Thursday, September 8th, 7 pm: Clemens Starck and Harold Johnson

Oregon authors Clemens Starck and Harold Johnson join us to read from their latest work.

Clemens Starck is best known for his Oregon Book Award winning poetry collection Journeyman's Wages, published by Story Line Press in 1995. The book received the William Stafford Memorial Poetry Award and the 1996 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. In 2011, Wood Works in Seattle published his collection Rembrandt, Chainsaw. For this event he will be reading from his newest collection of work, Old Dogs, New Tricks, published by Oblio Press.  

Harold Johnson is a lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest and a long-time customer of the store. Between the Korean and Vietnam wars he spent two years in the US Army, after which he returned to Portland where he married, taught English, studied music, and earned a graduate degree in visual art. He has published two chapbooks and the volume of poetry Citizenship. Recently, Johnson published his first novel, The Fort Showalter Blues.

Portland author Jamie Duclos-Yourdan will read from his debut novel Froelich's Ladder, published by Portland's own Forest Avenue Press.

Froelich nurses a decades-old family grudge from his permanent perch atop a giant ladder in this nineteenth century madcap adventure novel. When he disappears suddenly, his nephew embarks on a rain-soaked adventure across the Pacific Northwest landscape to find him, accompanied by an ornery girl with a most unfortunate name. In this story of their encounters with Confederate assassins, European expatriates, and a general store magnate, this fairytale twist on the American dream explores the conflicts between loyalty and ambition and our need for human connection, even at the highest rungs.

Jamie Duclos-Yourdon, a freelance editor and technical expert, received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. His short fiction has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Underneath the Juniper Tree, and Chicago Literati, and he has contributed essays and interviews to Booktrib.

We welcome the return of our Comma reading series for the fall! Hosted and curated by writer Kirsten Rian, Comma readings combine voices from different literary genres, with authors reading from new pieces, established pieces, or works in progress, which they then discuss with each other and the audience. This month's Comma authors are Henry Hughes and Scot Seigel.

Henry Hughes has lived in Oregon since 2002. He is the author of four collections of poetry, including Men Holding Eggs (which won the 2004 Oregon Book Award), Moist Meridian (a finalist for the 2011 Oregon Book Award), and Bunch of Animals (new from Cloudbank Books). His fishing memoir, Back Seat with Fish: A Man's Adventures in Angling and Romance, was published this past spring. He is also the editor of the Everyman's anthologies The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing and Fishing Stories. Hughes grew up on Long Island, completed his MA in Creative Writing at Purdue University, and spent five years working in Japan and China. He is currently a professor of literature and writing at Western Oregon University.

Scot Siegel, an Oregon poet and city planner, is the author of five books of poetry, including his most recent, The Constellation of Extinct Stars and Other Poems (Salmon Publishing, Ltd). He has received awards and commendations from the Oregon Poetry Association, Nimrod International, Aesthetica (UK), Poetry Northwest, and the Oregon State Library. The late US Poet Laureate Philip Levine recognized Siegel's long poem "Pages Torn from a Schoolmarm's Diary" as a Finalist with Honorable Mention in Nimrod International's 2012 Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize Competition. He has served as an Artist-in-Reisdence with Playa at Summer Lake and Oregon State University's College of Liberal Art's Spring Creek Project. His writing is part of the permanent art installation along TriMet's "Orange Line."

We are pleased to welcome three authors from Judith Kitchen's Ovenbird Books, including the winner of this year's Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. 

Kate Carroll de Gutes is the author of Objects in Mirror are Closer than They Appear, a debut collection of essays that won the Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, as well as the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Memoir. In her book she writes about big questions like sexual identity and gender as well as more quotidian problems like the battle against hat head. "If Woody Allen were butch, he'd write like Kate; he'd also be funnier, more endearing, and better dressed. Keenly insightful, roaringly hilarious, and deeply felt," says author Stephanie Kallos. She has a BA in Professional Writing from the University of Puget Sound and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.

Brenda Miller is the author of five essay collections, most recently An Earlier Life, in which she navigates the expectations placed on young girls and women at every turn, finding guidance in her four major creeds (Judaism, Home Improvement, the Grateful Dead, and Rescue Dogs), while charting a course toward an authentic life. She also co-authored Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction and The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. Her work has received six Pushcart Prizes. She is a Professor of English at Western Washington University and associate faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop.

Tarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm, which recounts her early years in the Canadian wilderness and incorporates artifacts such as recipes, photos, quotations, and song lyrics. Wilson earned her MA in education from Stanford and her MFA in creative writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop. Her work appears in Brevity, Defunct, Gulf Stream, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Inertia, Ruminate, River Teeth, South Loop Review, and The Sun, among others, and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.  

Ovenbird Books is an independent press dedicated to the publication of experimental literary nonfiction. Editor (and author) Judith Kitchen died of cancer in November 2014, just two days after she finished editing de Gute's book.

Portland author Wendy Gordon reads from her debut novel Wrong Highway. Erica Richards and Debbie Lassler are sisters. Both live in Dutch colonials three blocks apart in the Long Island suburb of West Meadow. Both are married with children, but the similarities end there. Wrong Highway is a jaw-dropping story of domesticity on the skids in the late 1980s. The setting may be ordinary, but Wendy Gordon's perspective and storytelling are anything but. Her carefully observed world of West Meadow is populated with characters who could be your friends or neighbors, or even yourself -- everyone shielding their big secrets in plain sight.

Wendy Gordon grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, and lived in Boston, Chicago, and New York before finding her true home on the West Coast. She received a BS in Nutrition from Simmons College and an MS in Clinical Nutrition from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. She has been a journalist for more than twenty-five years, publishing in newspapers, magazines, and on the internet. She lives in Portland with her husband and children.

In his quirky but informative Sea Foragers Guide to the Northern California Coast (illustrated and with a waterproof cover!), Kirk Lombard inspires readers to hook fish, dig clams, and pick seaweed for themselves. With its presentation of informed and thoughtful foraging and fishing practices, this book is sure to inspire an empowering epicurean adventure in our own coastal waters. As someone who is deeply passionate about our marine resources, Lombard encourages foragers to follow regulations and sustainable practices while finding delicious morsels from the sea.

Lombard was a former staff member at the state Department of Fish and Game and founder of the foraging tour company/seafood delivery service Sea Forager Seafood.  Lombard also spent fourteen years as an art teacher and counselor for severely emotionally disturbed children in the Bay Area and is a member of the band Rube Waddell, in which he sings, plays the tuba and harmonica, and plucks his hand-made junkyard diddley bows (one-string slide guitars). You just know this is going to be a fun night!

Portland author John Brant brings us the story of an amazing athlete and internationally recognized humanitarian in his new book The Boy Who Runs: The Odyssey of Julius Achon. Achon was born in northern Uganda in 1976, five years into Idi Amin's reign of terror. At age 12, while playing soccer on a dusty patch of dirt, Achon was taken by members of the notorious Lord's Resistance Army and made a boy soldier. When he became free he discovered his talents as a runner, which led to a career as one of the world's foremost middle-distance runners. But then a devastating tragedy prevented him from pursuing gold at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, and he was once again forced to forge a new path for himself. Today he is the director of the Achon Uganda Children's Fund, a charity whose mission is to improve the quality of life in rural Uganda through access to healthcare, education, and athletics. Brant is an award-winning sportswriter who is also the author of the book Duel in the Sun: Alberto Salazar, Dick Beardsley, and America's Greatest Marathon.