Join Us for a Spirited Spiritual Adventure

On Tuesday night (yes, that's tomorrow) we're excited to be hosting Oregon author Jessica Maxwell, who will read from and talk about her book, Roll Around Heaven: An All-True Accidental Spiritual Adventure.

Previously known for her adventure-travel writing, Maxwell was dragged kicking and screaming into the spiritual realm. She was used to adventures that involved hip waders, fly fishing rods, and putting greens -- not to experiences like seeing her father's face in the sky three days after he died or seeing Celtic visions on the Isle of Iona. But that's where she found herself, especially after the arrival of the completely-un-asked-for spiritual teacher, the Holy Pig Farmer (I'll let her tell you about him).

Called a "rollicking spiritual ride" by one reviewer, Roll Around Heaven chronicles nearly two decades of Maxwell's own spiritual adventures: "...spirituality is dangerously close to becoming another commodity, like yoga lessons and God Is My Copilot bumper stickers....If my own unexpected spiritual marathon has taught me anything, it's this: if we think we can buy -- or trivialize -- our way into the kingdom of heaven, we are in serious trouble."Another reviewer had this to say: "Maxwell knocks the pompous off their pedestals and finds inspiration in unexpected, sometimes terrifying places.”

Maxwell , who got her degree in journalism from the UO (go Ducks!), is the author of books on flyfishing, adventure travel, and golf. Her work has been included in more than two dozen anthologies, including multiple editions of Best American Travel Writing. From 1985 to 1997 she was a regular contributor to Esquire’s travel column, and she created and wrote Audubon’s in-the-field conservation column, True Nature, from 1992 to 1997. She has published adventure travel narratives for AARP the Magazine, Audubon, Esquire, Forbes, Gourmet, Islands, Lexus, More, Outside, The Discovery Channel Magazine, Town & Country Travel, and Travel & Leisure Golf.

Her article in November 2008 on Portland’s restaurant scene was nominated for a James Beard food writing award. Besides receiving a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and being a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism winner, Maxwell is one of the few female members of the Flyfisher’s Club of Oregon. She lives in Western Oregon with her husband where, as one friend put it, “they have a lot of fun correcting each other’s grammar.”

We hope you can join us Tuesday at 7 pm to for our evening with Jessica Maxwell and her accidental spiritual adventure.

Celebrating the Launch of Nadelson's Newest

Do you enjoy a fun party? Do you enjoy beautifully written short stories, albeit on the longish side? If your answers are yes, then we have the perfect Friday evening planned for you! Friday, September 9th -- yes, that's tomorrow night -- at 7 pm we join with Hawthorne Books to celebrate the launch of the newest collection of short stories from Scott Nadelson. In Aftermath, Scott's third collection of stories, his characters live in the wake of momentous events, finding new ways of forging on with their lives: "In this new collection, I’ve been drawn, as the title suggests, to write about aftermaths—the period following a significant loss or rupture rather than the moment of loss or rupture itself. What fascinates me about these periods is how people accommodate themselves to their new circumstances, how they fit loss or change into their understanding of the world and of themselves, and how, often, what starts out as rupture leads to growth."

Scott's first collection of stories, Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories, won an Oregon Book Award and his second collection, The Cantor's Daughter, was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award. Both books were published by Hawthorne Books. He is currently working on a collection of essays/stories that form a kind of loose autobiography: The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Process, will be published by Hawthorne in 2012.

Scott has the distinction of being born on Kafka's 90th birthday; make of that what you will. He grew up in New Jersey a few miles a way from the mental hospital where Bob Dylan famously visited Woody Guthrie. Now he lives in Salem just a few miles away from the mental hospital where One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was filmed. Again, make of that what you will. Or ask Scott what he makes of it.

While in high school, listening to his dad's early Bob Dylan records turned him on to the use of language to "externalize the voiceless angst that often had me tied up in knots. He tried his hand at poetry, but soon found that short stories were his genre. "More and more what draws me to a story is the sound of its voice. Above all else, storytelling is seduction, and different readers are seduced by different voices....When I'm writing now, I spend a lot of time trying to find the right sound for a story....If the voice sounds right, then it takes me to places I couldn't have expected." Scott says that in particular he finds himself "exploring the ways in which characters' fears undermine their desires."

He teaches creative writing in the English department at Willamette University, holding the Hallie Ford Chair in Writing. "Teaching is as much a passion for me as writing, and I strongly believe that the teaching of creative writing, particularly on the undergraduate level and in a liberal arts context, complements studies in literature.  My primary aim in creative writing courses is to teach students to read closely, from a writer's perspective."

Scott's publisher, the wonderful Hawthorne Books, will be providing goodies -- solids and liquids -- as we celebrate the launch of Aftermath. We hope you can join us for the evening -- it's free, and it's sure to offer a good time for all!

Patrick deWitt on Booker Shortlist!

Canadian-born-but-Portland-based author Patrick deWitt has made it through to the shortlist for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for fiction for his novel The Sisters Brothers! The other five authors/books on the shortlist announced today are Julian Barnes for The Sense of an Ending, Carol Birth for Jamrach's Menagerie, Esi Edugyan for Half Blood Blues, Stephen Kelman for Pigeon English, and A.D. Miller for Snowdrops.

Barnes is the oddsmakers' favorite to win this year, but that doesn't always pan out. He has been shortlisted for the Booker three times. Birch has made the longlist once before. The others are first-time nominees, and Kelman and Miller are debut novelists. We wrote about the full longlist in a previous blog post last month. The prize aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. The winner, who receives the equivalent of about $80,000, will be announced on October 18th. Last year's winner was Howard Jacobson for The Finkler Question.

DeWitt was also honored this week by being one of seventeen writers selected to the 2011 longlist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The Scotiabank Giller Prize is Canada’s most distinguished literary prize, awarding $50,000 annually to the author of the best Canadian novel or short story collection published in English. Finalists on the shortlist receive $5,000. The award was established in 1994 by Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch in honor of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller. In September 2005, Scotiabank was proud to become the first ever co-sponsor of the prize, and it has been known as the Scotiabank Giller Prize ever since.

This year -- the eighteenth year of the prize -- the longlist was selected from 143 books submitted for consideration, a record-setting number of submissions. The shortlist for the Giller will be announced on October 4th, with the winner announced in a ceremony in Toronto on November 8th. Booker shortlister Esi Edugyan also made the longlist for the Giller, along with Alexi Zenter for Touch (gorgeous cover!), Wayne Johnston for A World Elsewhere, Michael Ondaatje for The Cat's Table (publishing in the US next month), Vancouver author Michael Christie for his debut short story collection The Begger's Garden, and Marina Endicott for The Little Shadows. You can read the full long list at the Giller Prize website.