James Bernard Frost woke up one morning in March and knew it was time for a change. The Portland author had been pulling sixty-hour weeks at the office for ten years, hunched over a keyboard, stacking thousands upon thousands of sentences. “You know, you get your MFA in Creative Writing, then you have to intern …
(Editor’s note: We first published this interview with Lidia Yuknavitch last March. We’re republishing it to celebrate her 2012 PNBA Award, which she’ll accept Tuesday, March 6 at 7 pm at Broadway Books in Portland.) If you love memoir or poetry or Ken Kesey or have ever spent time on the planet Sorrow, you’ll want …
Nice to hear Portland indie publisher Hawthorne Books recognized in a recent NPR story about memoir—twice. In one of those segments where an author selects three books to recommend, memoirist Marion Winik (The Glen Rock Book of the Dead) chose ‘rebel memoirs,’ including The Chronology of Water by Portland’s Lidia Yuknavitch (a recent PNBA Award winner!) and …
It is not a metaphor to live books. I know it’s true. I once heard it articulated perfectly by Haruki Murakami: “The question is not ‘will one form overtake another?’ Forms are always overtaking one another. And yet we still have television, film, books. The better question is, and the question that must be asked …
Day 20. The first day of Hanukkah. Scott Nadelson is the author of three story collections, most recently Aftermath. A winner of the Oregon Book Award for short fiction, the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award, Nadelson teaches creative writing at Willamette University and in the Rainier Writing Workshop …
Our Day 15 author bookends her list in the smart, poetic, alluring way of her memoir, The Chronology of Water. The Chronology is on the shortlist for a Pacific Northwest Book Award from the indie booksellers of this region; a good number of other year-end lists and non-lists; and was recommended by authors on Day 7 and Day 12 …
“Genuine and generous, this memoir risks much and succeeds powerfully. A striking story is being told here, but the way it's told is even more striking. The book becomes experiential, fostering an intimacy generic zithromax between the writer and reader. You will be moved.”—PNBA Awards Committee. The Chronology of Water is on the shortlist for the …
“I think I discovered the Far West and some subject matter of my earlier fiction at almost the same time,” wrote Bernard Malamud about his decade in Oregon, during which he produced some of his best-known books: The Natural, The Assistant, The Magic Barrel. It was “an interesting conjunction, in imagination,” he went on, “of …
Congrats to Portland’s Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts, which, for the last ten years has been elegantly publishing the likes of Poe Ballantine. Hawthorne is celebrating its tin anniversary this year and has posted this tribute to Ballantine, who’s been with them from the start (they’ve published two of his books of essays and two …
Before the first official reading of my book, Little Green (Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts, 2010), at Annie Bloom’s Books in Multnomah Village, I was a little nervous. That evening in June on the final night of the NBA playoffs, I took the #44 bus to The Village, my old neighborhood. In the early 90’s …
