Nancy Rommelmann

The Shelter Cycle, by Peter Rock

My review, from the Sunday Oregonian. A clip:

Let us talk about deeply imagined fiction, Mary Gaitskill's "Veronica" and the stories of Paul Bowles and now Peter Rock's "The Shelter Cycle," books that follow no familiar path; which have their own logic and music and jags that can leave the reader feeling strapped to the back of a toboggan, on a journey to who knows where, watch that turn! Feeling just on the edge of trusting the author is going to get us out alive, get this story birthed, maybe in the middle of a forest in the snow, a metaphor and actual location for the book in question.

Rock reads tonight from the book, at Powell's City of Books, at 7:30pm

 

Come One! Come All! Yon Smallpressapalooza #6!

Have you been to the Small Press section of Powell's lately? It is seriously one of the sexiest parts of the store. Come hear 13 of its authors in action: Oregon Book Award finalist Carrie Seitzinger! Memoirists Lindsey Kugler and Chloe Caldwell! Zinester Aaron Dactyl (Railroad Semantics), novelist Barry Graham, fiction writers Nancy Rommelmann, Janey Smith, and Jeremy Robert Johnson! Poets W. Vandoren Wheeler, Thomas Patrick Levy, Mindy Nettifee, Donald Dunbar, and Susan Denning! Hosted by inimitable master of ceremonies and Powell's small press champion, Kevin Sampsell!

Monday, March 18, 6pm - 10pm.

Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside, Portland

I read from Transportation at 8:30.

 

Saturday Great Book (Special Monday Edition!): Sterling Hayden, "Wanderer"

How and why I picked up Wanderer, Sterling Hayden's 1976 memoir of defying Hollywood and the courts and setting sail for the South Seas with his four children, is lost to time. I can tell you, it was more than 10 years ago. That it may have been prompted by my going weak in the knees watching Hayden in The Asphalt Jungle, in The Killing, that I find him extraordinarily sexy and persuasive even while being shot by Al Pacino in The Godfather. That I once gave a copy to writer William Langewiesche, and that the actor Jim Beaver and I became friends, if virtually, after he saw on Goodreads that Wanderer is one of my favorite books and wondered what the hell kind of gal would think so. Maybe one who has three clipper ships tattoed on her arm, who has told everyone who loves her and might be around when she dies to please dump her body in the ocean, just dump it, that she might not even mind drowning if it means that's where she ends up.

 

Saturday Great Book: Joan Didion's "After Henry"

Great books, in my opinion, brought to you every Saturday. First up: Joan Didion's After Henry, a collection of nonfiction essays, many of which appeared in the New York Review of Books. Didion was the first to speak earlier in the month at the Review's 50th anniversary party in NY, which I attended. She read from Sentimental Journeys, about the Central Park jogger case. She was, at the time of its publication, pilloried. Editor Robert Silvers said the paper rarely had received as much castigating mail. When the alleged rapists were released, after wrongly serving more than a decade in prison, the silence from said castigators was deafening. Writers like Didion, and I hope myself in some small way, do their best to ammonia the sentimental, the popular, the easy from the windscreen, to show where we are and where we are going. 

"We Live in Water," by Jess Walter

My review of the story collection, We Live in Water, by Jess Walter, which runs tomorrow in the Sunday Oregonian. A clip:

In 1993, Robert Altman released the dramatic comedy "Short Cuts." Based on the stories of Raymond Carver, the film resituated the action from the Pacific Northwest to Los Angeles. With the exception of the quality of light, the location change did not matter, longing and loss pretty much playing out in the mountains as they do in the valley.

Twenty years later, Jess Walter brings love and death back to the Northwest with the story collection "We Live in Water." New century, new troubles: If Carver's characters were made to deal with medflies and drive-by shootings, Walter's must navigate meth and a beached economy and the occasional zombie barista. If that last has you thinking you are in for some laughs, you are, though often the kind where you go "ow ow ow" instead of "ha ha ha."

What does not change are the ways people pretend the scratching at the door is not the destinies of their own making. Walter's lead characters, men all, seem particularly lashed to the wheel of misfortune, as though fate is saying, "OK, bub, here's how it's going to be: you're going to tank." And the men, waking from a year, a lifetime, of bad decisions, scan the horizon for a way out as their figurative boots fill with water.

Do check it out - I liked the book a lot. It's on sale at Powell's, where Walter reads March 3.

