COURTESY OF MILKWEED EDITIONS

Philomath, which came out this week, is a 2020 National Poetry Series winner, and blurbed by the likes of Joyce Carol Oates and Sally Keith.

“I never wrote with the assumption they would read it,” Walker-Figueroa says in a recent interview with the Mercury. “It’s a wild dream come true, but it also doesn’t feel entirely real to me.”

These days, Walker-Figueroa lives in Brooklyn, and is working on her second Masters of Fine Arts—the first was in poetry, and this one is in fiction.

“It’s interesting to be promoting poetry and working on fiction,” she says. “It feels a little bit like having two gods. Which is fine—I’m definitely pro-pagan, in true Oregon fashion.”

Here’s more of our conversation, which touches on Biblical themes, Oregonians’ paradoxical relationship to nature, and the challenges of writing about people you know.

MERCURY: My first question is the most obvious one: What made you want to write about your childhood in rural Oregon?

WALKER-FIGUEROA: For one, these people haunted me, this place. I haven’t lived there for a number of years, but I come back and visit my family—this place really went with me everywhere I’ve gone. I’m not sure I could’ve written this first book about anything else, to be honest. Maybe it’s an inevitability to have a fascination with where one is from, to have a point of origin. But beyond that, there were a lot of people I encountered in that area, that I felt like their stories, what I had of them to tell, were worth sharing.

There’s a sense, living in a rural place sometimes, that no one knows what happens to you or the people there. There’s a sense that your life might pass unseen. Maybe this is just a way to let those lives be seen a little better.

"Coming of age in that setting, being immersed in that culture, upsetting things happen to you, and you don’t have the bandwidth or the vantage or outside perspective to identify the problems as they’re occurring."

Something I noticed while reading Philomath is that you write about some really traumatic issues—abuse, addiction, natural disasters—but never seem to cast judgement on your characters. Was that intentional?

I thought about that quite a bit, actually. One thing I wanted to capture in the book was that coming of age in that setting, being immersed in that culture, upsetting things happen to you, and you don’t have the bandwidth or the vantage or outside perspective to identify the problems as they’re occurring. I trust my readers enough that I think they’ll understand if something troubling or wrong is happening without my editorializing it.

My mother was one of these Good Samaritan types, and she liked to care for those she felt most needed it. It’s a wonderful idea, but also, that can bring issues with it when you’re raising a family and inviting relative strangers into your home.

Speaking of a Good Samaritan, this collection also felt very Biblical to me. There are overt references to church and Christianity, but also Biblical themes: male violence, blood and fire, a rotating cast of mysterious characters that appear and disappear just as quickly.

For me, that connects to the region. There are a lot of small towns in Oregon that are steeped in Christianity. A lot of the social opportunities arise around churches or bars. It’s probably a product of being in a space like that.

Kings Valley doesn’t have a lot of buildings besides houses and barns, but it does have a few churches. Culturally, there’s not a whole lot of activity going on, and yet there’s a vacation Bible school, and a church that’s doing a better job staying alive than a school. These are spaces people can rely on for connection—not everybody, but it’s definitely part of the culture out there.

It’s easy to idealize landscapes… But to be in those landscapes and to feel small and humbled in them, and yet to recognize how fragile they are, really drives home to me how fragile we are.

Something I’m always very aware of when writing anything based on real life is that you’ll have to face feedback from the people you’re writing about. You’re brutally honest in these poems; did you worry about loved ones’ reactions?

I very much thought about that. When I wrote a number of these poems, I never necessarily thought they’d be seen by people. The first poems I wrote, I was an undergrad at Bennington College in Vermont. I was trying to just begin writing poems; I hadn’t set out to write a book yet. So I felt a real sense of freedom in not feeling looked-at or examined.

I protected people’s identities—I changed names, and combined people. When you grow up in a small place like that, people will recognize themselves, but [friends I grew up with] gave positive feedback.

It was very stressful to share the book with people I’m closest to… My dad actually hasn’t read the book yet. He’ll be getting his copy in the mail. I’m nervous about that, actually. There are some people in my extended family who, I kind of hope they don’t read it, because it feels like an exposure to criticism… I’ve tried to be as honest and fair and transparent with people as possible. Now I just hope for the best. It doesn’t belong to me anymore.

Another thing that stood out to me in Philomath is the way you write about Pacific Northwest nature. A lot of writing about the natural beauty here can verge on being boring, but you focus more on the dark side of nature: dying cedars, animal carcasses, fires.

It occurs to me—there are all these premonitions of fires in my book, and now the real fires. It’s very surreal.

Growing up in that area, it’s an area where the logging industry still has a very strong presence. I remember seeing clear-cuts happen. You’d see where they were happening: One little spot on a hillside, and then they’d spread. I remember how upsetting that was—it was like my world was being dismantled when I saw that happening.

I grew up in a relatively conservative household. My parents were pro-logging industry, and yet they also, paradoxically, loved the landscape and took very good care of their own property. My mother interviewed a lot of the last remaining steam-age loggers in Oregon, and collected their tall tales. … The reverence that they had for the landscapes that their work employed them to destroy—those paradoxical relationships to nature in Oregon in particular, that really struck me at a very young age. I can hardly remember a time in my life when I wasn’t aware of that.

It seems incumbent upon us to note the ways we’ve affected our environments, and not to pretend they’re pristine when they’re not. It’s easy to idealize landscapes… it really can be so beautiful. But to be in those landscapes and to feel small and humbled in them, and yet to recognize how fragile they are, really drives home to me how fragile we are. This landscape seems so permanent, so overwhelming and beautiful and secure, but it’s not. What does that mean for us?

Philomath came out on September 14; you can purchase it from Milkweed Editions.

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Courtesy of Graywolf Press

Nelson, who I think of as a critical-theory spelunker, really goes there. Climate change, she writes, “amplifies the predicament in which we find ourselves as mortal beings.” Translation: You’re going to die, along with everyone you love. Damn, Maggie. Okay.

Reading these words, I was reminded of Donald Barthelmy’s odd little fable “The School,” about children grappling with newfound knowledge of death: “We require an assertion of value, we are frightened,” they say.

“I require an assertion of value! I am frightened!” could describe my experience of the past 16 months, and probably yours, too. We are all frightened children in the face of mortality and the related fact that, as Nelson puts it, “our life spans will not allow us to take in the whole story.” And what could be a bigger death-anxiety trigger than trying to do all of our dishes and get to inbox zero at the center of the horrible Venn diagram between COVID-19 and climate change?

But Nelson, who’s written about everything from murder to abject heartbreak without (it would seem) flinching, isn’t flinching now. Instead, she commits to what Donna Haraway describes as “staying with the trouble.” (There’s a lot of Donna Haraway in On Freedom). “Staying with the trouble” is exactly that — fighting to change material conditions, but not tapping out of the struggle, or giving into nihilism, even (especially!) when it would be easy to.

This is not “Everything happens for a reason” hogwash. It’s a thorny, circuitous route to something resembling hope for the future, and it’s a difficult joy to make the journey with Nelson. It’s also deeply comforting to read someone else describe the world as it is through clear-eyed language and heady analysis, and to witness her still come away believing in a practice of “all heart, no escape.”

I’m in.

I also think I should warn you right now that if you loved Nelson’s previous book, The Argonauts, you may not love On Freedom. A work of autotheory on Nelson’s partnership with artist Harry Dodge, gender identity, and becoming a parent, The Argonauts is the kind of book that I don’t think happens twice; I’ve read almost everything Nelson has ever written, and it’s far and away my favorite. It also holds the rare distinction of being an indie title that made its way to the top of mainstream bestseller lists.

While The Argonauts was propelled forward on a current of ebullient, contagious queer joy, On Freedom is heavier, more contemplative — more theory, less auto.

And for good reason: Nelson began writing it during the Trump administration and finished during the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning she wrote it under material conditions in which joy often felt rare, and freedom elusive. Though she allows herself a few autobiographical passages, On Freedom is really a book about ideas, so get out your monocle emoji. There’s a lot of Foucault and Marx in here. Like, a lot.

There are also some stumbles, especially in her analysis of the #MeToo movement. Nelson is interested in what she calls “gray area” encounters, and worries that women who have experienced them play up the perpetrator-victim dynamic and minimize their own “female waywardness, transgression, desire, and agency.”

