Reading Local: Portland

Welcome to another short roundup of a few of the links I found intriguing from the last week. I need to spend a little more time reading this week to give you a more comprehensive list, but I hope you enjoy the links here. 

Tin House Books Blog
Barry Hannah, 1942-2010
-A wonderful interview between Tom Franklin and Barry Hannah from last summer. 

Rose City Reader
Pro-Choice
-A blog post with a great title about how the Rose City Reader chooses her next book. I am always curious how people find and decide to open their next book.

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Hi Book Folk! So unfortunately, this is going to be a Short Edition of the weekly roundup. I won’t make excuses, but I will say I will need a month of detox and some good calm reading to recover from a ridiculous weekend. Just too much. I look forward to the tasty words of Cormac McCarthy, Charles D’Ambrosio and maybe finishing the last few stories I have left in Portland Noir. And I will be back next week with a full host of links for your Portland Blog Roundup.

Hawthorne Books
Frank Meeink’s Lecture at Washington and Jefferson College – Nov. 19 2009
-An amazing several part video link to a lecture by Frank Meeink, whose story is told in Hawthorne Books coming title Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead

Powell’s Book Blog
A Very Fine Engagement
-Now I am truly, truly sad I couldn’t make it to Kevin Sampsell’s reading last week for his book A Common Pornography. He also managed to squeeze in a proposal to his girlfriend! Oh and there’s some other news at the bottom of this post, but it’s not nearly as exciting as the warm fuzzy from the engagement pictures.

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Powell’s has released the winners of their Puddly Awards contest. Readers from all over got a chance to vote on the best book of the last decade. The list is long and in many cases overlaps with the Powell’s employee’s list. The top ten in each list have been given special discounts for new copies, 30% off to be exact.

The winners of the past decade in Fiction and Non-Fiction are:

Fiction – The Road by Cormac McCarthy

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Well Good Day Portland Book Folk! Here we are again on Monday with another round of Links that I and others of the RL crew find interesting.

Portland Fiction Project
Sin Sanai: Part Two
-Tonight the Portland Fiction Project performs at the Maiden. 7pm. Are you checking our their site every day for the new fiction that goes up? Great stuff from prolific local authors.

Poets & Writers
Floyd Skloot Recommends
-Okay so PW isn’t a Blog, but Local Author Floyd Skloot details a bit of advice for writers and the ideas that come from everywhere.

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From what I could find (please contact me if you have an event you would like me to add to this or future schedules), the local book events for the week of December 14, 2009 through December 20, 2009 are:

Monday December 14-

Greg Mortenson – Stones Into Schools (Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, @7:00pm, SOLD OUT): Since the 2006 publication of Three Cups of Tea, Mortenson has traveled across the U.S. and the world to share his vision with hundreds of thousands of people. He has met with heads of state, top military officials, and leading politicians who all seek his advice and insight.

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Today’s Featured Book Event:

To Pay My Way With Stories: A Documentary about Write Around Portland (NW Film Center, Whitsell Auditorium, @7:30pm, $8): Write Around Portland is a Portland-based non-profit that reaches out to under-served populations and provides them with the opportunity to enroll in a free, rigorous, identity-specific, ten-week creative writing workshop culminating in a public reading and a published anthology. Director Brian Lindstrom’s TO PAY MY WAY WITH STORIES closely follows participants and explores how they transcend their difficulties—including cancer, HIV/AIDS, methadone, Down’s syndrome and poverty—as they find their voices. (49 mins.)

Other Book Events Today:

Eighth Annual Jefferson High School Multicultural Film Festival (North Portland Library, @4:45pm): The North Portland Library is proud to co-sponsor Jefferson High School’s Multicultural Film Festival showcasing eight diverse movies. Watch “The Reckoning” and join us for a disccusion following the show.

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Today’s Featured Book Event:

Jeff VanderMeer, Jay Lake, Cat Rambo, and Jeff Johnson (The Press Club, @5:30pm): Join Underland Press to celebrate the weird and the wonderful with readings by acclaimed authors Jeff VanderMeer, Jay Lake, Cat Rambo, and Jeff Johnson. With art by Benjamin W. Burch and music by DJ Santo, along with crepes, wine, and beer at the Press Club, we’ll stay and talk fantastic lit ’till the management kicks us out.

Underland Press is dedicated to publishing weird, strange, odd, and unsettling fiction. Founded in 2007 by an ex Dark Horse editor, the press hit the ground running with titles ranging from Martin Millar’s Queen Vex, to the Best American Fantasy series, to Brian Evenson’s Last Days. Limited editions of Underland books will be available to purchase at the reading.

Other Book Events Today:

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Today’s Featured Book Event:

Charting Our Course: A Show About Education, Literacy, and Books (Reading Frenzy, @6:00pm): Tonight is the opening night for an exhibit featuring work from the Just Seeds Artists’s Cooperative. Justseeds is an artists’ collective that runs a webstore, a blog, and produces individual and collective work about political issues and for social movements. The prints in this show are all based on the written word, from portraits of authors to images inspired by poems and songs. The title of the show is taken from Malcolm X’s famous quote about education and culture: “Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future.” This event is free and all ages. Exhibit runs through November. Prints will be available for purchase. Free beer at the reception from Ninkasi!