What We Must Read: Barry Lopez "Sliver of Sky", Terrence Holt "In the Valley of the Kings"

I have been reading Terrence Holt's story collection, In the Valley of the Kings. I bought the book after learning that Holt is Junot Diaz's favorite author ("There is no one in the wide sea of English who writes like him [as far as I know]; no one who is so profound and mysterious, so searingly human and so implacably apocalyptic..."). The stories grabbed me very quickly, and I mean this literally; I felt variously as though the air was being pressed out of me, and that I was being cast to the void. Holt wrote and taught writing before enrolling in medical school; he is currently a practicing physician. But to state that last seems redundant: Holt in both his guises is telling us what is going on here and in "realms outside the scope of ordinary existence." It is overly self-laudatory but I will write it anyway: I keep seeing similarities to what informs Holt's stories and some in Transportation, particularly the title story.

Tonight I read Barry Lopez's "Silver of Sky," which appears as memoir in the January issue of Harper's. It's behind a pay-wall but go ahead and subscribe, it's $16.95. What Lopez has written had to be written and must be read. It's about the sexual abuse he experienced as a child; what does and does not happen when you do and do not expose the savagery. You will, I am sure, want, as did I, to grab Harry Shier by the throat, to shame him deeply, yes for what he did, and also for the compounding he was willing to do. And for what others, due to their own fears and rationalizations (cue Penn State anthem) are not willing to do. Lopez, a National Book Award winner and a friend, has thought long about this and writes the following:

A more obvious question I asked myself as I grew older was: How could my mother not have known? Perhaps she did, although she died, a few years after she was told, unwilling to discuss her feelings about what had gone on in California. I’ve made some measure of peace with her stance. When certain individuals feel severely threatened — emotionally, financially, physically — the lights on the horizon they use to orient themselves in the world might easily wink out. Life can then become a series of fear-driven decisions and compulsive acts of self-protection. People start to separate what is deeply troubling in their lives from what they see as good. To use the usual metaphor, they isolate the events from one another by storing them in different rooms in a large hotel. While these rooms share a corridor, they do not communicate directly with one another.

I’m not able, today, to put the image I have of my mother as her children’s attentive guardian together with the idea of her as an innocent, a person blinded by the blandishments of a persistent pedophile. But for whatever reason, she was not able, back then, to consider what might be happening in the hours after she saw Shier drive away, her son’s head, from her point of view on the porch, not quite clearing the sill of the car window as the two of them departed.

Reading one of these works in a week would be enough to knock one silent for a while. Reading both, today, made me need to tell you.

TRANSPORTATION, and the Company it Brings

On January 1 of this year, I released The Queens of Montague Street, a memoir of growing up in 1970s Brooklyn Heights. Last week, Longreads named it one of the Top 10 of 2012 Nonfiction reads. Others include John Branch's epic Snowfall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek (NYT), and Pamela's Colloff's wrenching and masterful The Innocent Man (Texas Monthly - be sure to read both parts!). Talk about ending the year in fantastic company.

And nice timing: my new book, Transportation: Stories, also came out last week, and is now available on Amazon, in paperback and Kindle. Authors Dana Spiotta, Karen Karbo and Deborah Reed offered generous blurbs for the cover, there are book parties and readings to come; the book is essentially a little fuel in the engine.

I had no idea, when I was typing Queens last New Year's Day, that the work would travel beyond my blog. Perhaps on this day next year, I can write about where Transportation has been, how the stories, like little emissaries, move people, including me, from one place to another.

I am reading a book right now that does exactly this: Terrence Holt's In the Valley of the Kings, a collection whose stories occur just outside the sightline, into the metaphysical and the terror and divine. The title story of Transportation is informed by understanding near-identical to the stories in ...Kings (which I had never heard of until last week), so much that I keep thinking I must send it to Holt, as if to say, I understand this thing, too, or am trying to, or this tiny little part of it.

More great company xx

Top Ten Longreads of 2012 - The Queens of Montague Street

I woke up this morning to an email from Mark Armstrong, who curates Longreads, which I think is the best long-form site online. It is also where early last year, The Queens of Montague Street was chosen as a read, and then as article of the week.