This is possible, I suppose, but talk to enough people who’ve encountered the so-called “gray area,” and you’re likely to find the opposite is true: These stories are often not very gray at all, but describe rape and assault under a comforting euphemism. There’s certainly value in scrutinizing #MeToo — for its erasure of founder Tarana Burke in favor of Hollywood surrogates, some of the reporting around it (looking at u, Babe dot net), its easy conflation with carceral feminism, or even the idea that #MeToo is a new movement in and of itself, and not, just, you know… feminism. But recasting sexual gray areas as some misunderstood zone of female agency? I’m just not sure this is the move.

Still, I’m comfortable with my discomfort — like Nelson, I’m not much into the idea of “problematic faves”, a phrase she aptly makes ridiculous through identifying the underlying implication that there are “human beings who are or could ever be ‘nonproblematic.’”

I didn’t always feel this way. I once viewed Nelson as a literary hero, but I now see her as a writer whose work I often love, which is, I think, the better compliment — and more real.

Besides, we don’t need heroes right now. We have bigger problems.

The night I finished On Freedom, every time I opened a social media app on my phone, I saw videos and images of New York flooded by Hurricane Ida’s northward trajectory. Couches floated haphazardly in apartments filled with mucky water, a man smoked a hookah on a blow-up raft in what was almost certainly raw sewage, bus drivers drove through feet of flood, and someone had been thoughtless (or hungry) enough to order takeout on a delivery app, brought via half-submerged bike.

I am glad that the day I saw these things was also the day I encountered Nelson’s description of “thick time,” a concept she finds more accessible in the indeterminacy of living with climate change, in which “other senses of time can become more palpable.” Nelson explains it through the way she sees her son. When she looks at him, she says, she “[beholds] all the selves and ages he has passed through folded atop one another.”

Caring is another way of folding time, Nelson writes, in which “one is attending to the effects of past actions, attempting to mitigate present suffering, and doing what one can to reduce or obviate suffering, all at once.”

Reading Nelson’s words, I sensed another kind of folded time: I have read nearly every book Nelson has written, and in this one, I felt I could see the shadows of the others that came before it, and the selves I’d been when I read them, an overlay of time and experience, style and repetition.

I remembered reading Bluets, her book of heartbreaking paragraphs refracted through the color blue, at a time when I was also processing the painful end of a relationship. I recalled the fierce joy of The Argonauts, a birthday surprise I read in snatches on TriMet buses before work. I could feel the park bench underneath me on an overcast day in Seattle, as I shivered and read The Red Parts, her account of a murder trial that rivals any reporter’s.

It is a privilege to follow a writer’s work like this, when the writer is still alive, and you can experience their books as markers of time in your own life. It is something that, depending on when you find a beloved author’s work, may not even be possible. Our life spans will not allow us to take in the whole story, but, writes Nelson, “Awakening to the choices we have in such matters is a practice of freedom, and one worth our time.”

You can purchase On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson (Graywolf) now from Powell's or wherever books are sold.

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P.C. and Kristin Cast are mother-daughter authors best known for the House of Night series, which P.C. penned and Kristin edited at age 19. They have lived in the Portland area since 2014. photos Courtesy of P.C. and Kristin Cast

P.C., who taught high school for ten years, said teens will rise to the occasion and aspire to more abstract thoughts if you ask them. With that, however, comes ramifications from some parents.

“There’s a lot of authors that feel how I do about it, who ignore whining and crying parents that say we can’t put any sex in our books because, ‘Then my teen will want to have sex!’” P.C. said. “Well, newsflash, okay. Your teenagers don’t need to read my book to want to have sex.”

The Sisters of Salem series is the third collaboration between P.C. and Kristin and the first installment, Spells Trouble, was released in May 2021. The mother-daughter authors are best known for the “House of Night” series, which P.C. penned and Kristin edited at age 19. They have lived in the Portland area since 2014.

Although P.C. has published both adult and YA fiction, both New York Times bestselling authors have been integral to the YA genre as it’s grown over the years—and have witnessed the changes within it.

One of the major changes has been the content of the novels. Despite publishers still acting as gatekeepers, Kristin said their hold has loosened on what should and shouldn’t be censored in a YA book; however, she noted there is still a lot of “disrespect” for young readers about what they can manage.

“[Publishers] don’t think they can handle certain things that not only exist in our world but people are handling very well every day,” she said, “and [readers] can also learn from characters with different experiences.”

Although YA has been seeing more diversity with BIPOC and LGBTQ+ authors featuring more diverse character representation, and there has been more sexual content allowed in novels, Kristin said there still isn’t a good picture of drug and alcohol abuse.

“It sometimes feels as if we’re still operating under the belief that young people won’t be impacted if adults just don’t talk about it,” she said. “This thought process doesn’t work.”

Wednesday Books

Kristin also struggles with mental health issues, and said there is a direct influence of who she is and her lived experiences that are embedded into her characters. Through them, Kristin explores what it looks like when a character continues down a path fueled by anger, as well as when and how the healing process comes in.

For example, in Spells Trouble, the character Kristin wrote—Hunter—deals with feelings of inadequacy and rage.

“My characters always have, I call it a bit of darkness. but I don’t mean that in a negative connotation,” she said. “I like to explore more stereotypically negative emotions and how living with those will impact someone.”

Kristin added that her main characters are all cathartic ways to experience feelings of anxiety, lack of confidence, PTSD, and depression. She enjoys figuring out how her characters handle each emotion and discovering what works for them.

When both P.C. and Kristin write their books, they don’t dwell on the fact they’re writing for the YA genre. Kristin writes for a younger version of herself, and P.C. said she writes a young character that is allowed to make mistakes.

“The only difference in the writing style of [adult novels] and Sisters of Salem is my adult characters can’t get away with the immature things my younger characters can,” she said. “I go into it crafting a character and setting, and I have the characters react to conflict age appropriately.”

P.C. added that she loves taking a character that makes a lot of mistakes and seeing their growth over the course of the novel. When people ask her about the paranormal elements in her books, she said they are just “icing” to the story.

“My YA books are about kids growing up,” she said. “That is what’s most important and what’s most interesting and successful in our genre.”

“It sometimes feels as if we’re still operating under the belief that young people won’t be impacted if adults just don’t talk about it. This thought process doesn’t work.”

P.C. first started writing YA in 2005 when her agent brought up the idea of an adult series about a vampire finishing school with “sexy-coeds.” At the time, P.C. was teaching high school students and argued instead the series should be YA, which was taking off at the time.

But it’s not just teens reading YA anymore. Kristin said one of the other changes that has happened in the YA genre is with its audience: As readers who discovered YA when the genre was taking off 15 years ago approach their 30s, publishers have now shifted their sales tactics to reach an older demographic.

“It’s strange to me because looking at the beginning of YA, it was Harry Potter, House of Night, and Suzanne Collins—teenagers were out buying those on purpose,” she said. “To sell to [readers] 15 years older, it’s a change that doesn’t make much sense to me. Especially because I’m not writing a book for a 35 year old.”

The publishing industry as a whole has also changed over the years. Kristin said publishers have shifted the responsibility of generating sales to the author, without increasing their percentage. Although this has been happening since before the COVID-19 pandemic, Kristin said the pandemic has exacerbated the challenge of promoting their work.

“We just had the surge of not just authors, but everyone selling anything, having one way—which was putting it online, primarily social media,” she said. “Consumers were getting burnt out. No one wants to log on and see ‘buy this,’ they want genuine interaction.”

That interaction is important to Kristin. She said she wants to leave the readers with a theme or a feeling.

“I like my readers to feel seen, and when I think of my audience, that’s important to me,” she said. “I want to point to you in the crowd and say, ‘I understand you and I see you, and I very much feel your story.’”

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Funeral For Flaca: Essays by Emilly Prado is out July 1 from Future Tense Books. Photo by Josue Rivas / Cover art by Francisco Morales

Did you know one in three Latinas will become pregnant before the age of 20? I sure as hell do, thanks to the enthusiastic white lady from Planned Parenthood who seared it into my brain during one of her visits to our biology class near the end of ninth grade.

