Every Saturday we will bring you links to articles from around the web featuring members of Portland’s lit community. Please feel free to pass along any you come across as well, by emailing us at portland@readinglocal.com, and we will include them in next week’s edition of Short Stories.
The Big Grabowski co-authors Carolyn J. Rose and Mike Nettleton are interviewed on My Shelf:
Deb: Collaborative writing presents unique challenges; how was your collaborative experience? Any hints for success?
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Today’s Featured Book Event:
Tangent presents: Jake Buffy, Brandon Downing, & Reg Johanson (Clinton Corner Cafe, @7:00pm): Tangent is pleased to host three exciting poets: Portland native Jake Buffy will be making his full-length reading debut; New York-based artist Brandon Downing will be screening some new film shorts; and Reg Johanson will be joining us all the way from Vancouver, BC to perform his new poetry.
Other Book Events Today:
Gala Celebration Honoring Local Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (Barnes & Noble-Clackamas, @3:00pm): Come celebrate the talents of the SCBWI-Oregon. Sixteen authors and illustrators of children’s and teen’s books will be here to present and sign their books, including Emily Whitman, Carmen Bernier-Grand, Lisa Schroeder, Dale Basye and Nancy Coffelt.
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From what we could find (please contact us if you have an event you would like us to add to this or future schedules), the local book events for the week of March 13, 2010 through March 19, 2010 are:
Saturday March 13-
Gala Celebration Honoring Local Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (Barnes & Noble-Clackamas, @3:00pm): Come celebrate the talents of the SCBWI-Oregon. Sixteen authors and illustrators of children’s and teen’s books will be here to present and sign their books, including Emily Whitman, Carmen Bernier-Grand, Lisa Schroeder, Dale Basye and Nancy Coffelt.
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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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Every Saturday we will bring you links to articles from around the web featuring members of Portland’s lit community. Please feel free to pass along any you come across as well, by emailing us at portland@readinglocal.com, and we will include them in next week’s edition of Short Stories.
Underland Press is profiled as part of the B&N Review Small Press Spotlight series:
Since its inception in 2008, Underland Press has illustrated—by the small run of superior books it has so far published—the value of having a strong and individual creative vision guiding an enterprise, in place of a diffuse and lowest-common-denominator corporate consensus.
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Today’s Featured Book Event:
Dave Eggers Booksigning (Powells City of Books, @12:00pm): Join us when bestselling author Dave Eggers signs copies of his most recent books, The Wild Things and Zeitoun (McSweeney’s). A riveting work of nonfiction, Zeitoun explores the life of a prosperous Syrian-American who chose to stay in New Orleans through Hurricane Katrina — and then abruptly disappeared. Loosely based on the picture book by Maurice Sendak and the screenplay co-written with Spike Jonze, The Wild Things is about the confusions of a boy, Max, making his way in a world he can’t control. Please note: This is a booksigning only; the author will not read from his work.
Other Book Events Today:
First Friday: Art and Letters (Downtown Camas, WA, @5:00pm): Local authors will sign, sell, and read from their books in shops and locations throughout downtown Camas. A collection of signed books donated by the authors will be raffled to benefit the nonprofit Friends of the Camas Library. Authors and local students will read from their works in the new Journey Community Church located on 4th Ave in downtown Camas.
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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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Today’s Featured Book Event:
Jennie Shortridge and Erica Bauermeister (Broadway Books, @7:00pm): Jennie Shortridge and Erica Bauermeister will read from their new novels. Jennie’s novel is When She Flew (New American Library), the story of a girl and her father found living off the grid in Forest Park. Inspired by real events that many of us remember, this novel is a warm-hearted story that imagines what happens when an injured war veteran and his 12-year-old naturalist daughter are 
brought back to “civilized” life after being on their own. Erica’s novel is The School of Essential Ingredients (Berkley), a tale of a cooking teacher and her students that navigates readers through each character’s personal dramas, memories and musings as they handle, slice, chop, blend, smell and taste. It is a remarkable debut novel that creates a captivating culinary world where the pleasures of sophisticated food come to mean much more than simple epicurean indulgence.
Other Book Events Today:
First Thursday Book Club (St. John’s Books, @5:30pm): Join us for the inaugural meeting of our First Thursday Book Club. Get in on the ground floor of a book club in the making! Our first selection is Jane Austen’s immortal, inimitable Pride & Prejudice. We invite you to read (or reread) this classic tale of money and marriage in Regency England–then sit down with us to discuss it over tea and cookies.. Future discussion books will be selected at this meeting.
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“Watching you is, in fact, what your government does best,” Shane Harris told an audience of about 45 at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne. Which is a pretty good crowd for a Monday night. Portlanders like to keep a close watch on their civil liberties.
A native Portlander, Harris lives in Washington, DC, where he writes for the National Journal. He was in town to promote The Watchers (Penguin Press HC), his new book about the rise of terrorism surveillance in the United States, told through the stories of five men who have been instrumental in this effort.
Well spoken and well groomed, Harris addressed the crowd confidently. He explained how writing about intelligence, homeland security and counterterrorism for the National Journal gives him access to all sorts of covert folks. Intelligence is a strange beat in journalism because it’s built around secrets and deceptions. “If there’s ever a story that lands in your lap,” he said, “be very careful.”
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Today’s Featured Book Event:
David Oliver Relin (Mercy Corps Action Center, @7:30pm): Relin will talk about the writing of Three Cups of Tea, as well as See How They Shine, his soon-to-be published book about blindness in developing countries. The author will sign audience members’ copies of Three Cups of Tea after his presentation.
Other Book Events Today:
Oregon Literary Review’s First Thursday Reading Series (Blackbird Wineshop, @7:00): Oregon Literary Review co-hosts First Wednesdays, a series of readings, performances and wine-tasting. Readers for March 3 are Mark Thalman, John Blackard, Penelope Scambly Schott, and Pedro Ponce. This show is 21 and over.
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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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