This homegrown anthology features meditations on the act of writing by forty-two Oregon authors, including journalists, poets, fiction writers, essayists, memoirists, and travel writers. In interviews and original flash essays, contributors share their thoughts on avoiding distractions, weathering rejection, using real-life dialogue in fiction, and what it takes to have a successful writing career. "What emerges is a tapestry of writers who happen to hail from the same geographic region, sharing wisdom, encouragement, and counsel beyond the boundaries of regional writing." - The Los Angeles Review

Brave on the Page: Oregon Writers on Craft and the Creative Life

Reference

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

Forest Avenue Press

Fifteen linked stories chart a true course through the lives of families, farmers, loggers, former classmates, and the occasional stripper. In the richly imagined town of Renata, Oregon, a man watches his neighbor's big-screen TV through binoculars. An errant son paints himself silver. Mysterious electrical humming emanates from an enormous barn. In A Simplified Map of the Real World, intimate boundaries are loosened by divorce and death in a rural community where even an old pickle crock has an unsettling history-and high above the strife and the hope and the often hilarious, geese seek the perfect tailwind. Stevan Allred's stunning debut deftly navigates the stubborn geography of the human heart.

A Simplified Map of the Real World

Literature & Fiction

Stevan Allred

Literary

Family means everything to widowed Alaskan fisherman Ray Bancroft, raising his granddaughter with help from a multitude of gods and goddesses--not to mention rituals ad-libbed at sea by his half-Tlingit best friend. But statues and otter bone ceremonies aren't enough when Ray's estranged daughter returns from prison, her search for a safe harbor threatening everything he holds sacred. Set against a backdrop of ice and mud and loss, Dan Berne's gripping debut novel explores the unpredictable fissures of memory, and how families can break apart even in the midst of healing.

The Gods of Second Chances

Berne, Dan

Humor & Satire

A current of longing runs through twenty-two short stories by Oregon writers. As the characters strive for connection, they make mistakes, reach out to the wrong people, and recalibrate their lives based on what they desire, whether or not it’s attainable—or even a good idea. A shy pyromaniac takes a chance on love. A young woman hands her decisions to a man she’s never met. An abandoned father and son struggle to pull a stump from the stubborn ground, the town wailer loses her voice after her mother’s death, and a cloudless Oregon sky triggers a trip for a final goodbye. Editor Liz Prato has curated a powerful collection of smart, funny, sad, exquisite stories about the losses that shape our lives. Featuring stories by Jan Baross, Gail Bartley, Victoria Blake, Alisha Churbe, Sage Cohen, Ellen Davidson Levine, Steve Denniston, Trevor Dodge, Gregg Kleiner, Christi Krug, Kathleen Lane, Dylan Lee, Margaret Malone, Matthew Robinson, Joanna Rose, Lois Rosen, Jackie Shannon Hollis, Domi Shoemaker, Scott Sparling, Tammy Lynne Stoner, Jennifer Williams, and Cindy Williams Gutiérrez.

