#BACKWORDS

BACKWORDS blog explores the intersection between presence and history. The blog is a platform that honors the moment of encounter that any one person experiences—with art, literature, music, performance, or place. Often, reflections fit multiple categories—the opposite of a news program or style blog, BACKWORDS is not preoccupied with immediacy. An event does not need to be current to be relevant, nor does a memory need to be close to its origins to hold its potency.

Featured Posts

2020 and The One Where We All Try to Stay Sane

Tunnel Vision: Preparing to Hike the Pacific Crest Trail

Giverny, This Way

Happy Holidays!

My First Foray Into The Wonderful Wallowas

Spice and Rain

Traveling with Less

Antibiotics and Balinese Dance, A Winning Combination

Let's Confuse Each Other In German: How I Turned 30 in Paris

Recent Posts

Can We Listen to Something Else: Love and a Love of Hip Hop in the 21st Century

When it comes to music, hip hop has always held a small place in my periphery. I like it in the sense that I like to dance to it, both in “the club” and in the hip hop dance class I take weekly. Classic tracks by Cypress Hill (insane in the membrane, insane in the brain!), Snoop Dogg (...smoke weed everyday), and R Kelly (so baby give me that toot toot) are so ingrained in the radio culture of my past that they’re hard to avoid and even harder not to sing along to. But really

Another Rainy Wordstock Weekend: Laika Studios and Making Time for Art at the Portland Art Museum

It was another rainy Wordstock weekend in Portland. (Okay, I know this is the third post I’ve started that way, but I promise I’m going somewhere different with this one.) But it was – Wordstock weekend, I mean... and raining. And even though I got to hear a handful of fantastic authors discuss their work – namely Jeffrey Eugenides, Danzy Senna, and Ta-Nehisi Coates – there was another element of the day that stood out the most. Wordstock has been hosted at the Portland Art

Hey, who are all those dudes playing marimbas?

It had been a rough day. At work, in general. Word back from an interview was past due, close friends were in the throes of relationship turmoil, one of my favorite temps at work relapsed and was fired from his job. I walked out of my building into the nearly-raining night feeling tired and a little bummed out. I made the two-block walk to my train stop in a bit of a daze, and was met with a wave of music. It’s not unusual for there to be buskers on the corner outside of Pion

Nathan Hill's "The Nix" or WTF is a "Great American Novel"?

Every day on my lunch break I make some time to read. Whether it’s in the park near my office, or in the corner of my L-shaped break room where I sit quietly and unintentionally scare everyone that comes in to use the microwave, I take in at least a few pages of my current literary selection. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of, well, crazy-depressing books. So, when I grabbed Jim Shepard’s novel, The Book of Aron, from my desk without knowing what it was about, I was surprised

Dreams of Gold

It arrived in the mail, one of my first assignments for my Master’s in Fine Arts Program: The Lady in Gold, a book by Anne-Marie O’Connor. I was accepted into a pan-European low-residency program for creative writing, and our first residency was in July, in Vienna, Austria, and the book was to be one of my weekly assignments. I didn’t know what to expect out of the “golden book,” but I had a feeling that, if the picture on the cover and the quote from The Washington Post: “Fa

Investigating Memory

“Memories aren’t stored as changes to the molecules inside brain cells,” Dr. Amnesty told Alma during her first appointment, three years ago… “This is what they thought forever, but they were wrong...” A line from the title story of Anthony Doerr’s second story collection, Memory Wall, introduces what will become a prominent theme in six moving pieces of full-bodied prose: memory – and all the joy, pain and complications that comes with it. In the story – set in an unknown fu

Spokane, Washington: Hometown Oddities and Affection

When I tell people I’m from Spokane, typically they respond in one of two ways: “What was it like growing up in your nation’s capital?” or “Zomg, I love Washington state! Doesn’t it rain all the time there, though?” It’s safe to say that, unless you’re a Sherman Alexie fan, you probably haven’t heard of my hometown. It’s about as far as you can get, within the intercontinental United States, from Washington D.C., and the climate is arid and seasonal (steppe), common for a pla

That Time I Saw Michael Jackson Perform in Piazza De Popolo

Okay, so maybe this particular Michael Jackson was an Italian imposter. But in makeup, a bright red jacket, white socks, and black loafers, he strutted around his small section of the square in a fairly successful imitation of the King of Pop. My classmates and I watched among a large half-circle of tourists – all taking photos or videos and occasionally staying long enough to drop a coin or bill into the performer’s hat when he passed it around the crowd. Until I started tra

El Anatsui and My Love of Modern Art Museums

In the Vatican Museum in Rome – on your way down to the Sistine Chapel, after weaving your way through rooms and rooms of paintings and tapestries by famous artists from hundreds of years ago – you’ll find a small display of modern art pieces. Or at least I did when I was there in the Fall of 2013. I’d spent hours upstairs taking in dark portraits and religious symbolism of the Italians masters, but while I rushed my way through the seemingly empty mid-level of the museum, so

Sherman Alexie: I Write to Fill The Absence...

It was another rainy Wordstock morning (what can you expect in Portland in November?), and I made my way from the Backwords Press booth at the Portland Art Museum to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall a couple blocks away. In the lobby I bumped into some old friends of mine. “Have you seen him read before?” they asked. When I said I hadn’t they were full of excitement. I was told it would be outstanding, and more than anything I should be prepared to laugh. I was seeing Sherma

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