Other Book Events Today:

NEGATIVE BULGE: Art & Zines by Islands Fold (Floating World Comics, @6:00pm): Luke Ramsey came down for the Zine Symposium this past July to represent the Islands Fold art collective that he started in Pender Island, British Columbia.  One day after the fest he was hanging out and participated in a drawing session with local artists: Blaise Larmee, Kinoko (from Seattle), Sean Christensen & Theo Ellsworth.  Little did they know, the collaborative jam session would result in a zine of ultimate greatness, Negative Bulge!  We are very pleased to present original art from the legendary jam session as well as the new zines from Islands fold.

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Today’s Featured Book Event:

Loggernaut Reading Series (Urban Grind East, @7:30pm, $3-5): Joel Bettridge, Tom Bissell, and Peyton Marshall will tackle this month’s prompt, “Arrival.”

Tom Bissell is the author of Chasing the Sea; Speak, Commentary (with Jeff Alexander); God Lives in St. Petersburg; and The Father of All Things. He is working on a long book about the tombs of the Twelve Apostles entitled Bones That Shine Like Fire and a much shorter book about video games entitled Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter—and Why They Don’t Matter More, and has recently joined the faculty at PSU.

Joel Bettridge is the author of two books of poetry, That Abrupt Here (The Cultural Society Press, 2007) and Presocratic Blues (forthcoming from Chax Press). He co-edited, with Eric Selinger, Ronald Johnson: Life and Works (NPF) and his critical study, Reading as Belief: Language Writing, Poetics, Faith is forthcoming from Palgrave in Fall 2009. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of English at Portland State University.

Peyton Marshall is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of a Maytag Fellowship and the Richard Yates award for short fiction. Her story “Bunnymoon” was published in Best New American Voices 2004, and her work has appeared in such magazines as A Public Space, Etiqueta Negra and fivechapters.com. She is writing a novel about California’s infamous Preston School of Industry.

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Today’s Featured Book Event:

Historic Zinesters Talking-Kevin Sampsell and Leanne Grabel (Central Library, @6:30pm): Meet some of the original creators of zines in Portland. Kevin Sampsell, of Future Tense Books and Powell’s City of Books, and Leanne Grabel, poet, performer and teacher, discuss the development of chapbooks, poetry and zines in Portland.

Other Book Events Today:

Bill Siverly and Barbara Drake (Broadway Books, @7:00pm): Two very fine teachers and poets, Bill Siverly and Barbara Drake, will be with us tonight to read from new books. Bill Siverly, originally from Idaho, has lived in Portland since 1972. He is co-editor of Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, which features poetry of the Pacific Northwest and appears twice yearly on the equinoxes. Bill’s new book, Clearwater Way, is a journey from the Washington Coast up the Columbia, Snake, and Clearwater Rivers and into the woods of north Idaho. The journey is also back in time, to his childhood, and is inspired by the Wasco myth cycle about Coyote, who traveled the same terrain, creating land forms, resources, and cultural practices. Barbara Drake grew up at the Oregon coast. She is the author of a number of poetry chapbooks, a memoir, and a college textbook about writing poetry. Barbara’s new book is Driving 100. The major theme of this work is that the past in all of its mystery and wonder is driving relentlessly into the dark. Barbara’s strong voice and sympathetic observation create a haven in her poetry for things which are passing away, and in these poems they go on living in the light of her unique poetic reality, exquisite in line, image, memory and emotion.

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Today’s Featured Book Event:

1000 Words Reading Series 2nd Anniversary (The Maiden, @7:00pm): 1,000 Words returns Monday, November 2 at the Maiden for its second anniversary and the newest chapter in our Oulipean experiment: five writers (Daneen Bergland, Joe Pitkin, Geoff Rogers, Geneva Chao, and Ryan Davis) wrote on the theme RECOGNITION, penning 250 words per week for four weeks in response to prompts extracted by series curator Mel Favara from William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions—only they didn’t know where the prompts originated. The results, as per usual, have been wildly divergent, smart, and fresh: want to see how five different authors employed the phrase, “a distance never measured in miles but in minutes”?

Other Book Events Today:

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Today’s Featured Book Event:

Reading with Neeli Cherkovski (The Writers’ Dojo, @7:30pm): Neeli Cherkovski reads from his new book of poems, From The Canyon Outward. Cherkovski lives and writes in San Francisco. His poertry books include Animal, Elegy for Bob Kaufman, Leaning Against Time, which earned an PEN Award for Excellence in Literature, Fronteras Rotas, published in a bi-lingual edition, and the newly released From the Canyon Outward. Another collection, The Manila Poems, is forthcoming. He has also written biographies of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Charles Bukowskii, and is the author of a book of critical memoirs, Whitman’s Wild Children. For many years, Cherkvoski served as writer-in-residence at the now closed New College of California where he also taught literature and philosophy. He continues to teach poetics at various locales throughout the SF Bay Area and is completing a new memoir.

Other Book Events Today:

Friends of Hillsboro Library Fall Used Book Sale (Hillsboro Library-Main Branch, @10:00am-8:00pm): The Friends of the Hillsboro Public Library are having the Fall Book Sale in the Meeting Room during regular library hours. For more information about the Friends, visit their website at www.hillsborolibraryfriends.org.

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