Week of September 3
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Book Release
Okay, this was technically last Saturday, but we missed it. And, you know, the launch is this Saturday. So we’re including it in this week’s happy happenings. Happy birthday, Dora: A Headcase!
Dora: A Headcase, by Lidia Yuknavitch
Dora: A Headcase is a contemporary coming-of-age story based on Freud’s famous case study—retold and revamped through Dora's point of view, with shotgun blasts of dark humor and sexual play.
Ida needs a shrink . . . or so her philandering father thinks, and he sends her to a Seattle psychiatrist. Immediately wise to the head games of her new shrink, whom she nicknames Siggy, Ida begins a coming-of-age journey. At the beginning of her therapy, Ida, whose alter ego is Dora, and her small posse of pals engage in "art attacks." Ida’s in love with her friend Obsidian, but when she gets close to intimacy, she faints or loses her voice. Ida and her friends hatch a plan to secretly film Siggy and make an experimental art film. But something goes wrong at a crucial moment—at a nearby hospital Ida finds her father suffering a heart attack. While Ida loses her voice, a rough cut of her experimental film has gone viral, and unethical media agents are hunting her down. A chase ensues in which everyone wants what Ida has.
Lidia YuknavitchIn 1986 my daughter died the day she was born. From her I became a writer.
My writing is informed, deformed, and reformed by these things:
1. I think gender and sexuality are territories of possibility. Nevermind what we’ve been told or what the choices appear to be. Inside artistic practice the possibilities open back up.
2. I think narrative is quantum.
3. I think the writer is a locus through which intensities pass.
4. I think literature is that which fights back against the oppressive scripts of socialization and good citizenship.
5. I think the space of making art is freedom of being.
6. I think things that happen to us are true. Writing is a whole other body.
7. I believe in art the way other people believe in god.
I have had lots of jobs. Some of my favorites were being on an all-male house painting crew because you could see and touch your labor and it had concrete meaning and I could drink beer, pee standing up, and fart anytime I wanted; seasonal farm work like picking basil and fruit because I got to be outside and meet cool people; and working on the road crew with Mexicans two of the times I was arrested.
In the more recent past all my jobs have been bourgeois teaching gigs. I don’t know what I think about teaching. Mostly I show up and beg people to have a dialogue with me about ideas. I do feel lucky to have a job and health insurance. It’s just hard to be an isolate and do something so public every day.
In Eugene I invented a magazine called two girls review. In Portland my husband and I made a press called Chiasmus. Both are the result of radical collaborations.
Oh. And I am a very, very good swimmer. Which must be why, as my friend Mia says, I have not drowned. When pulled under, kick.
Buy Dora: A Headcase at IndieBound or at Amazon
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MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 3
Authors in Pubs, area writers read original works, 7:30 p.m., Jack London Bar, Portland, OR
Bumbershoot Music and Arts Festival, Seattle, WA
Josh Garrett-Davis, Ghost Dances, 7:30 p.m., Powell’s Hawthorne, Portland, OR
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4
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Book Release
Fobbit, by David Abrams
“Abrams’s debut is a harrowing satire of the Iraq War and an instant classic. The Fobbits of the title are U.S. Army support personnel, stationed at Baghdad’s enclave of desk jobs: Forward Operating Base Triumph. Some of the soldiers, like Lt. Col. Vic Duret, are good officers pushed to the brink. Others, like Capt. Abe Shrinkle, are indecisive blowhards. But the soul of the book is Staff Sgt. Chance Gooding Jr., a public relations NCO who spends his days crafting excruciating press releases and fending off a growing sense of moral bankruptcy. A series of bombings, street battles, and media debacles test all of these men and, although there are exciting combat scenes, the book’s most riveting moments are about crafting spin, putting the “Iraqi Face” on the conflict. A sequence in which a press release is drafted and edited and scrutinized, held up for so long that its eventual release is old news, is a pointed vision of losing a public relations war. Abrams, a 20-year Army veteran who served with a public affairs team in Iraq, brings great authority and verisimilitude to his depictions of these attempts to shape the perceptions of the conflict. Abrams’s prose is spot-on and often deadpan funny, as when referring to the ‘warm pennies’ smell of a soldier’s ‘undermusk of blood,’ or when describing one misshapen officer: ‘skull too big for the stalk of his neck, arms foreshortened like a dinosaur... one word came to mind: thalidomide.’ This novel nails the comedy and the pathos, the boredom and the dread, crafting the Iraq War’s answer to Catch-22.” ~ from starred review in Publishers Weekly
David Abrams is the author of Fobbit, a comedy about the Iraq War (Grove/Atlantic) that Publishers Weekly called “an instant classic.” His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, Salamander, Connecticut Review, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The North Dakota Review, and other literary quarterlies. He earned a BA in English from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. He retired from active-duty after serving in the U.S. Army for 20 years, a career that took him to Alaska, Texas, Georgia, the Pentagon, and Iraq. He now lives in Butte, Montana, with his wife. His blog, The Quivering Pen, can be found at:www.davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com. (Author photo courtesyLisa Wareham Photography.)Buy Fobbit at IndieBound or at Amazon
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Book Release
Wilderness, by Lance Weller
Thirty years after the Civil War's Battle of the Wilderness left him maimed, Abel Truman has found his way to the edge of the continent, the rugged, majestic coast of Washington State, where he lives alone in a driftwood shack with his beloved dog. Wilderness is the story of Abel, now an old and ailing man, and his heroic final journey over the snowbound Olympic Mountains. It's a quest he has little hope of completing but still must undertake to settle matters of the heart that predate even the horrors of the war.
