#PhillipTrey

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

An Eye Over London

On June 21st, 2007, I found myself in London walking sleep-deprived and jet-lagged through Hyde Park and the Kensington Gardens with two friends from high school. We had just graduated a few weeks before and were greeting England for the first time (and my only time so far) at the beginning of what would be a month-long tour. Leaving Salt Lake City at 8 AM and arriving in London by 9 AM the next day was an exhausting journey. The atmosphere of the city was warmer than I had e

Channeling and Changing Art History: Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley, after completing degrees at the San Francisco Art Institute and a graduate program at Yale, has been making waves within the art community since the early 2000’s with his socially charged works. Looking at a Kehinde Wiley painting can transport you through time, recalling renaissance-styled portraiture with modern embellishments. A Wiley piece can simultaneously be rooted in the past, inspired by the present, and push the conversations of race, gender, and glob

Moments in Place

I toured Europe as an eighteen year-old with a few friends from school as part of an EF Tour, and our it took us to thirteen countries all within a month. My own travels involved exploring a mine in Berchtesgaden, Germany. I have later in life wondered, could this mine have once hidden art treasures of the world? A recent film, The Monuments Men, propelled me back into this question and caused me to reminisce years later back to my visit to Berchtesgaden. And I was not the on

Photographie / Francophile

I have an aversion to calling myself an artist, but what is an artist? What makes an artist? Is it a title assigned to someone by others? Am I even capable of forming a definition? I’m not certain yet if it’s a confidence issue or missing the feeling of having arrived: the moment where you feel yourself having become a peer instead of a follower, a rival instead of a student. Recently I had a moment where I took a step back and thought, on the art I have been a part of, and t

BACKWORDS Press Release & Launch Recap & Photos

Greetings from the BACKWORDS Team! Your curators, Jenny M Chu, Phillip Trey Coates, and Matthew D Kulisch are humbled and honored by the support we received Wednesday, April 29 at the BACKWORDS Press Release & Launch Party for our inaugural issue. Over 90 people from the Portland art and literary community, from out of state, from education and nonprofit organizations—and plenty of joining friends and family—came to support our first issue and learn about the future of the

BACKWORDS Press: The Future

Tonight, at the lucky hour of 7 p.m. we’ll officially launch BACKWORDS Press and release our inaugural issue featuring our three writers: Elaina Ellis, Ocean Vuong, and Kevin Sampsell. As we scramble with all the pre-event setup, we’re also imagining the future. It was dreaming that got us here, and it will be dreaming that will keep this press innovative, engaging, ever-evolving, and supportive of our non-lit and lit-communities alike. We wanted to share with you our thought

BACKWORDS Press: Elaina Ellis

This month of April, to celebrate the launch of our press and coinciding with Poetry Month, we at BACKWORDS would like to honor each of our writers from our inaugural printing. First up is the eloquent Elaina Ellis. Her bio, while impressive, cannot fully capture the presence she brings when performing her work. She is simultaneously an accomplished editor and poet. Ellis currently resides in the Seattle area of Washington, and brings true beauty to the words she forms and th

BACKWORDS Press: Origins

Matthew D. Kulisch: The Idea I’m not certain which day it was specifically, only that it came to me on a Wednesday in grad school. And I’m not certain which discussion we were in the midst of, only that the indomitable, quiet, and assured Norma Cole—poet and teacher—was the one leading it. We were talking, vaguely, about influence, diving through a pile of related texts (most of them new to us), when Norma gave her harshest imperative of the whole term: a light rap of book-sp

The Curators: Why BACKWORDS?

Surface : Context curator: Jenny M. Chu Context is everything. I’ve heard this. You’ve heard this. And context probably isn’teverything, but it’s certainly in the composition. Sometimes a glint, sometimes luminous. It wasn’t until I was in a painting class that I realized what “context” actually meant. It happened on a night when the instructor decided to start the workshop by projecting slides of paintings. The slideshow consisted of some renaissance and some baroque, some i

A Laramie Project

In my junior year at Idaho State, the university LGBT club worked with the Old Town Actor’s Studio of Pocatello to put on a winter performance of The Laramie Project. Twenty-eight actors played sixty-three characters, and I was fortunate enough to play three of them. The play, by Moises Kaufman, is based on the real-life aftermath of the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard (he was murdered because he was gay). It takes on the perspective of both the townspeople of Laramie as wel

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