This essay about life on the road is provided by Jaret Ferratusco. Jaret is the founder of Patient, Folded Hands Publishing, and author of the novellas I Grew Up In Amaltherey Hill and Please Don’t Leave Me. Jaret was recently featured on W + K Entertainment’s Story Time program, where he read from one of his short stories. Upcoming releases include a revised edition of Please Don’t Leave Me for rerelease through Patient, Folded Hands, and a new short-story collection titled To Make This Easier, which focuses on very lonely instances of personal horror and hopelessness in the summits of love and loss.
In early 2009 the groundwork was laid for a new Portland publishing company called Patient, Folded Hands. I started this venture in an attic, basically while drinking large amounts of energy drinks (the kind with high alcohol content), quietly getting myself prepared and excited about starting something all my own, with the only rules I would have to follow being those of finance. It took a bit of time to get the first publication off the floor, and that work is a story called I Grew Up In Amaltherey Hill, now available through my website. Although this book is the first breath for P, FH as a company, it was my second published book as an author, so I considered that I had a marginally accurate view of how it would probably go, moneywise. Which meant I’d better save up, because it takes much more money to do it than what you’re apt to make doing it.
What I figured is that I would probably (hopefully) end up getting out a good amount of books at first, then I could reasonably expect sales to slow a month or so after the release after initial promotions had been done. That was pretty accurate. I wasn’t able to save any of that money from the first month of sales for building the company up any little higher, because all of everything I made that first month went to paying off my investor.
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If you are a Portland author, poet, zinester, cartoonist or publisher looking to publicize your new release(s), email us (portland@readinglocal.com): the title of the release, a brief description, when it will be available, and a link to where it can be purchased or pre-ordered. We will then help you to promote your new release by posting this information on the site.
New Release:
The Big Book of Gross Stuff (Gibbs Smith Publisher), the latest release from Bart King, is now available for purchase.
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The handsome Danish author Peter Fogtdal took a break Friday to let me snoop around his apartment and ask nosy questions. He deserves a break, and a better one than I provided, after the fifteen months since his novel The Tsar’s Dwarf came out from Portland’s own Hawthorne Books. In that time he has done forty events in ten states to promote his book, taught at PSU, and accomplished the amazing international feat of simultaneously writing one novel in Danish and a different novel in English. I caught him in the midst of editing the Danish novel, which he had just finished writing two days earlier. Amidst his décor of beautifully misty Portland paintings and a collection of delicate old teacups, we talked about his life of travel and writing.
While Fogtdal has a long and distinguished writing career with twelve books to his credit, The Tsar’s Dwarf is the first to be translated into English. It tells the story of Sorine, a dwarf whom the king of Denmark gave to the Russian tsar in 1716. She is foul-mouthed, foul-tempered, and much smarter than anybody else in the book.
When I asked a question about traditions in what I stupidly termed “dwarf literature,” Fogtdal nipped that line of questioning in the bud. “I don’t know anything about dwarf literature,” he said, “because I’m not interested in dwarves at all. Not at all.” It turned out that Sorine was an accidental dwarf. Fogtdal was writing a book about Peter the Great and the Danish king Frederick IV, and their fractious 1716 meeting in Copenhagen. His main character at that point –who is a lesser but still important character in the final product – was Rasmus Aereboe, former Danish ambassador in St. Petersburg. “I got so bored writing that,” Fogtdal said. He put the first fifty or sixty pages away for a year. “When I came back to it, it suddenly dawned on me that I’d read several times that Peter the Great kept dwarves like other people collect stamps. So I figured oh my God, the protagonist has to be a dwarf.” After that, the novel became easy to write. Fogtdal was able to tap into his inner dwarf, the part of him that is angry at the world.
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If you are a Portland author, poet, zinester, cartoonist or publisher looking to publicize your new release(s), email us (portland@readinglocal.com): the title of the release, a brief description, when it will be available, and a link to where it can be purchased or pre-ordered. We will then help you to promote your new release by posting this information on the site.
New Release:
Volette I: Seven Saints & a Cigarette Butt a new chapbook from Wil Peregrine is now available for purchase. Seven Saints is also available at Reading Frenzy.
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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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If you are a Portland author, poet, zinester, cartoonist or publisher looking to publicize your new release(s), email us (portland@readinglocal.com): the title of the release, a brief description, when it will be available, and a link to where it can be purchased or pre-ordered. We will then help you to promote your new release by posting this information on the site.
New Release:
The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight, the debut novel from Gina Ochsner is now available for purchase. Ms. Ochsner will be reading from Russian Dreambook tomorrow (2-24) at 7:30pm at Annie Bloom’s Books.
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If you are a Portland author, poet, zinester, cartoonist or publisher looking to publicize your new release(s), email us (portland@readinglocal.com): the title of the release, a brief description, when it will be available, and a link to where it can be purchased or pre-ordered. We will then help you to promote your new release by posting this information on the site.
New Release:
Remember to Wave (Tin Fish Press), a new chapbook from Kaia Sand is now available for purchase.
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f you are a Portland author, poet, zinester, cartoonist or publisher looking to publicize your new release(s), email us (portland@readinglocal.com): the title of the release, a brief description, when it will be available, and a link to where it can be purchased or pre-ordered. We will then help you to promote your new release by posting this information on the site.
New Release:
A Life Transformed-By Accident (Outskirts Press), a new memoir by Helen Decker Liere, is now available for purchase.
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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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If you are a Portland author, poet, zinester, cartoonist or publisher looking to publicize your new release(s), email us (portland@readinglocal.com): the title of the release, a brief description, when it will be available, and a link to where it can be purchased or pre-ordered. We will then help you to promote your new release by posting this information on the site.
New Release:
Guest House (Bay Tree Publishing), a new novel by Barbara Richardson will be released in February and is available for pre-order now.
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If you are a Portland author, poet, zinester, cartoonist or publisher looking to publicize your new release(s), email us (portland@readinglocal.com): the title of the release, a brief description, when it will be available, and a link to where it can be purchased or pre-ordered. We will then help you to promote your new release by posting this information on the site.
New Release:
Golden Leaf: A Khmer Rouge Genocide Survivor (KU Publishing) by Kilong Ung, a memoir of Ung’s personal journey from the Khmer Rouge killing fields to the Rotary Club of Portland and the fellowship of the Royal Rosarians through minefields, rockets, bullets, refugee camps, and Reed College, is now available for purchase.
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If you are a Portland author, poet, zinester, cartoonist or publisher looking to publicize your new release(s), email us (portland@readinglocal.com): the title of the release, a brief description, when it will be available, and a link to where it can be purchased or pre-ordered. We will then help you to promote your new release by posting this information on the site.
New Release:
No Roads Lead To Rome (Via del Prat) by R.S. Gompertz is now available for purchase. You can read a sample chapter here.
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