NW 23rd Ave Interview with Scott Seibert

This week I had the privilege of interviewing Portland's 36th Rose Emperor, Scott Seibert.  Check out the NW 23rd Ave Blog to learn more about Scott, why he loves living in NW Portland and why the people of NW 23rd love Scott and don't even know it.

Click here for a direct link to the interview.
Thanks for reading!

"What the Hell is Water?"

This past Sunday marked the two year anniversary of the death of David Foster Wallace (who it just so happens that I Write Like).  A friend shared this excellent example of his work.  It makes me wish he had given my commencement speech.  Enjoy:

A speech by the late David Foster Wallace

A Northwest Gem and Some New Finds

Two weekends ago Matthew and I took a ten hour round-trip drive down to Ashland, Oregon on the California border.  Oregonians know that Ashland is home to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and America's first outdoor Elizabethan theatre.  This year Ashland is celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Shakespeare Festival, but sadly our brief afternoon in Ashland did not coordinate with the performance times.

Ashland, however, caters in many other ways to the Shakespeare enthusiasts and book lovers who are drawn by the festival.  Among a slew of antique and book stores, one of our finds was Antiquarium Books & Antiques.  The shop is packed with interesting antiques, but the walls were lined with every kind of book a collector could dream of.  In the classics section I found a 1937 edition of Oscar Wilde Selected Works and a (not-so-antique) reprint of the original 1847 edition of Wuthering Heights.  Matthew found a 1975 Baseball Encyclopedia.  One of the owners checked us out and was very kind to give us a little bit of a discount on our stack of books which amounted to getting Wuthering Heights for free.  Can't complain about that.

After perusing Antiquarium the rest of our time in Ashland consisted of window shopping, dinner at the Standing Stone Brewing Company, a walk through surprisingly expansive Lithia Park and dessert from a local homemade ice cream shop.  We questioned whether such a short visit would be worth the long drive, but while we do plan to return and see a show at that outdoor theatre we were certainly satisfied on the long drive back to Portland.  I would call Ashland a must-see for lovers of Shakespeare, antiques, books, and quiet little towns with plenty of character.

Links:

Ashland Wikipedia

Oregon Shakespeare Festival

www.passporttoashland.com

A Month Later...

No one ever said that being a writer would be easy.  Vacation may not have been best time to try to build a writing habit.  Especially on a vacation with family there is always something to do and someone to talk to and never as much free time as you imagine there will be.  In just under two weeks we hopped from Portland to Rhode Island, New York City, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, North Carolina and back to Portland.  We saw sisters, best friends, family friends, aunts, uncles, grandmothers and parents.  Needless to say there did not turn out to be a lot of reading or writing time.  On the beach in North Carolina, however, I did manage to sneak some time for One Hundred Years of Solitude and a little bit of writing.

I am still picking my way through One Hundred Years of Solitude and I am loving it.  It is a beautiful story of the rise and fall of the Buendia family over the course of, appropriately, one hundred years.  What is surprising me, and pleasantly, is the whimsical quality of the story.  The superstitions and beliefs of the isolated culture in which the Buendias live defines truth in the novel.  It is fantasy and reality in one package and it is exciting to watch the development of the small culture with changes and discoveries in science and world knowledge.

I am also still slowly enjoying Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, and am currently inspired by her thoughts on character description and dialogue.  It makes me think that I should have done more writing while I was with my family or that I should begin paying closer attention to the array of characters that I encounter so frequently at Starbucks.

While on the beach my thoughts were more on description, and of course the natural focus was the rolling waves, the shadows that the seagulls cast as the fly and fight their way along the shore, long lines of pelicans parading over rooftops, white crabs with huge eyes that scurry fearfully trying to blend in to the sand and fishermen with their poles stuck in the sand who may or may not have been compensating for something depending on how important it seemed to make them feel.  Additionally, a common theme was that writing doesn't just appear out of nowhere... you have to actually do something.  I feel like often when I am not writing it is because I'm waiting for some great idea to hit me so hard that it's all I can do not to write it down on the side of a coffee cup or a napkin or my arm if it's the only thing that's handy.  I'm starting to get that it doesn't always work like that.  Maybe it did in school after weeks studying a topic or days of research and agonizing over a subject, but that's not the same as pulling something out of thin air.  You have to do the work and the work means pages of pages of worthless writing before something great starts to flow.  I'm still working on that.

Next on the reading and writing agenda is more reading and more writing... But isn't that always the goal.  This week I'll get Mockingjay, the third and final book of The Hunger Games trilogy in the mail.  Of course I won't have any trouble getting through that ten times faster than I've read anything recently, but just maybe after that I'll get on a role.