#lit

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

I Said Sex, Not Sexy

At the beginning of 2012 I bundled up my life as I knew it – my home, my job, my marriage – and ditched it by the curb. I didn’t have a car so my mom drove me away from Portland where up until then I’d lived my whole life, and dropped me off 6 hours later in Moscow, Idaho to stay with a friend and mentor. I needed an escape, I needed space to think, to sort some things out before I could return and pick up the pieces I’d left behind. The University of Idaho in Moscow has an M

What Gets Trumped?

Where do I start? Do I start on Wednesday November 9, 2016 at 4:27 a.m. when I woke up to the confirmation that Donald Trump would be the next President of the United States? Do I start somewhere in the middle of my sleep-deprivation, moving through the waking nightmare that Americans elected a glorified reality TV star; a liar and a bully; who repeatedly denigrated immigrants, people of color, and assaulted women; who ran on a platform of massive deportations, on surveillanc

Charles Henri Ford: Association and America's First (Queer) Surrealist Artist

In 1986, BOMB Magazine’s Bruce Wolmer interviewed the first American surrealist poet and artist, Charles Henri Ford. Ford—not content with keeping only to poetry or art-making, but also an editor, novelist, filmmaker, and photographer—chronicled his life for Wolmer, claiming nevertheless (like one of his primary influences, Jean Cocteau) that poetry was a kind of “everything,” an ecstatic lens that was for Ford the central conception of a surrealist mission. This is one kind

Fall 2016 Issue: An Interview with Poet, Janice Worthen

This October, on the 1st of the month, the BACKWORDS Press team has the distinct pleasure of sharing the work of our Fall 2016 poets: Bianca Flores, Stephanie Adams-Santos, and Janice Worthen. We're collaborating with a new graphic designer for the issue—we'll introduce you to him later on—because right now we'd like to acquaint you with our new writers. Like we've done with past issues, our Fall 2016 Issue writers have helped us to gear up for the October release with a seri

Fall 2016 Issue: An Interview with Poet, Stephanie Adams-Santos

Fall 2016 Issue: An Interview with Poet, Bianca Flores

"Would You Eat Your Cat?" & Other Dating Questions

It spoke to me. It reached out to me with its little inquisitive blue cat eyes on the cover, poised, hopeful, and said “read me.” It was 2013 and my first time in the the Powell’s bookstore on Hawthorne Blvd – the smaller one in SE Portland, but just as eclectic and cute as the other. I was with my friends (and future Backwords cofounders), Matt and Jenny, exploring the neighborhood, having a wanderlust day that found us in thrift shops and in this particular iconic bookstore

The God of Queer Things

If you ever need a good cry, read The God of Small Things. I read it for the first time in a literary theory course as an undergrad, taught by a new (to Idaho State University) professor. Over the course of the semester, we read a theory text book, the novella A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid, dozens of short stories and critical essays, Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat, and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Arundhati Roy has had

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

A Lit Review: Workplace

If you asked my twenty-something-year-old self if I would be reading books and articles on leadership management, or company culture, or racial equity in the workplace with the same voracious appetite I once devoured the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Junot Diaz, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – I’d say, “you’re fucking crazy, and you don’t know me at all.” If you told me that I’d be spending my precious down-time hours, reading books like Smarter, Faster, Better:

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