Today, it's up there as one of the Top 10 Longreads of 2012, Nonfiction. I am kind of god-smacked about this at the moment, because the company is so extraordinary, including last week's massive NYT article Snowfall: The Avalance at Tunnel Creek.The links to all the pieces are here. Or you can go spend the 99-cents on Queens right here, right now.

And while you're online, go join Longreads for $3 a month. It truly is the finest place to read the best stuff out there.

Gene Weingarten, Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, and the Indefensible Ethics of Journalism

Boy, do I love the writing of Gene Weingarten, his boldness and subtlety and truth-telling, his subjects, his hyper-critical eye and his kindness, all of it works for me. A brilliant example: this December 5 piece from the Washington Post, on convicted family killer Jeffrey MacDonald, whose case every long-form journalist is well familiar with, because of the ethical snares writers Joe McGinniss and Janet Malcolm found themselves traversing, ducking, becoming impaled on, in their books respective books, Fatal Vision and The Journalist and the Murderer. The issues--of what you share with your subjects, of how you gain their trust and whether you deserve it, of how far you can and should push and who you're helping, who you're hurting--can never be empirically answered. You decide boundaries on the fly, you make the phone call that is going to make the person on the other end cry. Sometimes, they surprise you. Sometimes, they stonewall, only to come back two years last and say, "I'm ready to talk now." Tell yourself, people need to tell their stories, that this is what you're here for, that you try, on your best days, to be of service, or, in the words of a friend, "to add to the well of Truth we all drink from." Trust me, there is no time to get cocky about this, because you will certainly spend years of your life getting it quasi- or very wrong before you get it right, if you ever do. Weingarten does.

Defiance: A Benefit to Rebuild Red Hook, Brooklyn

Please join us for an important fundraiser to help the devastated community of Red Hook, Brooklyn! 

poster by PNCA student Amanda MacKenzie-Noise

The Portland Brooklyn Project and Tin House present:

“DEFIANCE: A BENEFIT TO REBUILD RED HOOK, BROOKLYN”

This Sunday, December 2, 2012

Disjecta

8371 North Interstate Avenue, Portland

Show 5:30-7:30

Doors open at 5PM

Tickets and/or raffle tickets HERE

Advanced $20 / $30 with raffle ticket

Door: $25 / $35 with raffle ticket

A fundraiser to benefit one of the to benefit one of New York's

communities most devastated by Hurricane Sandy: Red Hook, Brooklyn

All proceeds will be given to RED HOOK INITIATIVE which provides residents with emergency clothing and food,

 and RESTORE RED HOOK, a group that is helping to restore Red Hook’s small businesses.

The benefit will be held at DISJECTA a Contemporary Arts Center in North Portland.

The authors scheduled to appear include JON RAYMOND, KAREN KARBO, NANCY ROMMELMANN, COURTENAY HAMEISTER AND PETER CARLIN.

Former Brooklynites CASEY NEILL and TIM DUROCHE will perform.  Casey -

solo and Tim with the Kin Trio and special guest Noah Bernstein.

SUPER RAFFLE TICKETS are $10/each: 1 TICKET = 4 CHANCES TO WIN!

Raffle includes 4 packages with gift certificates from some of Portland’s hottest restaurants  

(LE PIGEON, POK POK, LINCOLN, TASTY NSONS, MOTHER'S BISTRO, TORO BRAVO, SUNSHINE TAVERN, etc)

Ristretto Coffee, Stumptown, a Kindle w/ Dymaxicon titles loaded, fine art from Molly Cliff Hilts and Amanda MacKenzie-Noice 

Moby-Dick in Pictures—a full color art book by Matt Kish, Tin House subscriptions, and more

Gary Wills on What Romney Lost

Gary Wills's lacerating post on Romney, on the New York Review of Books blog. A clip:

Many losing candidates became elder statesmen of their parties. What lessons will Romney have to teach his party? The art of crawling uselessly? How to contemn 47 percent of Americans less privileged and beautiful than his family? How to repudiate the past while damaging the future?

h/t Webster Hogeland

Booty Call #8

Come on, you know you want it...

