Book Heaven

For those of you who do not live in the Portland area, you should know that there is a little piece of heaven here.  Powell's City of Books in downtown Portland is a must-visit for tourists and residents alike.  It is the largest new and used bookstore in the world, with a mapping system and color coded rooms to help visitors find the kind of books they are searching for. The variety of books; seemingly every book imagined including used books and even a rare book room with signed first editions can be overwhelming.  It's a good thing there's a coffee shop inside because visitors could quite literally spend an entire day... and probably come back the next day for more.

I recently spent a few hours wandering through Powell's with my good friend Laura.  I was searching specifically for literature by and about Oscar Wilde for a  project that I am hoping to work on over the summer.  In addition to a $4 copy of Richard Ellmann's well-regarded biography of Wilde. I found some gorgeous hardcovers, including Oscar Wilde's Letters and a pristine 1932 edition of My Friendship with Oscar Wilde by Lord Alfred Douglas.

In addition to housing a grand array of books, Powell's also hosts authors and other public figures including past names such as Joyce Carol Oates and President Jimmy Carter.  Learn more about Powell's City of Books here.

In other book news, I recently joined Goodreads, a website where users can share what they are reading, write reviews of books they have read, see what their friends are reading and discover new books to read.  If you'd like to see what I've been reading, check out www.goodreads.com/CABHayes.

Happy reading!

Be the first to know

I'm compiling an email list of people who are interested in updates about what I'm working on and future projects.  It will be periodic, once every couple weeks or so at most.  If you'd like to be included, leave a comment with your name and email address or just write to me at chayeswriting@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading!

NW 23rd Ave Interview with Tatiana Miletta

Check out my new interview with the beautiful Tati Miletta: newlywed, aspiring photographer, and long-time hostess of Papa Haydn on NW 23rd and Irving here.

Find out why Tati is so beloved by the NW 23rd Ave community and all that know her!

Watch for more interviews every Monday at:

www.nw23rdav.wordpress.com

Thinking Backwards

I love discovering the ways in which different creative media influence one another.  Among other greats of the fashion and art world that Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen interview in their book Influence, Mary-Kate talks to interior architect and designer David Collins.  He tells her that he is inspired by Gone with the Wind because of the way it was written.  Margaret Mitchell wrote her manuscript beginning with the final chapters and worked her way through the story backwards.  In fact, the manuscript was accepted for publication before she had even completed the first chapters (Blair Rouse).  Collins explains how this style of writing has influenced his work:

You have to know the ending; how you got there is the story--because there are so many things that are a series of accidental happenings.  That's why, when I'm approaching a design project, I've got to figure out what it's going to feel like in the end.  I need to think about the ending first.  You don't always know what it's going to look like totally, but you have to think of what its going to feel like at the end.

I think this is often true in writing.  Not that you always need to or even can know the ending, but that it often helps to know what it is that you are trying to accomplish.  The mood, the tone, the style; what you want it to feel like at the end; the effect you want it to have for you and for the reader.  For me, the first draft usually doesn't come out feeling like I want it to, so I have to reread, rewrite, revise and sculpt it into something that serves the purpose that I meant for it to serve.  This is what people in the writing world call the "felt sense," among other names. It is what you keep coming back to when you get stopped, or when you just need to make sure you're staying on track.  Without it, writing can go everywhere and be anything; with it, writing can be effective, focused and meaningful.

If You've Ever Try to Spell it "Fluxuate"...

First, you would have been wrong.  It is spelled "fluctuate."

With that out of the way, here is what might have happened if you've ever been thrown off by this seemingly common misspelling:

You might first have tried to type "fluxuate" into your word processing program, only to discover that it is spelled wrong.

With no help from the spell check suggestions, you might then have typed "fluxuate" into your google search bar with the hopes of being saved by the ever-helpful "did you mean..." correction function.

Instead, you might have discovered, high on your list of search results, a blog by the name of Spooks By Me.  Specifically, a post from February 27, 2007 titled "Today, I tried to spell fluctuate as "fluxuate." 

The post itself has nothing to do with the word or the spelling of the word fluctuate, but it seems to have become a bit of a phenomenon.  The post has a whopping 178 comments, including comments from within the past few weeks (for those of you who aren't paying attention, that's over three years later)!

