#AWP19 Roundup

Join RBM and friends for this year's Festival of Language 2019​ offsite readings, 5-8 p.m. tonight, March 27, Ford Food & Drink​, 2505 SE 11th Avenue, Portland, Oregon. Raul will deliver the closing reading, just before 8 p.m.

Along with other working writers based on the West Coast, Raul will present a panel discussion, "Selfish, Sleepless, Self-Deprecating: Parents on Children and the Writing Life," at 3 p.m. on Thursday. Beyond the panel, connect with Raul and local colleagues at Bookfair​ tables T1002 (Clark College) and T10107 (Salmon Creek Journal​). See you there, #AWP19!

Later this week, friends are invited to another offsite reading, "Voices from Across the River," hosted by Clark College on Saturday evening at 1122 Gallery​ in Portland's Montavilla neighborhood. Please see below for details.

Flash Prose Nominated for Pushcart

Along with other compositions, "Blowfish," a work of flash prose by RBM published earlier this year by Salmon Creek Journal, has been nominated by the journal for a Pushcart Prize. More on the nomination process can be found here. Please enjoy an excerpt:

The Dakotas have probably crossed the county line. The Dakotas are not the kind of boys you’ll find in a Walmart parking lot. So why this careful study of Entrance and Exit? Of tired woman and wailing would-be piano man? Inside there is Grocery and there is Pharmacy. Centers Garden, Vision, and Photo, and 1-Hour Photo. Where would the Dakotas hide? Sporting Goods? The walk-in cooler?

For the rest of this and more works by writers and artists from Washington State University Vancouver and other corners of the Northwest, please visit the journal's archives. (Submissions are currently open to the public and close Jan. 11.) Thanks to the hardworking SCJ staff for this kind recognition.

Fastwrite: Election Night

Nov. 9, 2016 -- This month, on the campus where I teach English, we're studying "living sources." Fieldwork, et cetera. Today I asked students to write for 10 minutes in a notebook about something or someone you've overheard in the past 24 hours. "Give your topic a face," Bruce Ballenger urges his curious and not-so-curious researchers. Here's what I got down.

North Portland. November 9, 2016. Corner bakery, big windows. 

The man sitting down the bench from me is on his phone. I can't make out the caller. His mother, maybe. He loves her very much—that much is clear. What's also obvious? This morning, this man is nearing some breaking point.

"You don't understand," says the man. "You're a white, straight American and you can't understand what this means for me. It's a nightmare. For someone who's gay, I mean. I'm gay, remember?" 

The man has curly brown hair and big headphones wrapped around his Adam's apple. Up-down, up-down. 

He's working, he told his sad friend earlier, for a little paper company off Mississippi. They're trying to convert a Craftsman into office space. Free beer, sans wireless. So he's working from the bakery today.

"You don't understand," the man repeats, his whisper beginning to crack. "I'm fine, I'll be fine. But I have friends in North Carolina. I'm worried sick about them. For their safety, I mean. They don't understand.

"And listen, when I get back, I don't want to hear about this. Nothing. Not at Thanksgiving. Not now. They don't understand, and you don't, and I don't either."

And I don't either. But that's what I heard today, I told the class. Who's next?

---

Update -- Another version of this piece appears in the 2017 issue of Salmon Creek Journal.

Snap Box

RBM has a new short story, "Snap Box," in the current issue of Drunken Boat. An excerpt:

But this too is probably a false picture. This town, like Isabel and maybe Aurelia, shares its name with debutantes—the daughters of Percy, the transcontinental tycoon. In pictures, Percy A. Rockefeller’s thick jowls and small worried eyes remind you of a picture book. Right there on the shelf in the TV room: Percy the Small Engine (1956), about a shape-shifting locomotive who sometimes prefers the look of a green caterpillar with red stripes. ¶ What has become of your daughters? The question ripples in the heat. The caterpillar rears above the wasteland.

For more fiction from DB23, and statistics coinciding with the 2015 VIDA Count, see fiction editor Sybil Baker's introduction to the issue. And don't miss the moving DB23 folio on homelessness.

Fall Readings at #PAMLA2015 and #WesternLit2015

A father-son portrait from "Thanksgiving for Aurelia"

November 8, 2015 -- This fall, RBM brought new chapters of a prose manuscript-in-progress, The Land of Infinite Variety, to the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association's 113th annual conference in Portland, and to the Western Literature Association's 50th annual conference in Reno (PDF).

At Friday's PAMLA session on "brief prose forms," organized and moderated by Megan Spiegel of Western Washington University, RBM read from a lyric essay on motherhood, "Thanksgiving for Aurelia," modeled after Dinty W. Moore's "Son of Mr. Green Jeans: An Essay on Fatherhood, Alphabetically Arranged." Glimmer Train recently shortlisted (PDF) a related work of fiction as a finalist for the magazine's Short Story Award for New Writers.

Slides from "The Archivist and The Voyager"

At October's WLA session on "intergenerational memoir," moderated by Megan Riley McGilchrist of the American School in London, RBM read from "The Archivist and The Voyager," another alphabetically-arranged essay. This chapter from RBM's forthcoming collection juxtaposes accounts of the American West from two journals of the late 1930s: that of his grandfather, and that of French tourist Antoine de Seynes. The story of the latter "voyager" and two companions was recently documented in a feature-length film, Voyagers Without Trace (2015), which debuted in Portland. (RBM served as a post-production associate producer; there's more on this acclaimed project at OPB.org.) Below is a brief excerpt from RBM's reading in Reno:

One fragment, from that first westerly passage, stands out from the rest. Some measure of redemption, let’s say, for our collective memory. It’s an image of descent, under the noonday sun of 1930-something, from the high plateau of the Old West into the fruit valleys of the Northwest: peaches, pears, apples, toilets, electricity. Men crawling like so many insects over something called the Grand Coulee. Such wonders, says my great uncle, in his eulogy. The three boys gazing the whole time, I’m told, from the rear window of a 1929 Chevrolet. 

The car rolls to a stop at a big painted lodge in the basin. The youngest boy, the one usually last in line, steps out first, now suddenly a tourist. Just then, something peculiar catches the boy’s eye—a glinting transom at the peak, the very zenith of the roofline. And so the young archivist scurries up the railing to have a look. 

Staring back, through the beveled glass, is the boy’s own reflection—the sight of which sends us both tumbling back to earth.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Island

July 10, 2015 -- From a week of kayaking the Salish Sea with a Sigma zoom lens (100-300 mm), thirteen views of Sucia Island, an early home to the Lummi people. The island's cryptic geology, which alarmed Spanish explorers, owes its designs to intertidal erosion and the sculpting of countless organisms. Stony clams protruding from the walls of Fossil Bay, for example, tell a story 80 million years in the making.

The View from (Another) Long Island

May 25, 2015 -- Pictures from a long weekend exploring Washington's Long Island, where lumber production doubled in the postwar years, and surrounding Willapa Bay, one of North America's most extensive estuaries.