On June 19, 2015, Matthew D. Kulisch and I, as BACKWORDS Press, had the pleasure of attending our first Poetry Press Week (PPW) show, evening one of two, for their fourth season. We arrived at Disjecta the nonprofit contemporary art venue, and took our seats in the press & publisher section of the audience. Poetry Press Week is the brainchild of co-founders Liz Mehl and Justin Rigamonti, and is produced with the help of Heather Brown (publicity director), and Chelsea Carpente

It’s been a long time since I’ve walked into a bookstore and picked up a book simply because of the gorgeousness of its title, but The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears was such a title. Several years ago, at the Sunriver Books & Music store in Sunriver, OR, I was drawn to the levity associated with the idea of “Heaven,” and the burdening verb of “bear.” My curiosity was piqued by the ambiguity of the “beautiful things,” because beauty is so subjective it becomes as ambiguou

Photo Credit: MKulisch Photography I am defining “place” loosely. The coordinates are invisible to everyone but me, a place where the compass needle revolves in tentative circles because an internal North is harder to find. Right now, I’m situated in a world where I filter everything through the successes and failures of my daily task lists for both BACKWORDS Press and my other full-time gig. This isn’t a complaint. This is just what’s happening. I love what I’m doing. I’m so

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

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

When we first began dreaming up which writers we’d ask to be part of the inaugural BACKWORDS Press issue, Kevin Sampsell was the first person that came to my mind. With each printed piece no more than 300 characters long, I chose Sampsell because, after reading his novel, This is Between Us, I knew he was a master of the short-short form. The whole book is a collection of tightly framed vignettes, some sections only a single paragraph long, where each moment ended for me with

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

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

Earmilk contributor Alex Leonard claims that British composer DJ Simon Green’s, aka Bonobo, electronic music has been described as “…sounds without genres and timeless to all demographics.” Here, at BACKWORDS Blog, we treat any occasion as an event worth resting in, and Bonobo’s music represents that ethos in audio. BACKWORDS Blog is a platform that honors the moment of encounter that any one person experiences—with art, literature, music, performance, or place. Often, guest

Falling in love takes a fifth of a second, according to a 2010 study by Syracuse University Professor Stephanie Ortigue. When asked, “Does the heart fall in love, or the brain?” Ortigue responded, “That’s a tricky question always…for instance, activation in some parts of the brain can generate stimulations to the heart, butterflies in the stomach.” Despite science, we still resort to using metaphorical butterflies to explain love. On January 10, 2015, my first live symphonic