We’re constantly perusing our Portland literary directory looking for interesting folks to feature in our weekly “Five Questions” interview series. Today’s featured guest is Shannon Wheeler, author of the recently released Too Much Coffee Man Omnibus.

Wheeler began cartooning for the University of California, Berkeley student newspaper. Later he created Too Much Coffee Man, which has run as a weekly newspaper comic, as a web comic, in comic books, in magazines and been collected in graphic novels. Too Much Coffee Man even lays claim to being the first opera based on a comic book.

The New Yorker began publishing single panel cartoons from Wheeler in 2009. BOOM! published a collection of New Yorker submissions in the book I Thought You Would Be Funnier (2010). Wheeler is currently working on a graphic novel about the Gulf Coast oil spill.

What Portland bookstore do you frequent the most?

Powell’s on Hawthorne has amazing employees and a rocking coffee shop (Fresh Pot).

What is the last book you bought at a Portland bookstore? What made you pick it up?

I bought Carter Beats the Devil for my book club. Yep, a few of us cartoonists get together to read books without pictures. We try to have food and booze that matches the book. Mostly I buy graphic novels or collections from New Yorker cartoonists.

Who is your favorite Portland author (past or present)?

I know a few of them so it’s hard to say. Ariel Gore has written great parenting books, interviews, and autobiographic books that all remain relevant. I’m dying to meet Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love. It’s always great seeing Chuck Palahniuk and he actually seems to remember me. Kevin Sampsel put out a cool book, A Common Pornography. I heard he’s working on a second one and I’m looking forward to reading that too. Richard Melo is my old neighbor and has a great book, Jokerman 8. And that’s just the traditional novelists who I know. If I start talking about the graphic novelists I’ll be here all day.

What author would you drop everything to go see if they were reading in Portland?

Kurt Vonnegut, but I don’t think that is going to happen any time soon. David Sedaris is a great story teller, but it’s really Steve Martin I’d like to hear. His books are better than they have any right to be. Isn’t he a comedian? When did he learn to write such gentle, insightful, character-driven prose? And talk about turning a phrase – he makes a sentence dance the Charleston.

When is your next event? (And will you share a cartoon with us?)

I’m having a One-One-One-One art show that begins on October 6th at PCPA.

We’re constantly perusing our Portland literary directory looking for interesting folks to feature in our weekly “Five Questions” interview series. Today’s featured guest is Peter Rock, author of My Abandonment (which won an Alex Award, the Utah Book Award, and has been published in Germany, Turkey and France).

Rock is also the author of the novels The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, This Is the Place, and Carnival Wolves, and a story collection, The Unsettling. Rock attended Deep Springs College, received a BA in English from Yale University, and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He has taught fiction at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Deep Springs College, and in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and other awards, he currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is a Professor in the English Department of Reed College. His next novel, The Raccoon and the Letter (about the end of the world in Montana in 1990), will be published by Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt in late 2012.

What is the last book you bought at a Portland bookstore? What made you pick it up?

Yasunari Kawabata’s The House of Sleeping Beauties at Powell’s on Hawthorne, because I saw it and it was so small and Japanese and beautiful – and Kawabata is one of my favorite writers (his Palm-of-the-Hand Stories may be my favorite book). Then I opened it up and read this first paragraph:

He was not to do anything in bad taste, the woman of the inn warned old Eguchi. He was not to put his finger into the mouth of the sleeping girl, or do anything else of that sort.

Damn.

Who is your favorite Portland author (past or present)?

Ursula Le Guin. Not even close. Because my father read the Earthsea Trilogy to my brother and me, sitting on the edge of our beds in our basement bedroom in Salt Lake City in the seventies, and that changed everything. That’s why I write, how I learned to love the transports of story. Also, Le Guin is fearless — she writes for all ages, in all genres, and is never above or beneath anything. Finally, she has been nice to me. For the first ten or so years I lived here I would see her at this event or that, and I was afraid to approach her. Recently, I quoted from The Wizard of Earthsea in my book My Abandonment, and I had to ask her permission. She asked to read my book, liked it, and we had lunch. Since then we sit down every few months. She’s wise and sharp and I feel so fortunate to have this link to my childhood, this actual person who spoke to me through my father’s voice, long ago.

What Portland bookstore do you frequent the most?

