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

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

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

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