Mr. Schnitz, with his knobby knees, bow ties, and four eyes, could instruct chromosomal curriculum and meiosis in his sleep, yet any steps beyond XY and XX would have caused him a malfunction. He was real sweet and probably loved listening to Coldplay on CD with his wife, but Mr. Schnitz stepped back to let the nice white lady do the talking when it came to the XXX.

Barb was a safe sex zealot. She had dark hair and wasn’t super old yet—30 tops—and giggled as she released new facts into the classroom, letting them linger a little too long before saying another. She seemed equal parts excited and nervous, like the first day I worked at Toys ‘R’ Us after getting away with lying about my birthday so I could work more hours. But Barb went above and beyond: there were anatomically correct plastic genitalia in different colors and sizes, pop quizzes—multi-choice and fill-in-the-blank, and maybe even a condom-covered banana. Between facts, she’d offer her wisdom. The small, latched red plastic Caboodle she brought to class had a slit in the top and students could insert their folded up, top-secret sex questions. She’d answer them aloud. About one in two were jokes.

I can’t recall how my own pregnancy odds stacked up against the other minorities and underserved youth in the classroom, but I do remember it was so bad, she repeated it twice. “Ooonnne in threeeee,” she hissed, gaze oscillating around the beige linoleum box of a classroom to everyone, but especially wide-eyed at the handful of Black and brown girls in the room. The second time she said it I think it echoed out into the hallway, what with all the doom and gloom she shoved out alongside it.

I’m sure the nice white lady didn’t mean to single me, or us statistically at-risk girls out in that suburban Bay Area high school classroom designed by a guy who designed the state’s prisons. But when you’re the hairy shell of a coconut in a sea of tender and sweet white meat, it’s impossible not to feel like you’ve already fucked up a little bit. Plus, I knew if I was immediately tallying up my classmates and doing the math to predict which one of us would get pregnant on account of science, smug ass Timmy from the San Carlos hills sure was too.

All my life, I’ve been dodging the shitty statistics of being a Brown Girl in America.

Most Likely to Be a Dropout. Most Likely to Attempt Suicide. Most Likely to Do Drugs. Most Likely to Become a Teen Mom™.

I had already achieved two superlatives on the list, and a real one for Best Hair in middle school, but being a teen mom scared me the most. So, all I had to do was make it six more years to avoid falling victim to another Brown Girl Stat.

“Did you know if you get pregnant, you only have one of three options?” The nice instructor lady taught us that one, too. You can keep it, give it away, or have an abortion. There was a one in three chance I’d have to make that decision. I could keep it and become a mom that almost flunked out of eighth grade but then dropped out to raise her baby as best as she could by working at Toys ‘R’ Us for 20 years. I could look up an adoption How-To online to figure out how to give my baby away to a family, but they would have to be cool and rich and not racist, which would be hard to find. I could also take a $500 pill and make it go away if I had enough time, or suck it out with a $500 vacuum if I had less time.

Between me, and my cousin Amanda, and my cousin Isela—one of us was destined, statistically speaking, to make the mistake of getting knocked up before really reaching adulthood. Amanda was really good at soccer, Isela was really rich, and I was the one really trying—but failing—with a 1.4 GPA freshman year.

Right in the thick of figuring out whether we should take French or Spanish as an elective, sneak in peppermint schnapps or sour apple gin to the bowling alley, find a dress to wear to the homecoming dance, or pick out where we might apply to college one day, one in three of us would suddenly be forced to squeeze in some time to decide one of three choices for what to do with the growing embryo embedded in our body. Fuck that.

Tia Sylvia was 20 when she had Martin. Abuelita was 20 when she had my mom. My mom was 19 when she had Erika.

Maybe it was just my turn to be one in three.

I went to school and pretended everything was normal for the next few days. I tried not to think about the looming possibility of a swift end to my youth. Instead, I thought about the classmates who’d gotten pregnant over the years, right before my eyes.

When I was in the seventh grade, an eighth grader got pregnant by her eighth-grade boyfriend. When they had the baby, her parents made her pretend it was her younger brother. In high school, she and her boyfriend were still together and were still slipping up. She got pregnant again and had to transfer to Redwood—the alternative school for students who disrupt classrooms with outbursts of rage and/or swelling bellies. That’s where Wexler’s best friend was sent, too, after she got pregnant junior year. It’s also where Wexler went after he set a piece of plastic to spin in the science lab microwave for eight minutes and it caught on fire.

Rumors swirled that admin shipped pregnant girls off to Redwood so the good girls wouldn’t be tempted to get pregnant too, but I knew teen pregnancies weren’t all bad. I’d seen failing schoolmates turn their shit around and graduate for the sake of their babies. I’d seen pregnant girls get permission to prioritize themselves for the first time in their lives. I’d seen pregnant girls become women and remain kick ass mothers while growing up alongside their babies the whole way. Teen mamas had raised my own sister and cousins and friends, and I would be a kick ass mama if it became my destiny too.

Over the next year or so I drifted further away from my friends and dove into playing grown up with my older boyfriend. We spent nights together regularly. He looked through my phone regularly. We’d fight, and I’d be the one apologizing regularly. We had sex less and less regularly.

I broke up with him for the first time somewhere around fifteen months. This break-up only lasted eight weeks.

We got back together and had more regular missionary sex. We used more condoms. Then we broke up again my junior year. Three weeks after that break-up, I realized I had missed my period. I was 17 years old. I had never missed a period in my seven years of having one.

On a drive home from school later that week, I decided I couldn’t wait any longer to uncover my fate. The pregnancy test commercials had confused me into thinking I had to wait five days or two weeks or something before taking the test. I tried to do the math but didn’t know where to start.

I thought about stopping into the local Planned Parenthood I frequented to stuff my backpack with handfuls of novelty flavored condoms, but I didn’t want to run into anyone I knew. The last thing I needed was to have it become known that I was maybe possibly carrying my ex-boyfriend’s baby. He definitely couldn’t know, and neither could anyone else.

I parked my second-hand Toyota 4Runner in the driveway of my house instead. I don’t remember if it was cold or not, but I put on a black hoodie just for the occasion and stretched the hood over my head as far as it would go. I walked down the steep hill with my head down towards the shopping center.

I picked the furthest entrance to the Luigi’s Market and weaved past the still-warm baguettes, chocolate sprinkle cupcakes, and wheels of parmesan cheese. In the aisle north of the canned artichoke hearts and sundried tomatoes, I found the medicine. I had a problem that needed fixing, but pregnancy tests weren’t a medicine, it turns out. I moved to the next aisle and there— between the single bottle of K-Y Jelly lube and fancy floral adult diapers—were a row of pregnancy tests. I crouched down and picked the cheapest one.

I held it at my hip, close to my body, and moved towards the checkout stands. I had two options: The open register with a boy from school standing behind it and another boy from school ready to bag or register number two where a woman’s groceries were being bagged in plastic by an older gentleman.

The boys laughed and waved their arms to get my attention. The older man told me the other register was open. I pretended I was invisible and didn’t hear a thing. They all shrugged.

When it was my turn, I placed my test, face-down, on the conveyor belt and momentarily stared the store clerk in the eye. We said nothing, and I handed him a single crumpled up $20 bill from my pocket.

Emilly Prado is a writer, community organizer, and the Director of Youth Programs at Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon. When not writing or teaching, Emilly moonlights as DJ Mami Miami with Noche Libre, the Latinx DJ collective she co-founded in 2017. Her debut essay collection, Funeral for Flaca, is forthcoming with Future Tense Books on July 1, 2021. Learn more at www.emillyprado.com or social media @emillygrado.

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Michelle Zauner has two new projects out this spring: the album Jubilee, released under Japanese Breakfast, and the memoir Crying in H Mart. Peter Ash Lee and Penguin Random House

Zauner’s debut memoir Crying In H Mart was released in April, to much critical acclaim. The book recounts Zauner’s fraught but fiercely loving relationship with her mother Chongmi, a Korean immigrant, and charts Chongmi’s battle with cancer and eventual death when Zauner was 25. Chongmi shows her love for Zauner through food, and throughout the memoir Zauner is served Korean dishes before learning to cook them herself after her mother dies—hence the title, which references the Korean grocery chain that stocks a plethora of Asian staples for United States residents.

