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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

Treading Time in San Francisco: A Mortal in the Infinite City

Several months ago, motivated by a surfeit of unseasonably sunny weather, I decided to play tourist in my own town. Armed with Daniel Bacon’s excellent guidebook, Walking San Francisco on the Barbary Coast Trail, I set out early in the day to meander my way through the 3.8-mile hike, which began downtown at the Old Mint, a formidable structure of steel-fortified granite, sandstone, and brick that survived the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fire. The route was marked by a se

Tea With Milk

A few weeks ago, I returned from a quick 5-day trip to Tokyo. It was early April. The cherry blossoms were just beginning to bloom and this was my first time in the country for more than a couple days. It was a trip of sunshine and strong, brisk spring winds. Amidst the crowded streets and alleyways of Shinjuku and Shibuya, I began to feel an unsettling feeling—a mix of calm comfort at odds with a glint of guilt. As a Yonsei (fourth-generation Japanese-American), this trip br

A Song, A Catch, Undone: An Admirer Reflects on Uncertainty

Visiting his old blog was a late-night, instinctual sort of stumbling. A way to reconnect with someone I had imperceptibly missed lately. That someone lived in Porto Alegre, on the southern tip of Brazil, and we had formed a connection through text and video conversations over Whatsapp, a messaging app. [Link to Part 1] The connection with Felipe fell in that zone between friend and romance which I took fairly unseriously and met hopefulness on his part with a joke or a laugh

A Personally-Inspired, Wholly Vicarious Experience of Porto Alegre

Our first talk was brief; a ward against loneliness. I wasn’t familiar with the place he was from but its distance impressed me. At first I thought it was warm; a party city at night, that’s how my mind’s eye imagined it. But as it happened, the first time we had a real conversation was in his small apartment about a week later. Only then did I notice his dark hair; his delicate nose, features on his round, pale face rimmed with blue glasses. It was summer and the afternoon f

John Irving Begins with the End

I was seated in the balcony of the First Congregational Church of Christ in Downtown Portland, a little soggy because I had waited an hour in the rain to claim my seat. It was Wordstock and the chamber was buzzing after Cheryl Strayed interviewed Diana Nyad and drew a standing ovation. But I was ready for what I thought to be the main event. John Irving was being interviewed by Dave Miller of OPB’s Think Out Loud. After another ecstatic round of applause, Irving – cleanly dre

Two Poems, One Song

In high school, I was not college-bound. I did not know what I wanted to do with my life, I did not see how I could even afford to go to college, and I was damn tired of academics. But somehow I ended up in advanced placement literature my senior year. It was there that I encountered two life-altering poems. I wish that I could say that this class woke up my academic ambitions and opened a limitless literary world to me, but it didn’t. In spite of her wit and caring, Mrs. Huk

Williams Avenue—Culture Found and Culture Lost

Things change. I knew that. But when did this young man start towering over me? And when did this neighborhood we were strolling through become an urban hot spot? It was one of those Portland winter days when I was happy the overcast sky didn’t threaten rain, or at least that’s what I told myself. Seventeen consecutive days of rain had grown tiresome, and my son and I needed to get out of the house, so we pretended the clouds were white and fluffy and headed to Williams Avenu

Re-placing Belgium

It’s a strangely chilly August morning and I’m on a train in southern Belgium, waving goodbye to a tiny, grinning woman and her two teenage daughters. I’m hoping the dirty window obscures the tears streaming down my cheeks. As the train pulls away and I can no longer see them, I sit back and take a deep breath. I am alone. Despite having lived in Belgium for almost two years during my early twenties, it is only now, more than a decade later, that I’m alone here. The train pic

The Locavore Anthophilous: A case for farm to table. The whole table. Even the centerpiece.

I came to farming through vegetable gardening. It was the exposure to the art of bouquet making, and the overall power that flowers have in creating a diversified and ecologically sound farm system, that drew me to become a flower grower. Our first year in production, Kara, co-owner and co-operator of Vibrant Valley Farm, got married and we decided to try flower farming ourselves. We grew all of the flowers she needed for her big day and had so many more that we were able to

The Returned (Les Revenants) Gives the Dead Life

This show believes itself to be different. And it is. But it also isn’t what it appears. I may be overcritical of zombie shows and movies given the oversaturation in recent years. I think that explorations of the zombie genre has to really show me something special, something different, to get my attention. I was very hesitant to start a show that my friend called a zombie/horror show. I had seen The Walking Dead and didn’t care for it. For me, at least, The Walking Dead walk