As Abel makes his way into the foothills, the violence he endures at the hands of two thugs who are after his dog is crosscut with his memories of the horrors of the war, the friends he lost, and the savagery he took part in and witnessed. And yet, darkness is cut by light, especially in the people who have touched his life-from Jane Dao-Ming Poole, the daughter of murdered Chinese immigrants, to Hypatia, an escaped slave who nursed him back to life, and finally to the unbearable memory of the wife and child he lost as a young man. Haunted by tragedy, loss, and unspeakable brutality, Abel has somehow managed to hold on to his humanity, finding way stations of kindness along his tortured and ultimately redemptive path.
In its contrasts of light and dark, wild and tame, brutal and tender, and its attempts to reconcile a horrific war with the great evil it ended, Wilderness tells not only the moving tale of an unforgettable character, but a story about who we are as human beings, a people, and a nation. Lance Weller's immensely impressive debut immediately places him among our most talented writers.
Lance Weller has published short fiction in several literary journals. He won Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A Washington native, he has hiked and camped extensively in the landscape he describes. He lives in Gig Harbor, Washington, with his wife and several dogs.There’s a great video of Lance talking about Wilderness on the book’s Amazon pagehttp://www.amazon.com/Wilderness-A-Novel-Lance-Weller/dp/1608199371/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344716430&sr=8-1&keywords=wilderness+lance+weller
Buy Wilderness at IndieBound or at Amazon
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Fourth Annual Hemingway Festival, a celebration of Ernest Hemingway, with Teju Cole and Sandra Spanier, among other events, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID
Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son, 7 p.m., Book People, Austin, TX
Lance Weller, Wilderness, 5 p.m., Square Books, Oxford, MS
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5
David Abrams, Fobbit, 5:30 p.m., Quarry Brewing, Butte, MT
Duane Becker, Mount Spokane, 7 p.m., Auntie’s Bookstore, Spokane, WA
Jonathan Evison, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, and Willy Vlautin, Lean on Pete,7:30 p.m., Powell’s Burnside, Portland, OR
Fourth Annual Hemingway Festival, a celebration of Ernest Hemingway, with Teju Cole and Sandra Spanier, among other events, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID
Fur Trade Symposium, Museum of the Mountain Man, Pinedale, WY
Gould Distinguished Lecture on Technology and the Quality of Life, Miriah Meyer, 12 p.m., Gould Auditorium, J. Willard Marriott Library, Salt Lake City, UT
Rick Hendricks, “Fiesta Lecture: Diego de Vargas’ Strategies,” lecture, 6 p.m., New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe, NM
Pam Houston, Sight Hound, and Heather Lende, Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs, 7 p.m., Wilda Marston Theater, Loussac Library, Anchorage, AK
Lance Weller, Wilderness, 5 p.m., Lemuria Books, Jackson, MS
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6
Fourth Annual Hemingway Festival, a celebration of Ernest Hemingway, with Teju Cole and Sandra Spanier, among other events, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID
Fur Trade Symposium, Museum of the Mountain Man, Pinedale, WY
William Gibson, Distrust that Particular Flavor, 7 p.m., Book People, Austin, Texas
Alice Hoffman, The Dovekeepers, Mittleman Jewish Community Center, Portland, OR
Stephen Graham Jones, Growing Up Dead in Texas, 7:30 p.m., Tattered Cover Colfax, Denver, CO
Cheryl Strayed, or Dear Sugar, Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things, 6 p.m., Celebrate 30 years of Orion Magazine, On-stage conversation with Brian Doyle, Ecotrust Natural Capital Center, Portland, OR
Victoria Ann Thorpe, Cages, 7 p.m., Auntie’s Bookstore, Spokane, WA
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7
David Abrams, Fobbit, 5:30 p.m., Fact & Fiction Books, Missoula, MT
Sharon Coleman, The Christmas Calf, 5 p.m., Ritzville Art Gallery, Ritzville, WA
Amanda Coplin, The Orchardist, 7:30 p.m. Powell’s City of Books on Burnside, Portland, OR
Jonathan Evison, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, Jefferson County Historical Society, Port Townsend, WA
First Friday Poetry with Bill Campana, 7 p.m., Changing Hands, Tempe, AZ
Fur Trade Symposium, Museum of the Mountain Man, Pinedale, WY
Sierra Nevada College Literary Lollapalooza, with Suzanne Roberts, Shaun Griffin, the Sierra Nevada Review, and Bona Fide Books, 7:00 p.m., Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe, Nevada
Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8
Fur Trade Symposium, Museum of the Mountain Man, Pinedale, WY
Jess Steven Hughes, The Sign of the Eagle, 1 p.m., Auntie’s Bookstore, Spokane, WA
D. Andrew McChesney, Beyond the Ocean’s Edge: A Stone Island Sea Story, 2 p.m., Hastings, Spokane Valley, WA
Lidia Yuknavitch, Dora: A Head Case, book launch, 7:30 p.m., Powell’s City of Books on Burnside, Portland, OR
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 9
Clemens Starck and Charles Goodrich, 7 p.m., the Studio Series, Stonehenge Studios, Portland, OR
Mo Willems, Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs, 2 p.m., Powell’s Cedar Hills, Beaverton, OR
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