A lot of Oregonians got excited about Crying in H Mart because much of the book is set in Eugene, where Zauner grew up, and Portland makes a few quick cameos. But my favorite parts were inevitably the trips Zauner took with her mother to Seoul every couple years to visit relatives. Zauner perfectly captures the excitement of traveling, trying new food and taking in the bustling city—but there’s familiarity around the edges, bits of language she recognizes and flavors she knows but can’t quite place. Zauner’s prose is heavily peppered with Korean names for dishes, explaining their components but never pandering too heavily to readers who aren’t versed in Korean cuisine.

But the heart of the book, of course, is about grief: The grief Zauner feels watching her mother’s health decline, and the grief after her death, made more acute by the fact that Zauner and Chongmi had recently finally reconciled after an adolescent rough patch in their relationship. But rather than wallowing in pure sentiment, Zauner writes the particulars of her grief: A strange visit to an apple orchard right after she dies, because it’s one of the few places in Eugene they’d never gone to together; eschewing weekly counseling sessions and teaching herself to make kimchi instead, its own form of therapy. After a year in which we’ve all felt grief of some kind—if not for a person, then for a way of life—it’s those idiosyncrasies, the weird ways our minds find to process the onslaught, that ring the most true.

Near the end of the book, Zauner finds a stack of old family photos that her mother had kept in a small fridge she used specifically for storing kimchi. It’s a perfect image for Crying In H Mart, in which the flavors and textures of grief collide with that of food.

Not content with merely publishing a powerhouse memoir, Zauner also released her third album as musical artist Japanese Breakfast this year—in fact, it’s out today, June 4. Titled Jubilee, the album is billed as a sort of ode to joy, after her first two albums were meditations on grief heavy on references to her mother.

Jubilee feels less literally autobiographical than Japanese Breakfast’s earlier work, and considerably more danceable, flirting with synthy pop while still heavy on poetic lyrics, as in the track “Posing in Bondage”: When the world divides into two people/ Those who have felt pain and those who have yet to/ And I can't unsee it, although I would like to.”

Those lyrics, nestled in the middle of such a purposefully joyful album, make Jubilee feel all the more perfect for our times. Zauner’s been through some shit, she’s felt pain, and she knows she can’t unfeel it. She’s not ignoring it, but through some processing, she’s found a way to live with it, and be joyful anyway.

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images courtesy of Keith Rosson.

“He was a felon, Nolan, and had gotten the job at Good Acres Foods the year before because the sticker before him had lost a thumb from a hog kicking the blade back against his hand. Good Acres was about the only place in the county that’d hire anyone with a record, and Nolan made twelve dollars an hour killing roughly five thousand animals a shift, five shifts a week. At night he could feel the souls of all the dead hogs pressing on his chest, pressing down on his ribcage like something real.”

The Mercury caught up with Rosson about plagues, magical realism, Lakota literature, composing “garbage-ass” first drafts, and trying to write in a pandemic with toddlers running around the house. Our conversation has been edited for brevity.

MERCURY: Hi Keith! What are you reading these days?

ROSSON: Hey! Right now I’m tackling David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s Winter Counts, a crime novel written by a Sicangu Lakota guy that primarily takes place on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, and Kevin Barry’s recent story collection, That Old Country Music. Nice mix of genre and literary stuff.

You recently taught a course on magical realism. How’d that go? Do you consider these stories to be magical realism?

It’s always fun, and the folks taking the classes always bring something new and unforeseen to the table. As far as [my new collection] Folk Songs goes, it’s across the board genre-wise. Magical realism, crime, literary, speculative, all of it. But I’m hoping the tone and style and overarching themes kind of tie everything together into something cohesive and moving. (And, you know, fun to read.)

Speaking of Folk Songs, in “The Lesser Horsemen” (perhaps the collection’s flagship story), you posit Pestilence as the least relevant of the four horsemen. How did it feel having this story come out amidst the first pandemic in centuries, marking Pestilence’s comeback?

It’s definitely the story that gets talked about the most. I wrote it six years ago, and had no clue about what the future would hold, personally, globally or otherwise. I do think it’s a pretty fascinating example of readers finding connections to your work where they might not always be overtly intentional. I obviously didn’t write it with COVID in mind, but I can certainly see correlations now. Just one of the cool things about stories, and literature in general.

You have a way with clever turns of phrase doubling as vivid, unexpected descriptors. In “Dunsmuir,” for example, you describe a backwoods, girlfriend-murdering meth-head as “feral, a snake hit with a shovel but not quite dead.” Do you spend a lot of time crafting these, carrying around a dictionary like the narrator in “Coyote,” or do they just appear to you?

I am a firm believer in writing a garbage-ass first draft. A lot of newer writers insist that the first five or ten pages of something has to be perfect before they can move forward, and they’ll spend eternity working on that first section, never finishing anything. I’m way more interested in writing a terrible first draft and palpating that mofo into something workable after the fact... I probably do six or seven complete drafts of a story before I feel like it’s done, and the first draft is a mess, always.

Your writing explores themes of addiction, self-loathing, powerlessness, regret, and brutality. What motivates you to write gritty stories?

For one, I like to read gritty stuff. It interests me as a reader. And as a writer, I want to write about those big, overarching ideas you just mentioned—as well as notions of family, indebtedness, faith, redemption—and the vehicles to tackle those ideas are often a bunch of gritty, hard luck characters. I admire writers who can pen a moving story that addresses those concerns while setting it at, like, a tennis match or a family barbecue or something supposedly pedestrian. But I just don’t write like that, you know? I need the ghosts and the monsters and the alcoholics and rageful fathers and stuff.

You regularly bring the reader around to empathy in the end. What’s your take on the role of humor, irony and snark in literature, versus sincerity and compassion? Is it important for characters seeking redemption to find it?

Yes, absolutely. Redemption is possible and meaningful and attainable. It’s one of my key points as a writer, and a strident belief as a person. I also think that writers can toe that line between hilarity and compassion. But probably not in the first draft.

Are you working on another novel? What’s the writing process been like under pandemic conditions?

I have a couple projects that I’m tapping away at, but one of the results of a year-plus of pandemic-living with toddlers is a distinct and profound lack of focus. Like, the amount of sustained concentration needed to write a novel, at least for me, just isn’t there right now. So there’s no big project that’s taking precedence. [I’m] definitely enjoying writing short stories and sending them out; after four books in five years, it’s nice to just take things a little slow and piecemeal.

Keith Rosson is the author of the novels Road Seven, Smoke City, and The Mercy of the Tide. He also started the zine AVOW in 1995. His latest book, Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons, was published earlier this year by Meerkat Press. You can buy it at Powell’s.

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Fabrizio Grassi / EyeEm / Getty images

• The Ken Kesey Award for Fiction goes to The Great Offshore Grounds by Portland-based author Vanessa Veselka. The novel takes a classic cross-country road trip tale and turns it on its head, weaving in mythologies, complicated sibling dynamics, and a detour into the ocean. Judge Hilary Leichter writes that she was "riveted by every line, the humor of being alive, the pathos of this deeply American narrative, and the energy of the prose" while reading.

• Hood River's Sierra Crane Murdoch picked up the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction for her book Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country. Yellow Bird tells the story of a white oil worker who goes missing in North Dakota, and about the Native woman who searches for the truth about his disappearance. Judge Ingrid Rojas Contreras writes that the work "balances the true crime elements with a searing family saga, a character and a community seeking different redemptions."

• The Frances Fuller Victor Award for General Nonfiction goes to Portland-based Nicholas Buccola, for his book The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America. The book looks at the historic 1965 debate between the revolutionary Baldwin and the conservative Buckley, and expands outward to explore race and power in the United States. "Buccola’s incisive and critical commentary enlivens these men and their ideas, as well as the implications of their positions, demonstrating all the ways this debate remains relevant still," writes judge Adam Sowards.

• Anna Elkins of Rogue River won the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry for Hope of Stones, an imagined conversation between herself, a sixteenth-century Spanish nun, and an eighteenth-century French architect. Judge Tyree Daye calls Hope of Stones "an excellent example of time travel in a book."

• The Angus Bowmer Award for Drama goes to You Cannot Undo This Action, a play from Conor Eifler of Portland. The play concerns teenagers and social media—material fraught for cliches, but as OBA judge Michelle Carter writes, "The teenagers of You Cannot Undo This Action are smart, hilarious, brave, fearful, wise, naive, and full of longing... Technology gives these characters’ personalities full expression."