BOOTY CALL #8 - FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 8pm



A night of dirty, weird, smutty, funny, sexy stories Friday, October 26th 8pm doors, 9pm readings 21 and over $5 at the door In the basement of The Blue Monk 3341 SE Belmont http://www.thebluemonk.com/ Hosted by KEVIN SAMPSELL & SARAH MIRK http://kevinsampsell.com/ http://mirkwork.wordpress.com/ Readings by PAULA BOMER (author of "Nine Months") http://www.paulabomer.com/ MICHAEL HEALD (author of "Goodbye to the Nervous Apprehension," Publisher of Perfect Day Publishing) http://www.perfectdaypublishing.com/ NANCY ROMMELMANN (author of "Transportation" and "The Bad Mother", award-winning journalist) http://www.nancyrommelmann.com/ JIMMY RADOSTA (Mortified, Back Fence PDX) https://twitter.com/jimmyradosta Musical guest JULIA KOBOS (Second City, Entertainment For People) https://www.facebook.com/julia.kobos.7 Plus: sexy trivia and cool prizes.

Ristretto Reading Series: Audrey Braud/Deborah Reed, "Fortune's Deadly Descent"

This Wednesday, October 10, 7pm, Ristretto Reading Series is very pleased to present an evening with author Deborah Reed, writing under her pen name Audrey Braun and reading from her new thriller, Fortune’s Deadly Descent. The second in the Fortune series trilogy – A Small Fortune was called “a polished page-turner. Braun writes with verve and confidence in this stunning debut” (IndieReader) – the book is fast-paced, sexy and dangerous. What more could you want in a heroine? Reed/Braun will have all her books available for sale and signing.

This event will be the first at Ristretto Roasters’ new northwest location in the Schoolhouse Electric Building, a seriously glamorous space. Come and see.

Ristretto Roasters Nicolai, 2181 N. Nicolai Street, Portland

Coffee, tea and snacks will be served. Wine graciously provided by Anne Amie Vineyards. This event is free and open to everyone, as are all Ristretto Reading Series events. More info at www.ristrettoroasters.com

Early reviews for Fortune’s Deadly Descent:

"The trip is worth taking...as a shift in perspective shows that nothing is what it first seemed to be in Fortune’s Deadly Descent." — The Washington Post

"Braun suffuses the village’s Old World charm with just enough shadow to enhance suspense, and Celia’s courage and determination make compelling reading. Readers of A Small Fortune will enjoy this further adventure..." — Booklist

Audrey Braun is the pen name of novelist Deborah Reed. She comes from a long line of storytellers and musicians and finds creative inspiration in the composition of alt-country, folk, homespun goods, and mysteries of the European kind (see Patricia Highsmith). Deborah is the author of the bestselling novel, Carry Yourself Back to Me, a Best Book of 2011 Amazon Editors' Pick. Deborah's work has appeared in The Center for Fiction's The Literarian, The Nervous Breakdown, Opium Magazine, More Magazine, and elsewhere. She has lived all over the United States and in Europe but currently resides in the Pacific Northwest where she is at work on a new literary novel. Find out more at her website: www.reed-braun.com

Erika Schickel on Cheryl Strayed Envy

I am trying to type this post, to get the links right, but it's a little hard when you feel you've just been kicked in the eyeballs and teeth and heart, by the essay my fellow Bad Girl of LA Lit Erika Schickel posted yesterday on LA Observed. What can I say but, Jesus, Erika. Also, that Cheryl, too, is a friend. And on we go, on we must.

113 Crickets - Summer Issue

Nice company to keep

Bad Girls of LA Literature Redux

Sex! Drugs! Rock 'n' Roll! (as well as bioidenticals, schvitzing and cat care--we won't be restrained!)

It's time again for the (now annual)...

BAD GIRLS OF LA LITERATURE party!

Samantha Dunn

Annabelle Gurwitch

Hillary Johnson

Sandra Tsing Loh

Nancy Rommelmann

Erika Schickel

 

5 p.m. Sunday, May 27th

3380 Ley Drive
Los Angeles , CA 90027

(at the home of Annabelle Gurwitch in lovely Los Feliz)

See ya!

In the Mood for a Good Time?

What do you have planned this weekend? Some LA sunshine, some sex, some frolicking with movie stars and maybe, offing them? No? Would you like to?

Download Shooting Stars now. It's free, until midnight.

A Love Story, with Pastry

Wherein I tell the true story of a chance meeting with Kim Boyce, a meeting that's led to continual laughter, sleepless nights, and one of these days, a bottle of wine.

 

How Others See You - Concrete Blonde Edition

Today received an email from Michael Totten, with the below video embedded, and the message, "It sounds like the soundtrack to a book you might write, especially the second two-thirds."

Thank you Michael xx