#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

This is War! (Part 2)

Last week I discussed the Literary Arts’ Delve Readers Seminar This is War!, and how the exhibit at the Portland Art Museum incorporated the novels we were reading. This week, I’ll move into the literature portion of what our group discussed. Over the course of the six-week seminar we read and discussed Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. All Quiet on the Western Front is a timeless novel. Remarque conceals the char

The Noonday Demon

There are books you read through, books you read into, and books with which you end up having a conversation. Andrew Solomon’s extensive 443 page survey on depression (not including the 55 pages of notes and 34 pages of bibliography) is such a book. The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, a 2001 National Book Award winner and a 2002 Pulitzer finalist came to me by way of my then boss’s suggestion. I think, at some point, I would have found this text on my own or through an

Everything was Red

Over a year ago I was sitting in a coffee shop with a few friends for a writing group. We started it to continue our passion for creating, to be held accountable amongst each other, and subsequently to play catch-up with each other’s lives. Unfortunately we mostly gabbed. This particular time, however, my friend Matt was very much discouraged none of us had read the works of Anne Carson. He got up from our table and twenty minutes later returned with copies of Autobiography o

Madness, Rack, and Honey

I was introduced to Mary Ruefle on a road trip to Bend, Oregon when I had a fiancé, a comfortable existence—domestic and unchallenging. It was the four of us: my partner D, my brother, my good friend Matt, and me. D was driving, and seated behind him was my brother deep in a Manga on an e- reader. I was in the front passenger seat reading a book about depression. Then from behind my left shoulder the words “Madness,” “Rack,” “and” “Honey” in thick black type on an eggshell pa

1 2 3