• For the Leslie Bradshaw Award for Young Adult Literature, Eugene's Kathryn Ormsbee picked up the prize for The Sullivan Sisters, in which three estranged sisters are forced back together during a road trip to the Oregon coast. "At its center it’s a gripping mystery," writes judge Cynthia Hand, "but It’s also a story about sisterhood and about learning how to truly support your family through thick and thin."

• And finally, we've got the Eloise Jarvis McGraw Award for Children's Literature. This one goes to Portland's Jenn Reese for A Game of Fox and Squirrels, a middle-grade book about a girl's recovery from a traumatic past, told through animal-based metaphors. Judge Eliot Schrefer writes that the book "never veers into preciousness or cleverness; instead it’s the perfect form to shed new light on the wonder and terror that live next-door in the mind of a child."

Want to read some of these winning titles? You can find them all at Broadway Books. You can also check for a copy from Powell's or another indie bookstore, or check one out from the Multnomah County Library.

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Love Is a Revolution Bloomsbury Press

As a teenager, I was constantly reading books that were not age appropriate, often dealing with adult topics like erotica, domestic violence, and HIV/AIDS. While I needed this very relatable and hopeful novel 15 years ago, I have to admit that reading Love Is A Revolution during the pandemic has provided a rare form of escapism—one in which COVID-19 could not be accurately worked into its storyline, and Black pain was not a main focal point.

Love Is A Revolution's narrative takes place over the course of a summer in New York precluding the high school senior year of 17-year-old protagonist Nala and her cousin-sister-friend of the same age, Imani. Since Nala’s own mother isn’t great at “mom stuff,” Nala lives with her cousin Imani who looks just like her (hence why she’s a cousin-sister-friend), and her loving aunt and uncle.

Nala’s main goals for the summer are to hang out and watch movies with Imani and her best friend Sadie, find a new hairstyle, and of course, find love. And while the first two of those seem easy enough to accomplish, Nala finds that in her hell-bent search for love, her quest to find herself and who she wants to be in this world is pushed to the wayside.

Also at play in Nala’s (and our) world are the ubiquitous “woke olympics,” represented accurately every time Nala feels judged by Imani’s friends who volunteer at a local youth non-profit called Inspire Harlem. At the beginning of the book, the cousins celebrate Imani’s birthday by attending a talent show fundraiser, where Nala begins to fall for Tye Brown, the show’s emcee. Nala ultimately decides to lie and say she’s a vegetarian who works at her grandmother’s retirement home in order to impress environmentalist Tye, an activist and avid Inspire Harlem volunteer. Indeed, Tye is worth impressing. In this book, it’s not weird at all for the hot guy in high demand to be into Nala’s plus size figure and fun demeanor, so when she lies about her principles and fibs about a job, he’s drawn in even more.

Watson does a good job illustrating our modern world of smartphones and social media, and it doesn’t feel strange at all to have them live on these pages. It’s obviously realistic to have these items but I was happy that while reading, I didn’t feel like the characters were interacting too much with their devices (like in real life). There’s no lengthy text message dialogues or emails included here. Instead, Watson simply focuses on Nala’s perspective: all the messages she types out before deciding against them and then sending something more measured.

But the deeper narrative is the familial one: figuring out the source of tension between Nala and Imani… why does Nala feel they’re not as close as they once were? I related to Imani in this story a lot because I too have lived with a couple cousin-sister-friends. My high school best friend Maya (whose name I’ve changed for this article) lived with my mom, brother and I for a few years in high school because Maya’s mom wasn’t meeting her needs. While I was glad she lived with us, it also felt weird to be sharing my final years of adolescence living with only my tight-knit family unit.

Some of my favorite chapters in Love Is A Revolution's were the most mundane and familiar-seeming moments that turn into juicy conversations. These include a chapter when Sadie, Nala and Imani go down to the beauty supply store to shop for packs of synthetic hair for the new braids Sadie installs in Nala’s hair; the roller skating date with Tye that turns into a non-date; and the dialogue that’s had around the puzzle table and whenever Nala regularly visits her grandmother in the retirement home.

Love Is a Revolution ends up being about finding, accepting and loving yourself as you are, and how vital it is to nurture important familial and friendship bonds—even while trying to save the rest of the world.

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Simon & Schuster

Carroll, a Black woman who was adopted by an all-white family as a child, remembers the experience vividly in her new memoir Surviving the White Gaze, which recounts her time as a child and young adult being the only Black person in mostly white spaces.

The first Black person Carroll remembers seeing in real life—rather than on her family’s black-and-white TV set—was her ballet teacher, Mrs. Rowland. When Carroll first meets Mrs. Rowland, she can hardly believe she’s real and not a TV character.

“I studied with Mrs. Rowland for five years, and often in her company, I felt small pangs of fragile awareness regarding who I might be, what my skin color might mean,” Carroll writes. “There were days when I wanted to be, or believed I was, Black just like Mrs. Rowland, but it also seemed as though I would have to give something up in order for that to remain true. Cocooned within a whiteness where my brown skin was mocha-colored, I spoke with an inflection similar to that of my white brother and sister, and my adult guardians were welcomed and centered wherever we went. I was being ushered through my life via the powerful passport of white privilege.”

This is the core theme of Surviving the White Gaze: As Carroll grows up, her fraught relationship with whiteness is interrupted through a series of elucidating encounters with Blackness—something she skirts around the edges of at first, before seeking it out as she matures. Further complicating matters is her conditional relationship with her white birth mother, who enters her life at 11 years old and attempts to control Carroll’s identity, insisting she isn’t really Black.

Carroll’s life story makes for an engrossing memoir, with intimate insights into life as an adoptee and a person who is constantly otherized on every page. As Carroll reaches young adulthood and finally emerges herself in her racial identity—reveling in it rather than running from it—the reader is invested enough to share her sense of triumph. The same is true when she learns how to interact with her birth and adopted parents on her own terms.

But that isn’t to say the book is centered around a few “aha!” moments. Rather, it hews closer to how real life unfolds, gradually charting Carrolls’ growth over years’ and chapters’ worth of remembrances.

In college, Carroll discovers Black women writers like Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker. “Their words and worlds, and the structure and grace across every page, felt biblical and made my insides churn and my mind explode, she writes. “It was guzzling love, fast and warm and sweet in my heart.”

Finding inspiration from these heroines, Carroll goes on to write and publish several of her own books, and writes for magazines like Elle and Mother Jones. In Surviving the White Gaze, she recounts an interview with writer and poet Ntozake Shange, author of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enough.

“I write for young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive,” Carroll remembers Shange telling her. It isn’t a stretch to say Carroll has done the same with this memoir, particularly for people who, like her, don’t grow up seeing their own experiences reflected back to them.

Rebecca Carroll will discuss Surviving the White Gaze with Desus Nice of Desus & Mero in a free virtual event hosted by Powell’s Books this Thursday (Feb. 11) at 5 pm. You can register in advance here, and buy the book here.

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Whew, that certainly was a lot of words to say that you should check out these books about relationships, death, and the ineffable mysteries of life.

Absolutely wonderful. I adore this story of a witch and a werewolf on an awkward date. It’s a very sweet modern love story with social media and monsters in equal measure, with adorable dialogue and art by Ashely Robin Franklin. (Also, why is this the first time I’ve ever seen a story with a lesbian werewolf? How is that not more of a thing???) Suzy and Jade are delightful characters, and it’s an absolute joy to see them discover — along with the reader — how much fun it is when they spend time with each other, whether going to a snooty restaurant or enjoying burritos by a monster-inhabited lake. The story is chipper and upbeat, and does a great job of capturing the feeling of a successful first date: Starting with the uncomfortable getting-to-know-you moments when your quirks sheepishly emerge; moving on to the elated discovery that your quirks are complimentary; and ending with the feeling of cozy companionship when it becomes clear somehow, against all odds in this fractured world, you have found a member of your clan.

