large gravel bar to the Snake River. There, while mining for gold, as many as 34 of them were shot, axed, and beaten to death by a gang of horse-thieving outlaws from nearby Wallowa County.

This mass slaughter – undetected until bodies started floating into Lewiston, Idaho – went virtually uninvestigated and unavenged for over a century, until newspaperman Gregory Nokes covered a story about trial documents “discovered” in an unused safe in the county courthouse in Enterprise, Oregon. Nokes turned amateur historian, spending over ten years wringing every clue and theory out of the scant evidence he could dig up. The result is Massacred for Gold: The Chinese in Hells Canyon.

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This review has been provided courtesy of Lynn Alexander, editor of Full Of Crow, Fashion For Collapse, Blink|Ink Online, and producer of assorted chapbooks, zines, and ebooks through her small press collective.

Ghost Town, USA refers to the poet’s town of Vancouver, Washington, a town in the shadow of the infamous Portland. The name comes from his first impressions: a quiet place, a place without people, even in the middle of the afternoon. Now maybe he was exaggerating, or maybe bustle is relative. Certainly for a transplanted New Yorker, it can be unsettling. And for a poet like Christopher Luna whose writing is so rooted in observation, one can imagine how difficult it must have been in the beginning as he struggled to get used to the silence.

Perhaps something changed in him, opened up to the place, because he came around to this particular town and came to discover his own layers of noise, in the chatter of the ordinary. He needed to get to eye level and engage with the place, with the geography and it’s subtle pulse, to hear it, and it came. These poems include : conversations on the bus, one sided sentiments delivered in skips to a cell phone, young lovers and friends immersed in the logistics of living, plans made, plans changed, bands discovered, people making their way on the bus to different destinations…personalities made, being crafted and delivered in postures and gestures before his observant eyes. We have conversations recounted, bits of text, but his is an omnimedia ethic: music, bumper stickers, signs, notes, fridge magnets, jackets, recollections of poetry, words of the street. We meet believers of magic and miracles, social service cynics, hustlers and bruskers, addicts, people who are in love and people who would dearly like to be.

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This review is provided courtesy of Reading Local contributor Gilion Dumas, and was first published in the Internet Review of Books. You can read more of Gilion’s reviews and other book musings on her fabulous blog, Rose City Reader.

Paul Newman referred collectively to his acting roles as “the child of our time.” Shawn Levy puts it this way in his new biography, Paul Newman: A Life:

Taken as a whole, Newman’s body of work nicely encapsulated the history of an in-between generation of American men who helped their fathers and uncles conquer the world in war and commerce but who could only watch—likely with some jealousy—as their younger siblings and their own children acted out on the native rebellious impulse to overturn everything. . . . Torn by the conflicting impulses to rule and rebel, his was arguably the pivotal generation of the twentieth century, and Newman, almost unconsciously, was its actor laureate.

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This review is provided courtesy of contributor Ali J.  You can read more of Ali’s work on her entertaining blog Worducopia.

As a writing coach and editor, Jessica Page Morrell describes her role in relation to aspiring authors as “Simon Cowell meets the Grinch.” Thanks, But This Isn’t For Us: A (Sort of) Compassionate Guide to Why Your Writing is Being Rejected (Tarcher 2009) is her answer to the worry that writers will remember her as the Angel of Death. Her task: to convince would-be authors to abandon all amateurish mistakes. Preferably, prior to submitting their manuscripts.

Morrell’s tone is light but stern, occasionally veering dangerously close to mockery, as she refers to some of the less impressive manuscripts she’s read: Read the rest of this entry »

This review is provided courtesy of contributor Angela Allen.  Read more of Ms. Allen’s work on her beautiful website.

You’ll have to dig deeply among David Biespiel’s new poems – dictionary, Bible and encyclopedia on hand – to find reason to be hopeful about men and women.

Not that art has to be redemptive, but I like it that way, at least some of the time. Might a few poems out of the 44 in “The Book of Men and Women” (University of Washington Press, 2009, $19.95) be something other than downers?

To be fair, several in the last section of this 80-page volume lift up my heart. Among them: “The Hummingbird” (“I could have touched you as I touch a petal”) and “The Theory of Hats” (“She will come to sit on the porch like a dark sparrow/And let the sun creep slowly onto her hair/And grow old and wonder about the balance of things./And he beside her, sitting, too, distracted in the sun for hours,/ But all the same, both of them, at last, so much warmer”).

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This review is provided courtesy of Reading Local contributor Gilion Dumas.  You can read more of Gilion’s reviews and other book musings on her fabulous blog, Rose City Reader.

The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones is a satisfying novel about the connections between food and culture and, specifically, the cultural role of cooking in imperial and communist China.

The story centers on magazine columnist and recent widow, Maggie McElroy, as she travels to China to handle a matter involving her husband’s estate. She combines the trip with an assignment to write about an up and coming Chinese American chef competing for a spot on the “culinary Olympics” team.

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This review is provided courtesy of Reading Local contributor Gilion Dumas.  You can read more of Gilion’s reviews and other book musings on her fabulous blog, Rose City Reader.

Judgment Calls is a pretty good first effort from the daughter of legendary mystery writer James Lee Burke. Like her heroine, Samantha Kincaid, Alafair Burke was a Deputy District Attorney in Portland, Oregon. Her book is packed with colorful details of life in a DA’s office, although their inclusion sometimes interrupts the flow of the story.

The book has a decent plot with enough complications to keep it moving along at a good pace. The conclusion is a little far fetched, but Burke builds up to it reasonably well so it did not come completely out of the blue.

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This review is provided courtesy of Reading Local contributor Gilion Dumas.  You can read more of Gilion’s reviews and other book musings on her fabulous blog, Rose City Reader.

Four brothers, twin sisters, a father with minor league baseball in his blood, and a Bible thumping mother form the story skeleton of The Brothers K. David James Duncan packs a lot of meat on these bones in his very long, very elaborate, quasi-biographical novel of the Chance family of Camas, Washington.

The first half of the book centers on the baseball career of Hugh “Smoke” Chance, latter known as “Papa Toe” for reasons almost too outlandish to believe. Hugh’s life as a triple-A lefty pitcher stumbles along through interruptions great and small, as his family steadily adds children and his wife rides herd. This part of the book is an engaging account of growing up in small town America in the 1950s and early ‘60s. It has the same steady, powerful flow of the Columbia flowing past Camas.

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