The surge of comments has sparked a debate over whether all these people should have gone the dictionary route rather than typing their questions into google (I vote google... c'mon, how are you supposed to use a dictionary to efficiently find the correct spelling of a word spelled f-l-u-c... if you think that it begins f-l-u-x...? Seriously.), but it has also become a useful resource with many of the comments including the correct spelling!

I don't really know what all of this means, other than that an apparently common misspelling obviously isn't getting a lot of attention if this is first thing that comes up in google.  But if you are as amused by it as I am, you can check it out for yourself here.

NW 23rd Ave Person of the Week Interview

The first NW 23rd Person of the Week Interview is up!  Check out my interview with Nick Dothee here.

Thanks again to Nick for sitting down with me and giving me so much great material to work with. Thanks to Dave and the NW 23rd Ave Blog for letting me help out with your quest to spread the word about all NW 23rd has to offer.  

Interviews will post on Mondays weekly beginning June 28th. Watch out for them at www.nw23rdav.wordpress.com

A Different Way of Writing

I was recently asked to write for a local blog that shares news and information about the NW 23rd Ave shopping district in Portland.  I was given full reign to contribute to the blog in any way that I desired, so I decided to use the opportunity to try out interviews.  It is a completely new form of writing for me but one that I have been wanting to take a shot at for a while.  So far, it has definitely been a learning experience. The questions are the easy part - just think up some basic questions, silly questions, questions about the interviewee's impressions of and experiences on NW 23rd - but introducing the person is different.  How do you accurately represent someone's story in your own words in only a few sentences?  How do you do justice to all the interesting things about them without going over the top?

My guide has been an excerpt from Ken Macrorie's Telling Writing.  Macrorie's mantra: 

"All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth."

Good writing is honest and authentic, doesn't waste words and shares with the reader the experiences of the writer.  My first interviewee put my ability to write this way to the test.

I chose to interview Nick in part because I see him regularly and could set up the interview quickly and easily; but also because he is a musician, so I knew he would have something to share and would be comfortable sitting down and talking with me.  Nick has a great personality so my expectations were high but he managed to exceed them.  Before he answered a few written questions I asked him to tell me a little bit about himself, his past, and his recent move to Portland.  He was incredibly enthusiastic and genuine about his story and I felt like I had to find a way to convey the experience that I had talking to him to the readers of the blog.  What came to mind, however, were cliches, not the truth.

To find the truth, Macrorie suggest writing continuously for ten minutes without stopping.  I think the point is that when you can't stop to think about what you're writing your mind can't come up with the cliches and the "great thoughts" that you might otherwise resort to.  Without the time to think, you don't have anything to draw from but the truth.  So I sat down and I started writing about Nick.

It worked, it didn't even take ten minutes of continuous writing before real, honest statements about what I had learned began to flow.  I began to discover what was really important about my interview with Nick and what it was that impressed me about him.  I really only had a few lines to write, but I think that I was able to express what was important to him and to me.

Thanks to Nick for being my guinea pig!  Check out the NW 23rd Ave Blog at www.nw23rdav.wordpress.com and I'll be sure to share the interview when it posts.

Punctuation Station

 A happy amendment to the Grammar With a Sense of Humor post!

Please enjoy The Oatmeal's new addition:

How to Use a Semicolon

Pleasure Reading

I wanted to share two great websites that I have recently had the pleasure of discovering.

"Personal, Political, Provocative"

The Sun Magazine features many pieces from their monthly publication online.  The Sun is a non-profit, advertisement-free magazine that features photographs, poetry, interviews, short stories and essays submitted by regular contributors and readers.  The subject matter is life, and The Sun looks for honest, personal and political writing that reveals some of its complexities.  The result is a fascinating rainy day read.

Find out more about The Sun and read select pieces at www.thesunmagazine.org

"You are traveling with us today, no?"

Border Hopping is an online collection of worldly goodies including visual art, photography, reviews and writing.  The theme is entirely cultural with the goal of giving readers a diverse experience of world travel from the comfort of their desk chairs.  The writing consists of all genres including stories, poetry and journalesque pieces.  Like The Sun, Border Hopping welcomes reader submissions.

Check out Border Hopping at  www.borderhopping.net