If you’ve been enjoying WandaVision so far (here’s my discussion with Brett White of The Decider about all the things that make it our favorite show right now) you might want to check out Scarlet Witch: The Complete Collection, which brings together a series of stories about Wanda fixing broken witchcraft from various mythologies. There’s more superhero fun to be had in Flash Facts, a delightful science book for young people with a nice introduction by Dr. Mayim Bialik. My last recommendation is for two slim issue-ones that present intriguing mysteries: Luna introduces us to a young woman caught up in the thrill of what seems to be a cult, and Maniac of New York is a decidedly serious slasher by Daily Show and MST3K writer Elliott Kalan.

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Of those, I’m most captivated by Maybe Someday, an anthology about futures where everything turns out okay after everything goes to shit. After spending this weekend literally partying in the streets, I’m feeling a twinge of pessimism again that Trump won’t leave; that Biden’s cabinet will be too conservative; and that the vaccine won’t work. I’ve been trained to anticipate the worst over the last few years, so it’s a pleasant relief to read a book that suggests that there will be good times mixed in with the bad.

Once & FutureBOOM! Studios

TitanOni Press

Maybe SomedayA Wave Blue World

Black AFBlack Mask Studios

There are also some Issues Twos this week to followup on previously-reviewed titles: Killjoys #2 is now out, featuring more mayhem from My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way. And there’s a second issue of Getting it Together, a lovely coming-of-adult story about grownups learning how to be grownups. Also new this week is the third volume of Black AF, in which humans develop superpowers—but only Black humans. I haven’t covered the previous two volumes, since they were first published a few years ago, but now that there’s a new collection it’s a fine time to dive on in.

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Complete Works, A Midsummer Night's DreamForced Entertainment, Courtesy of Portland Insitute for Contemporary Art

If you didn’t know that Portland’s annual Time Based Arts Festival (TBA) is STILL ON, STILL HAPPENING, and STARTING THIS WEEKEND, don’t stress. The organization that puts it on—the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA)—didn’t know if it would be possible either, until this past June.

“We certainly didn’t know at the beginning of the pandemic,” Artistic Director and Curator of Public Engagement Roya Amirsoleymani said, via phone interview. “We didn’t know how [COVID-19] would impact the economy or the completely questionable status of nonprofits and arts organizations nationally. We didn't know what the future public health restrictions would be.”

But thanks to Beyond Now, a virtual fundraiser that PICA held in May, the nonprofit arts organization raised enough funds to throw this year's festival. They have what Amirsoleymani estimates to be "a quarter or even a fifth" of their usual budget and they paced the performances out over three weeks instead of one and a half. But it's happening.

TBA: 20 will be mostly online, but will include a number of events presented outdoors or in large enough spaces that audiences can safely distance. So if you’re a fan of challenging, prescient performance art or just interested in checking out a comic re-telling of a Shakespearean play cast with kitchen utensils, here are a few things to look for at this year’s festival.

Jaamil Olawale KosokoIMMA Asher, Courtesy of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art

He embraced the potential to view American Chameleon through multiple approaches and worked intentionally to center his installments around Monday, September 21st—the International Day of Peace. On that day, another group of TBA artists Mobile Projection Unit will assist him by projecting American Chameleon into a grand outdoor location. Like all the TBA:20 in person events, the location won't be revealed until the day before.

Mobile Projection Unit (MPU) may already be familiar to those who've attended protests or community events where MPU co-founders Sarah Turner and Fernanda D’Agostino displayed their video artworks onto highway underpasses or on the side of buildings. Another point of reference could be D’Agostino's jaw-dropping contribution to this map is not a territory, which swathed the museum’s foyer in massive, interwoven projections of dancers in flaming forests.

Mobile Projection Unit Kristan Kennedy, Courtesy of Portland Insitute for Contemporary Art

In addition to providing projection assistance to Kosoko, MPU will also project a compilation of short video works—dubbed "samples of recent American history"—which were curated by Jibade-Khalil Huffman and titled IN LIEU OF AN OCEAN (SEND FLOWERS) on a large scale in an outdoor setting, next Monday September 28th. This noted helpfulness and desire to collaborate with other artists is something Amirsoleymani describes as part of MPU's artistic process.

"[MPU] supports other artists in taking advantage of the technologies they employ to make the whole sonic and visual experience of these place-based projects come to life. Nothing surprised me about their recent involvement with the uprisings and community events because they really understand that connection between activism and art. Many artists in Portland also identify as activists and vice versa. Or they see no difference, no distinction, especially now."

IN LIEU OF AN OCEAN (SEND FLOWERS) sits like a centerpiece within the greater banquet of TBA:20 and like Kosoo's American Chameleon, it too can be viewed a number of different ways. If you don't want to wait until the 28th, the installation can be viewed Thurs-Sun in PICA's 3,000-square-foot warehouse between the hours of 12-6 pm.

Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr.Margaret Jacobsen, Courtesy of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art

It's worth noting that all the installations at this year's TBA:20 are free, with the exception of The Who Cares Clock (an essay you can request through the mail by sending in two forever stamps or $1.10 in postage) and the West Coast premiere of Charles Mudede's latest feature film Thin Skin (sliding-scale $5-15). Mudede directed and co-wrote Thin Skin with Ahamefule J. Oluo and Lindy West, basing it on Oluo's life and his award-winning stand-up memoir musical Now I'm Fine. (Conflict of interest note: Mudede is a longtime staff writer and critic for The Stranger, the Mercury's sister paper, and West is a former Stranger writer.)

Being that they are a nonprofit, PICA suggests donations from audience members attending this year's fest, but they're passing on half that pot to social justice and racial equity organizations like Don’t Shoot PDX, Pueblo Unido, and the MRG Foundation’s Since Time Immemorial Fund. At multiple points throughout our conversation Amirsoleymani described PICA as a conduit through which money flows to artists. "Fundamentally. Paying artists. It's what we do," she said. Even as Beyond Now was a fundraiser for PICA, they paid their artists. Now, this festival presents yet another opportunity for PICA to distribute funds to struggling artists on a local, national, and international scale. But that's not the only reason you should go to TBA:20. You should go because TBA is awesome.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that I tell time by TBA, I can count the years. Every year I have some transformative experience in the care of PICA's extraordinary curation. So holding the festival this year feels especially important because TBA is a place where we mark time and right now is a time none of us will likely ever forget.

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This article is part of the Mercury's 2020 all-digital Queer Week coverage.

Author Audre LordeSpellman College archives

Real Life (2020) — Brandon Taylor
This new novel follows the story oa f Black queer man who leaves Alabama to attend college in the Midwest, where he tangles with homophobia, racism, insecurity, and the pursuit of self-preservation.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) — Audre Lorde
A peek into Lorde’s experience as a queer, working class Black woman living in New York City during the 1950s—all told in Lorde’s lush, poetic writing style.

No Ashes in the Fire (2018) — Darnell Moore
An honest, vulnerable memoir describing Moore’s life as gay Black boy coming of age in Camden, New Jersey during the crosshairs of the AIDS epidemic and the War on Drugs.

Redefining Realness (2014) — Janet Mock
While some criticize Mock’s attachment to hetronormative norms in her memoir, her book is groundbreaking in its ability to talk candidly about navigating the world as a transgender woman of color. A good read for folks who need a little hand-holding in understanding what it means to be trans.

Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (2008) — E. Patrick Johnson
This non-fiction book is made up of stories collected from more than sixty Black gay men who were born, raised, and live in the South. The collection twists stereotypes and adds nuance to a population that rarely is handed the mic.

Black Girl Dangerous: On Race, Queerness, Class and Gender (2014) — Mia McKenzie
This non-fiction collection of personal essays about being a queer Black woman is the essential guide to understanding intersectionality (and it’s funny, too!).

Wow, No Thank You (2020) — Samantha Irby
Irby’s latest collection of essays artfully use self-deprecation and wiping-tears-from-your-eyes humor to tell deeper stories about privilege, gender, and existing in uncomfortable spaces.

Black Panther: World of Wakanda (series) (2016) — Roxanne Gay (et al)
This comic series, co-authored by Gay and Ta-Nehisi Coates tells the story of the badass queer Black women who work as Black Pather’s bodygaurds. ENOUGH SAID.

Parable of the Sower (2000) — Octavia Butler
This science fiction novel set in a dystopian world drowning in social, economical, and environmental crises is just as relevant—maybe more—than it was when it was published 20 years ago. Imagine The Road, but with a teenage heroine, uncomfortably relatable scenes of social collapse, and longer sentences.