The Night, and the Rain, and the River: 22 Stories

United States

Kate Gray takes an unblinking look at bullying in her debut novel, CARRY THE SKY. It’s 1983 at an elite Delaware boarding school. Taylor Alta, the new rowing coach, arrives reeling from the death of the woman she loved. Physics teacher Jack Song, the only Asian American on campus, struggles with his personal code of honor when he gets too close to a student. These two young, lonely teachers narrate the story of a strange and brilliant thirteen-year-old boy who draws atomic mushroom clouds on his notebook, pings through the corridors like a pinball, and develops a crush on an older girl with secrets of her own. CARRY THE SKY sings a brave and honest anthem about what it means to be different in a world of uniformity. “In the rich rarified world of a prep school, Kate Gray has woven two powerful personal stories into a charged and compelling human novel which shows us that swimming under that quirky, antic, off-beat community are also life and death. Gray has a sharp eye and tells her story with verve and a deft touch.” – Ron Carlson, author of A KIND OF FLYING “Lyrical, moving, and hauntingly beautiful, Kate Gray’s CARRY THE SKY winds between two voices, Taylor and Song, both navigating the narrow lanes of St. Timothy’s boarding school where they teach, both hitting the walls that surround them. One uses science to make sense of loneliness, loss, and desire—the other uses the beat of a rower’s oar in water. Together these two outsiders struggle to move past mourning, to seek hope as they crack open their insular world. CARRY THE SKY is full of unforgettable characters and images, each word carefully chosen, like a perfect fold in a paper crane, creating a graceful neck, strong tail, and mighty wings, perched on the edge of the page, ready to take flight.” – Hannah Tinti, author of THE GOOD THIEF “A splendid debut novel, beautifully written and brimming over with humanity and grace, alternately humorous and heart-wrenching.” – Christopher Buckley, author of BUT ENOUGH ABOUT YOU “Set in a boarding school in 1983, CARRY THE SKY is a haunting exploration of loneliness, grief, and desire. In lyrical, elegant prose, Kate Gray spins a tale of characters struggling to forgive themselves and to find each other, and reminds us to pay attention to the ordinary and unexpected flashes of beauty around us: a brilliant kite, geese overhead, a paper crane in a tree.” – Carter Sickels, author of THE EVENING HOUR “In the small, close world of a boarding school, three broken people circle each other, drawing closer to the tragedy that will move them all, finally, beyond their private sorrows. Three voices, three stories, and we are caught up in those stories as they are slowly revealed, like shards of a shattered mirror, one piece at a time. There is huge humanity in this novel. It is shockingly beautiful. Kate Gray is relentless.” – Joanna Rose, author of LITTLE MISS STRANGE “Carry the Sky is as intricate and precise as the paper cranes its characters fold. It comes as no surprise that Kate Gray is a poet as well as a fine novelist. Here we are surely in a poet’s hands, her lyricism and attention to detail elevating the boarding-school narrative to something heartbreaking and truly universal.” – Cari Luna, author of THE REVOLUTION OF EVERY DAY “CARRY THE SKY is a dazzling narrative mosaic about innocence lost, the ghosts we grieve, and the emptiness of some forms of discipline and delineation. Kate Gray gives us a ‘page-turner’ in the best sense: you’ll want to read both fast and slow, moving back and forth through this fearlessly told story, savoring.” – M. Allen Cunningham, author of THE GREEN AGE OF ASHER WITHEROW “Kate Gray’s prose sings as she gives us schoolyard bullying, unrequited love, unresolved grief, adolescent desire running amok, and adult desire scarcely contained.” – Stevan Allred, author of A SIMPLIFIED MAP OF THE REAL WORLD

Carry the Sky

Gray, Kate

Two mothers and their teenage daughters, whose lives collide in a fatal car crash, take turns narrating Ellen Urbani's breathtaking novel, Landfall, set in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Eighteen-year-olds Rose and Rosebud have never met but they share a birth year, a name, and a bloody pair of sneakers. Rose’s quest to atone for the accident that kills Rosebud, a young woman so much like herself but for the color of her skin, unfolds alongside Rosebud’s battle to survive the devastating flooding in the Lower Ninth Ward and to find help for her unstable mother. These unforgettable characters give voice to the dead of the storm and, in a stunning twist, demonstrate how what we think we know can make us blind to what matters most.

Landfall

Urbani, Ellen

The town of New Eden, peopled with hereditary oddities, has arrived at its last days. As two near-centenarian citizens prepare for their annual birthday tea, a third vows to interrupt the proceedings with a bold declaration. The Remnants cartwheels rambunctiously through the lives of wood-splitters, garment-menders, and chervil farmers, while exposing an electrical undercurrent of secrets, taboos, and unfulfilled longings. With his signature wit and wordplay, Robert Hill delivers a bittersweet gut-buster of an elegy to the collective memory of a community.

The Remnants

HILL, ROBERT

When Froelich disappears from the fourth-tallest ladder in the world, his nephew’s quest to find him interlaces with the journeys of two spunky young women who outwit their guardians. In a Wild West populated with immigrants, skittish Civil War veterans, hungry clouds, a circus menagerie, and a few murderers, this fairy-tale twist on the American dream explores the conflict between loyalty and ambition, and the need for connection, even at the highest rungs.

Froelich's Ladder

Duclos-Yourdon, Jamie

City of Weird conjures what we fear: death, darkness, ghosts. Hungry sea monsters and alien slime molds. Blood drinkers and game show hosts. Set in Portland, Oregon, these thirty stories blend imagination, literary writing, and pop culture into a cohesive weirdness that honors the city’s personality, its bookstores and bridges and solo volcano, as well as the tradition of sci-fi pulp magazines. Including such authors as Rene Denfeld, Justin Hocking, Leni Zumas, and Kevin Sampsell, editor Gigi Little has curated a collection that is quirky, chilling, often profoundand always perfectly weird.

City of Weird: 30 Otherworldly Portland Tales

Manolo Lualhati, a respected doctor in the Philippine countryside, believes his wife hides a secret. Prior to their marriage, he spied her wearing wings and flying to the stars with her sisters each evening. As Tala tries to keep her dangerous past from her new husband, Manolo begins questioning the gaps in her stories―and his suspicions push him even further from the truth. The Hour of Daydreams, a contemporary reimagining of a Filipino folktale, weaves in the perspectives of Tala’s siblings, her new in-laws, and the all-seeing housekeeper while exploring trust, identity, and how myths can take root from the seeds of our most difficult truths.

The Hour of Daydreams

Rutledge, Renee Macalino

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