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 dur...

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...

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; thro...

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 cur...

“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 collecti...

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,...

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 follow...

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 th...

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...

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...