#BackwordsLiterature

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

Traveling with Less

I’ve written before about taking a book with me around the world but unlike the last time, I actually read a bit of this one everywhere I took it – and it didn’t take years to finish. Less (awarded the Pulitzer prize in 2018) by Andrew Sean Greer, has been the perfect companion for me since I bought it while traveling in New York City last January. The story of Less is about a man doing what I think is the best thing you can when it comes to avoiding your feelings: travel. An

What Tony Hoagland Means to Me

Snow is a unique experience in Portland. Not the weather itself, but the reaction from the city and everyone in it. An inch or two can cause chaos. Threats of more than a few inches can mean widespread panic. Every once in a while we’ll get a decent storm, and it’s during one of those storms that this memory unfolds. Even though I’d had to go to work, and generally went about that day like normal, it had snowed enough for most of Portland to give up and stay home. With a thi

A Border is a Veil Not Many People Can Wear: "The Farming of Bones" and the Memory of Fear

The very last class of my undergrad wasn’t supposed to happen. I had graduated! Walked with my fellow classmates, had parties, said goodbyes, and had a move-out date set for the apartment I’d lived in for three years. Then I got the call that I needed one more class for my degree. I’d spent a solid year in meetings with admissions, changing my class schedules, even dropping my minor in order to graduate on time. It was time to be done. It was time to move on from my small col

750 Pages of Pure Tragedy, and Thoughts on Why I Read Them

A couple years ago I did something that felt a little crazy: I sold and donated a couple hundred of my books. At the time, I was moving… again (I would move 4 more times before settling where I live now) and hauling 6 rubbermaid tubs up and down stairs and in and out of trucks was getting a little old. I’d pared down my possessions with each consecutive move, but until then had treasured my vast collection of books. They were weighing me down. With that choice, I made a littl

Spending Time in "Jacob's Room"

The first time I opened Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf I was 22 and on a plane to Las Vegas. I was going on a (mostly) impromptu weekend trip with 2 close college friends. I read some of Jacob on the plane, maybe 10 pages on the short flight heading south, and was less than hooked. The life of Virginia Woolf and her novel Mrs. Dalloway have been central to my favorite-things lists for as long as I can remember. I can never get enough of the brilliant and complex author, or th

Making a Habit of Standing When Love Walks into the Room, or The Price of (Long-Distance) Salt

I started reading Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt to get a boy to fall in love with me. I know, I know. It was as naive as it sounds, but my intentions were good. We had known (of) each other through the lens of the internet for several years before dating; through Tumblr, Instagram, and Snapchat. When internet-talking became texting every day, became Skyping as often as possible, I started to think of other ways to stay connected. I started seeing past the 3,088 miles

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

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

Ronald Johnson: Activist, Heritage Chef, & Poet

I first learned of Ronald Johnson in graduate school, in a poetry workshop by California writer, Brian Teare. Teare had challenged me to re-encounter and incorporate Mormonism, the religion of my childhood, its language and peculiar cosmology, into a series of chants, curses, liturgies, etc. he hoped would force me to make my history my own again. I failed his challenge spectacularly, I think—I only really regurgitated my experience of Mormonism on the page—but discovered and

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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