American Dreams (poetry collection) (1996) — Sapphire
Before writing the novel that became the film Precious, Sapphire poured pain, love, and rage into these beautifully brutal poems on racism, sexual trauma, and police brutality.

Lot (2019)— Bryan Washington
This conversational collection of short stories discets gender, sexuality, class, and race through the eyes of a Black Latinx boy coming of age in Houston, in the years surrounding Hurricane Harvey.

The Salt Roads (2003) — Nalo Hopkinson
Hopkinson weaves the story of a Haitian slave, an Egyptian sex worker, a Parisian dancer and several other women together in a whirlwind novel spanning time and seeped in magical realism.

Felix Every After (YA novel) (2020) — Kacen Callender
This Young Adult novel follows Felix, a Black, queer, and transgender teen, as he pines for romance and self-acceptance. One of many new, spectacular YA novels with a trans teen protagonist.

How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir (2019) — Saeed Jones
Jones melts together poetry and prose in this memoir, which documents his tumultuous, tender adolescence as a Black gay boy growing up in Texas.

Notes of a Native Son (1955) — James Baldwin
Baldwin’s first collection of non-fiction essays focus on civil rights, art, and racial divides in Harlem and abroad. An accessible, powerful point of entry for Baldwin newbies.

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Multnomah County Library

The rollout for this new service will start with just four library branches—Central, Gresham, Midland, and North Portland—before expanding out to other locations through the month. Also, on June 8, all Multnomah County Library branches will open up their book drops for the return of borrowed materials. All items will be quarantined for 72 hours.

Patrons will have to call and make an appointment and then stop by their chosen branch to pick them up. After giving their name to library staff, they will be asked to give the employee distance until the books are brought out and left for them on the pickup table. Full instructions on how to use the pickup system can be found here.

Sidewalk pickup for books will expand to eight other Multnomah County branches (Belmont, Capitol Hill, Gregory Heights, Holgate, Hollywood, Kenton, Rockwood, and St. Johns) starting on June 15, with more locations joining in a week later.

While the physical branches for the libraries won't be open during this time, Library Director Vailey Oehlke hopes they'll be able to open up some branches for time-limited computer service for patrons to use for job applications, filing for unemployment, and other benefit application assistance. That, however, won't be possible until Multnomah County enters Phase 1 of the state's reopening plan. As our Alex Zielinski reported, that could happen as soon as June 12.

“We are grateful and excited to begin the process of resuming some physical library services," Oehlke said in the news release. "Having libraries closed due to COVID-19 has been wrenching for our community and it requires that we fundamentally rethink the work we do, guided by a set of priorities that sharpens our focus on community recovery."

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The Story of Soaps
What better way to celebrate staying home on a Monday afternoon than by digging into The Story of Soaps (Now streaming, Hulu). Soaps are long past due for a star-studded retrospective like this, especially since they were the first mainstreamed examples of "shared universes" and "binge watching," and "time shifting" (I can't be the only kid whose mom taught herself how to program a VCR to maintain a library of All My Children stories.) A ton of the home entertainment innovations we all take for granted here in 2020 were invented by the soaps, and a panel of experts including Carol Burnett, John Stamos, Susan Lucci, Bryan Cranston, Agnes Nixon, Erika Slezak, and Alec Baldwin will walk viewers through the soaps' foamy, fantastic history. But be warned: With about a half hour to go, it... sorta becomes an informercial for reality shows? As if Real Housewives, as fun as it might be to watch, could ever, EVER compete with Erica Kane or Viki Lord.

Fire up the Grill!
There's a lot of unnecessary mystique surrounding the grill, and were this a normal Memorial Day there'd probably be a couple fights already over who gets to make fire and put food on said fire for eating later. But don't let any grunting neanderthal friends of yours intimidate you away from that Weber: Grilling really isn't that hard, and to prove it, YouTube cooking celebrity Anthony Rea of the Binging with Babish channel has a short 'n' sweet 10-minute video that can catch you up on the basics of grilling, basics that most chest-thumping grill captains only pretend to know.

Wolfenstein: The New Order
Doom: Eternal came out earlier this year and continued Bethesda's winning streak of story-driven, ultra-violent-yet-oddly-charming single-player first-person-shooters (whew that's a lotta hyphens). But there's an alternate history where Doom doesn't get successfully revived, because on that timeline, Wolfenstein: The New Order isn't a fast, fun, and satisfying success of gameplay and storytelling that takes gaming by storm in 2014. Luckily, we live in this timeline, where Wolfenstein's revival winningly used gonzo sci-fi settings and outlandish what-if scenarios (i.e. what if Nazis won WWII and established a goddamn MOONBASE guarded by ROBOT DOGS) to tell an honest-to-god affecting story of resistance against fascism in all its forms. If you've never played it, it's only $9.99 on PS4 right now, and you could do worse than to spend a cozy Memorial Day utterly destroying a bunch of space Nazis. Hey, speaking of which...
Star Wars
May 25, 1977 was the day a bearded nerd named George Lucas released Star Wars—a low-budget mashup of Akira Kurosawa movies and Flash Gordon serials—to less than 40 theaters. The movie starred a soap actor named Mark Hamill as the improbably named Luke Skywalker, a dorky hick from the boondocks who meets up with a maddeningly smug mystic (Alec Guinness) that drafts him to rescue a pissed-off princess (Carrie Fisher) with the help of an arrogant dipshit Uber driver (Harrison Ford) and his overgrown dog (Peter Mayhew). They all end up overthrowing a fascist regime of space Nazis along the way. It ended up being pretty, pretty popular. It's available to stream on Disney+, if you want to watch it. There's a beeping trash can that talks mad shit the whole movie, too. He's the best.

World War Z
DID YOU KNOW: The guy who played Luke Skywalker is also a very good voice actor? He was the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series, for example. That means he was the best version of the Joker ever. And yet: It can be argued that's not even his best voice acting performance! Because he also played gunner Todd Wainio, veteran of the Battle of Yonkers, in the audiobook of Max Brooks'World War Z (available at MultCo Library w/ Card; on Audible, $28 to buy, free trial here) and Hamill's performance is good enough to almost make you forget he didn't actually survive a zombie apocalypse. Brooks' book was made into an okay blockbuster movie, but there is likely no version of World War Z that ever tops the audiobook, which along with Hamill features a cast that includes F. Murray Abraham, Alan Alda, Rob and Carl Reiner, Henry Rollins, Nathan Fillion, John Turturro, David Ogden Stiers, and Alfred Molina among others.<

Little Fires Everywhere
Hulu's adaptation of Celeste Ng's best-selling book has been knocked for essentially removing all nuance from Ng's novel, and it's hard to disagree that the story is a lot louder than it was on the page; This show doesn't feel like the book... but the sour, entitled, pretty-on-the-outside-but-mean-as-fuck-for-no-good-reason vibe it absolutely nails from its first 15 minutes on? That's some genuinely authentic '90s nastiness; the kind of sunshine-covered bitterness these characters would snidely razz as they watched their umpteenth hour of Ricki Lake from the comfort of their couch. The miniseries is now available in full on Hulu, and the approach taken with the source material (an approach Ng herself applauded, probably best realized dramatically by executive producer and director Lynn Shelton) makes a lot more sense when the reworked story is taken as a whole.

Cirque du Soleil: Kurios
In 2017, Cirque du Soleil brought their big-top extravagance to Portland to transforms the Moda Center into the curio cabinet of an old-timey inventor, bending reality, time, and space into a variety of stages and platforms by which this troupe of amazingly flexible performers do their mind-and-body-bending work. If you missed that show, head to YouTube and get yourself yourself a (third) eyeful of this steampunk wonder.

Young M.A.
Young M.A—born Katorah Marrero—is unique among her peers. While her low voice, stud swagger, and off-the-charts machismo may give the impression she uses alternate pronouns, the artist has made it clear she’s perfectly at home in her assigned female gender. She named her 2017 EP Herstory, after all, and followed that up with the critically acclaimed Herstory in the Making, and just this weekend released her latest, Red Flu. While Young M.A’s sexuality is definitely part of her content, it’s not a gimmick she’s leaning on. She didn’t set out on some heroic mission to pave the way for other queer rappers. She simply came into the game as the real her—for better or for worse. Now M.A is unintentionally changing the narrative for what is and isn’t acceptable in rap, just by being authentically, unapologetically herself. JENNI MOORE

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Powell's BooksK marie

As the renowned bookseller announced on its website, you can now choose to stop by the downtown shop and snag your online order from a table outside the shop's entrance on 11th and Couch.

