My Articles
- Is Portland the New Neverland?
Or do local 20-somethings measure success by a new clock? - Ode to a Greek Diner
Niki's in Portland struggles to survive in a town gone mad for hipster hangouts. - "Live Through This," Debra Gwartney's Memoir of Two Runaway Daughters
- "The Rajneesh Chronicles," Q & A with Win McCormack
- Mother Lode
Ode to Delia's, or, When a Mother Starts Wearing Her Daughter's Clothes - Dee's Golden Door
A bygone era of beauty and community lives on at Dee’s Golden Door - Death Penalty Defense Lawyer
Oregon's Kenneth Hadley takes on the toughest cases - Anatomy of a Child Pornographer
What happens when adults catch teenagers "sexting" photos of each other? The death of common sense. - Natasha's Ballroom
At Studio 6, dance students discover their secret identities - Uniform Appeal
Manhattan, Woody Allen, Sex and Beauty - Clueless in New York
Why the New York publishing world swallowed Margaret Seltzer's whopper of a tale - No Exit Plan
The lies and follies of Laura Albert, a.k.a. JT LeRoy - Sacrificing Rebecca
Laurie Recht loved her daughter to death. Literally. - Last Supper
The rise and fall of the Ripe empire - The Eventualist
William Langewiesche on The Atomic Bazaar and facing our worst fear - There Goes the Neighborhood
Race, Real Estate and Gentrifcation on My Block - Lives of the Carnies
On the road with the Cleanest Show in the West - The Great Alaskan Morel Rush of '05
Bears, Guns, Cash in the Woods - Crying and Digging
Reclaiming the realities and rituals of death - Who She Took With Her
The Mother, the Husband, the Son: A Drunk's Tale - Apocalypse Now
Squatting at Slab City - Why not to write about a supreme master of the universe
A Day with the Disciples of Ching Hai - Us and Them
The code of the cop bar - Going to Gacy
A cross-country trip to shake the devil's hand - Sanctuary
Days and nights at the King Edward Saloon - Hailey's Comet
How Bruce Willis romanced and then jilted a small Idaho town - 40 Bucks and a Dream
The lives of a Hollywood motel - Jena at 15
A childhood in Hollywood - Grief's Gravity
When Jesica Santillan died of a botched heart-lung transplant, Nancy Rommelmann was nearly swallowed by the story - Brown Dirt Cowboys
Meet your Mexican gardening crew
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« September 2011 | Main | November 2011 »
October 31, 2011
October 22, 2011
October 21, 2011
October 19, 2011
Flannery O'Connor Reads "A Good Man is Hard to Find"/Storytelling
In which you hear the humor in this remarkable story, as did the audience at Vanderbilt University to whom she read it, in 1959, until nearly the very end. I will be grateful to anyone who can name another writer that captures voices, terror and humor the way O'Connor does.
Speaking of reading one's work: I just enjoyed the morning's first cup of coffee while watching a four-part video series by Ira Glass. In part three, he made me laugh out loud by playing a segment he recorded at age 27, and explained just why it was so awful, including his habit, at the time, of putting EMPHASIS on every THIRD WORD, as if this SOMEHOW gave the STORY gravity. I recently heard something similar, an author reading from her book, and though her medium was prose, she had the familiar if not to my ear (as yet) successful cadence of the poet, where the ends of sentences go UP, as if it's all in QUESTION.
Next week, I go in to do a sound recording of The Bad Mother.
October 03, 2011
Tafv, 1991
Taken by my good friend Condee Russo, but unearthed only earlier this year!
Wordstock!
So many reasons to go! Here are a few:
- Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit From the Good Squad, which deservedly won about 6000 literary awards in 2010, in conversation with Wordstock Executive Director Greg Netzer (Saturday, 1pm, National Endowment for the Arts Stage)
- Lili Ristagno, author of the true crime graphic novel, Short Fuse, will appear on the panel, “Graphic Novels: Not Just for Geeks” (Saturday, 1pm, Oregon Cultural Trust Stage)
- Mega-brilliant author Barry Lopez (Saturday, 3pm, National Endowment for the Arts Stage)
- Blake Nelson reading from Recovery Road (Saturday, 4pm, Wieden + Kennedy Stage)
- Ursula Le Guin (Sunday, 11am, Attic Institute Stage)
- Chelsea Cain reading from her latest thriller, The Night Season (Sunday, 3pm, McMenamins Stage)
- Nancy Rommelmann, reading from her novel The Bad Mother, and Jennifer Lauck, reading from Found. (Sunday, 5pm, Oregon Cultural Trust Stage)
- Ristretto Roasters, coffee of the literati, pouring cold brew and selling beans. (Saturday/Sunday, Beer Garden)
- Please stop by Dymaxicon, booth #705, where we will be raffling a new Kindle loaded with Dymaxicon’s 2011 fall list, including Short Fuse, The Bad Mother, BeBop Garden, The Sushi King’s Daughter, Physical Culture, The Elements of Scrum and others.
- For a full Wordstock line-up and other details, www.wordstockfestival.com
October 02, 2011
Susan Orlean's "Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend"
My review, in the Sunday Oregonian. Short version: loved it.
Buy the book.