The Reed College bookstore, because my orbit is very tight, most of the time. That’s where I work. But they are good! It’s small, it’s an independent bookstore, and the people there are so excellent and helpful and funny and sweet. It’s always a pleasure.

What Portland literary non-profit inspires you?

Write Around Portland. Because they get people telling stories and putting words together who wouldn’t do it on their own.

What is your favorite independently owned (non-book)store in Portland?

Sellwood Cycle Repair, hands down. They’ve worked on my bikes since I moved here, and take as much care with my Schwinn LeTour from high school as they do with someone else’s fancy bikes. Erik Tonkin, the owner, is a bike racing hero in this world, but he’s also a wonderful person. He’ll even deliver bikes to my house or show up with a wrench if I mention that my wife’s brakes are rubbing…

What is your favorite Portland park?

1) Forest Park. It’s our ocean, our bottomless, wild reminder next to us, changing our emotional climate. The paths are just causeways built over the depths, and it’s impossible to see what lives in there, what possibilities exist for us.

I used to spend so much time there, when I was writing about it, and it was transformative. I’d like to spend as much time there, now, but I live way down in the SE and now have two little daughters who tighten my radius considerably. So:

2) Berkeley Park. It has both swings and climbing structure, which is a strangely rare combination in a park. Also, it has plenty of shade, a nice picnic table, and is within walking distance of popsicles.

We’re constantly perusing our Portland literary directory looking for interesting folks to feature in our weekly “Five Questions” (sometimes six) interview series. Today’s featured guest is M. Allen Cunningham, who was just featured in The Ecstatic from Tin House. Cunningham is also the author of The Green Age of Asher Witherow and Lost Son.

What Portland bookstore do you frequent the most? Why?

I’m a Powell’s sycophant, an Annie Bloom’s infatuate, and an official Friend of the Friends of the Multnomah County Library store, but due to equal parts budgetary constraint and an obsession with serendipitous surprise, my readerly hunts most often lead me to the impressive book sections in the various Goodwills around the Portland Metro area, whose inventories change with radical, thrilling regularity. Bless you, Goodwill book-donors!

What is the last book you bought at a Portland bookstore? What made you pick it up?

From that Holy of Holies, the blue room at Powells, I picked up a New York Review Classics edition of Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White. White’s work is awe-inspiring, towering, and in its originality and force almost debilitating to aspirants like me. Read Voss or The Vivisector and be healthily debilitated yourself.

What Portland literary non-profit inspires you? Why?

It’s not expressly literary, but the Milepost Five community inspires me greatly. A low-cost work and housing enclave for artists? What a beautifully civilized idea! It’s as if the Renaissance never ended.

What makes Portland a great literary city?

The existence of the Sterling Writers Room at the Central Library could stand alone as an answer to this one. Then, too, there’s the library that houses it, of which the Portland demos entire should be proud. In a more general sense, Portland is a place filled with creatively-minded folks who like to say yes to unconventional voices, enterprises, and ideas (look at the McMenamins, look at our second-run cinemas and food carts, look at Hawthorne Books and LiveWire and Literary Arts and Oregon Humanities, the TBA Festival and Wordstock). That inclination toward Yes makes for quite a ferment of inspiration. And for writers in particular, whose lot consists overwhelmingly of isolation and rejection, it makes for a climate of invaluable encouragement and inclusivity. Finally, as Joe Sacco has said somewhere, it’s easy to get lost in your own head walking down the sidewalk in Portland (unlike, say, New York, where there are just too many people).

What author would you drop everything to go see if they were reading in Portland?

Can I name a few, all deserving of many more readers? Jayne Anne Phillips, Bruce Olds, Karen Fisher, Brian Hall, Cynthia Ozick.

What is your favorite coffee shop in Portland? Why?

I love coffee, but I’ll offer a tea shop instead: Tea Chai Té (on NW 23rd). You can’t beat their Tra Que Chai (#36 on the menu). And for that inimitable, sought-after, but extremely scarce combo of 1) friendliness, 2) mindful atmosphere, and 3) the best in-store music in town, they’ve got few rivals.

If you are, or represent, a Portland author, book club, bookstore, comic artist, editor, library, literary journal, literary organization, open mic, poet, publisher, reading series, or writing program, and would like to be featured in an upcoming “Five Questions” post, please take a couple minutes and add your listing to our directory.