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

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

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

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

“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

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

It’s a hero’s task—in so subjective an art as literary adaption—to accomplish the significant act of honoring a work of written art while making it new again. Concerns of plagiarism or form aside, works that get adapted are typically important: their significant following, their cultural pull, places a kind of premium on the position they occupy which tugs at the reverent, the scholarly, even the audacious among us. The criticism and acclaim around Madeline Miller’s first nov

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

It must have been about 9 years ago that I first read Jim Shepard. I encountered him at a reading at Marylhurst University, where I was finishing up my undergraduate degree in Writing. And while 9 years is a long time, reflecting back it feels so much longer – like an entirely different life, when I was a completely different person. I went with my good friend (and Backwords co-founder), Jenny Chu, and we must have been a few minutes late because we ended up in the front row

Right now, in this world, in this country, this state, in small liberal-minded Portland, OR–I’ve been thinking a lot. Reading. Meeting people. Listening. I’m in a gathering period. My fingernails, untended, are too long. I feel slow. I’ve turned off all my social media notifications. The fuzziness, I have faith, will give way to focus. Everything feels necessary, and time is always running out. I’m trying to synthesize everything, but I don’t want to write about it, because l