Backwords Press: Visit Our Weekly Blog

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

2020 and The One Where We All Try to Stay Sane

Tunnel Vision: Preparing to Hike the Pacific Crest Trail

Tunnel Vision: Preparing to Hike the Pacific Crest Trail

Giverny, This Way

Giverny, This Way

Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays!

My First Foray Into The Wonderful Wallowas

My First Foray Into The Wonderful Wallowas

Spice and Rain

Spice and Rain

Traveling with Less

Traveling with Less

Antibiotics and Balinese Dance, A Winning Combination

Antibiotics and Balinese Dance, A Winning Combination

Let's Confuse Each Other In German: How I Turned 30 in Paris

Let's Confuse Each Other In German: How I Turned 30 in Paris

Recent Posts

2020 and The One Where We All Try to Stay Sane

Traveling with Less

Traveling with Less

I’ve written before about taking a book with me around the world but unlike the last time, I actually read a bit of this one everywhere I took it – and it didn’t take years to finish. Less (awarded the Pulitzer prize in 2018) by Andrew Sean Greer, has been the perfect companion for me since I bought it while traveling in New York City last January. The story of Less is about a man doing what I think is the best thing you can when it comes to avoiding your feelings: travel. An

What Tony Hoagland Means to Me

What Tony Hoagland Means to Me

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

A Border is a Veil Not Many People Can Wear: "The Farming of Bones" and the Memory of Fear

A Border is a Veil Not Many People Can Wear: "The Farming of Bones" and the Memory of Fear

The very last class of my undergrad wasn’t supposed to happen. I had graduated! Walked with my fellow classmates, had parties, said goodbyes, and had a move-out date set for the apartment I’d lived in for three years. Then I got the call that I needed one more class for my degree. I’d spent a solid year in meetings with admissions, changing my class schedules, even dropping my minor in order to graduate on time. It was time to be done. It was time to move on from my small col

750 Pages of Pure Tragedy, and Thoughts on Why I Read Them

750 Pages of Pure Tragedy, and Thoughts on Why I Read Them

A couple years ago I did something that felt a little crazy: I sold and donated a couple hundred of my books. At the time, I was moving… again (I would move 4 more times before settling where I live now) and hauling 6 rubbermaid tubs up and down stairs and in and out of trucks was getting a little old. I’d pared down my possessions with each consecutive move, but until then had treasured my vast collection of books. They were weighing me down. With that choice, I made a littl

Spending Time in "Jacob's Room"

Spending Time in "Jacob's Room"

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

Making a Habit of Standing When Love Walks into the Room, or The Price of (Long-Distance) Salt

Making a Habit of Standing When Love Walks into the Room, or The Price of (Long-Distance) Salt

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

Nathan Hill's "The Nix" or WTF is a "Great American Novel"?

Nathan Hill's "The Nix" or WTF is a "Great American Novel"?

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

Investigating Memory

Investigating Memory

“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

Ronald Johnson: Activist, Heritage Chef, & Poet

Ronald Johnson: Activist, Heritage Chef, & Poet

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

Sherman Alexie: I Write to Fill The Absence...

Sherman Alexie: I Write to Fill The Absence...

It was another rainy Wordstock morning (what can you expect in Portland in November?), and I made my way from the Backwords Press booth at the Portland Art Museum to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall a couple blocks away. In the lobby I bumped into some old friends of mine. “Have you seen him read before?” they asked. When I said I hadn’t they were full of excitement. I was told it would be outstanding, and more than anything I should be prepared to laugh. I was seeing Sherma

The Song of Achilles: A Review & Four Fragments

The Song of Achilles: A Review & Four Fragments

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

Tea With Milk

Tea With Milk

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

The Obscure and Subtle Tragedies of Jim Shepard

The Obscure and Subtle Tragedies of Jim Shepard

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

Social Justice on the Macro, Empathy on the Micro

Social Justice on the Macro, Empathy on the Micro

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

I Said Sex, Not Sexy

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?

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

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

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, Stephanie Adams-Santos

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

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