These contactless orders don't just apply to the stock on hand at the Burnside shop either. Powell's will ship over any books that might be in their other store locations or at their partner warehouses. It just might take a little longer to get your books that way.

While Powell's has been doing yeoman's work to ship a flood of online orders, they're far from the first Portland bookshop to offer in-person pickup. Nearly all the independent bookstores in the Portland metro area have been offering curbside pickup for months now. Still, considering the breadth of reading material that Powell's continues to offer, this new option is a welcome spot of positive news on this grey Portland morn.

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The Talisman
Looking for a good book to read while you're enjoying that Silent Reading ambiance? Why not go big, go pop, go KING: Stephen King, that is, one of the most well-read human beings on Earth, and also one of the most well-watched since practically everything he's ever imagined has been turned into a movie or a TV show. One of the few he's written that hasn't? His fantasy epic The Talisman, co-written with Peter Straub (ebook available at MultCo Library w/ card, physical copies avail at Powell's, $19.99). The story has almost been adapted by Steven Spielberg three or four times by now, but until that happens, the universe those two masters of horror spin out in the pages of The Talisman can only be visited in your mind, and it's a pretty damned wondrous (and scary) place to go.

The Kingcast
Speaking of those multitudes of adapted King titles: There's a podcast for that now! For a ton of people, Stephen King is more like a name-brand than an author, and their first exposure to him has been via film or tv, not his plain-spoken prose. The quality of those adaptations varies a little more wildly than the quality of the source material, and Birth.Movies.Death EIC Scott Wampler has teamed up with film critic Eric Vespe to provide a podcast guide to the best and worst of King's catalog. The Kingcast is opening strong with special guest Kumail Nanjiani helping them take a look at The Running Man, a movie that doesn't have much to do with the short story it sprang from, but does feature Arnold Schwarzenegger vs. Richard Dawson as directed by one half of Starsky & Hutch.

The Kingcast
Speaking of those multitudes of adapted King titles: There's a podcast for that now! For a ton of people, Stephen King is more like a name-brand than an author, and their first exposure to him has been via film or tv, not his plain-spoken prose. The quality of those adaptations varies a little more wildly than the quality of the source material, and Birth.Movies.Death EIC Scott Wampler has teamed up with film critic Eric Vespe to provide a podcast guide to the best and worst of King's catalog. The Kingcast is opening strong with special guest Kumail Nanjiani helping them take a look at The Running Man, a movie that doesn't have much to do with the short story it sprang from, but does feature Arnold Schwarzenegger vs. Richard Dawson as directed by one half of Starsky & Hutch.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (now streaming, Netflix) is a sweet, sad movie that hinges on the topic of mental illness in young men, and sets his mental health issues amid the fashion, mixtapes, and Rocky Horror Picture Show-screenings of teenagers dabbling in the counterculture in the late-'90s; the whole thing is one hell of a nostalgia trip. (Cracker is on the soundtrack, for chrissakes.) It's a great little movie, one that stands right next to Dazed and Confused for perfectly capturing an accurate decade-in-a-bottle snapshot of suburban American teenagers. ALISON HALLETT

Ben Platt: Live from Radio City Music Hall
On the subject of of acclaimed portrayals of teen anxiety: Ben Platt achieved bonafide Broadway stardom in Dear Evan Hansen, and followed that up by joining Ryan Murphy's gleefully dysfunctional TV family, anchoring Netflix's satire The Politician. Now he's leveraging that Netflix power to get his own hourlong special on the platform, called Ben Platt: Live from Radio City Music Hall. He's got a band, he's got some personal songs to sing, some personal stories to share, and one amazing floral-pattern shirt to sweat through all night long.

Set My Heart on Fire Immediately
Perfume Genius is the project of singer/songwriter Mike Hadreas, whose albums tend to revolve around themes of sexuality, addiction, chronic illness, abuse, and homophobia. He sings about being gay and the frustration of being punished for something he can’t control, but he greets pain with sardonic wit, imagining his own transcendence in grand, sweeping protest music. This is reflected in fluid movements between genres, from glam rock to the magic of Angelo Badalamenti’s piano ballads to stringed chamber folk to TLC-inspired R&B grooves to volcanic pop anthems. They’re all united by Hadreas’ androgynous voice—he’s always commanding the center, through explosive moments of catharsis and lighter-treading hymns. CIARA DOLAN

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The GreatOllie Upton/Hulu

For those who fear that The Great—Hulu's original series about empress of Russia, Catherine the Great—is a stuffy, historical bore-fest that will have you clawing your eyes out... well, this definitely ain't that. Elle Fanning stars as Catherine in this historically inaccurate comedy about a forward thinking and wildly optimistic French girl who's sent to marry Emperor Peter III of Russia (a fantastic Nicholas Hoult) and finds her world turned upside down—and then turns the world rightside up in response. Written by The Favourite screenwriter Tony McNamara, you can expect off-kilter, smart, anachronistic humor paired with deeply likable (and unlikable) characters.

Fanning is truly "great" as Catherine, whose feminist awakening is fueled by her hubby's churlish/whoring/insane behavior, inspiring the coup that eventually leads to her ruling Russia for a good portion of the 18th century. But pay close attention to the razor-sharp performance from Phoebe Fox, Catherine's handmaiden/fallen aristocrat: Her understated sly portrayal is simultaneously heartbreaking, funny, and cunning, making her one of my fave characters in the series. In short, The Great provides top notch performances, gorgeous costumes, and a whip-smart script filled with sex, violence, poop talk, and just a smidge of education—if that's okay with you.—Wm. Steven Humphrey

Both of these books have a straightforward, almost pedestrian quality at first blush—they’re a suburban comedy of manners and a tale of young adult love, respectively. But the more I read each of them, the more pleasantly enveloped I became in their settings and characters and syntax. I wanted to race to finish each of them, a feeling that becomes rarer the older and busier I get.

Quarantine offers the ideal parameters for getting lost in a bestselling novel—there’s not too much going on in your real life, you have hours to spend indoors, and you might not have the bandwidth for a denser title. Both Little Fires Everywhere and Normal People are fine options to consider when plotting your next literary escape.—Blair Stenvick

The Mary Tyler Moore ShowHulu

To reference a recently wrapped-up sports documentary: The Mary Tyler Moore Show is basically the sitcom equivalent of Phil Jackson getting to coach Michael Jordan. Does that make this show the Chicago Bulls of sitcom history? Is there a version of this blurb that morphs into a 3,000 word thinkpiece extending the analogy to how Cheers = the Boston Celtics and The Honeymooners = the New York Knicks? Thankfully, you'll never have to read that (it's probably already a three-hour Bill Simmons podcast anyway), but rediscovering The Mary Tyler Moore Show is an affirmation of just how influential this show was, and how ahead of their time Mary and James were—not just in political terms, but also as a constantly impressive example of how thoughtful, emotional, and satisfying mainstream prime-time comedy could be.—Bobby Roberts

The X-FilesFOX

Another accidentally relatable watch: 2018’s Annihilation, a horror/sci-fi flick featuring Natalie Portman as a slightly self-destructive biologist investigating a mysterious military mission that left her soldier husband (played by a “meh” Oscar Isaac) fatally ill. The film (by Ex Machina director Alex Garland) is hauntingly beautiful and dark, weaving together psychedelic alien shenanigans and thought-provoking scientific theories to create a truly unique premise. I loved following Portman and her all-woman cadre of equally self-destructive scientists (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, and Tuva Novotny) through an eerily beautiful swamp to uncover its alien architect.—Alex Zielinski

Fat GirlCriterion

Working my way from #1,000 to #1 and skipping over the movies I’ve already seen, I have been treated to a wondrous array of cinematic styles and eras. My favorites so far include Catherine Breillat’s absolutely brutal feminist allegory Fat Girl, Akira Kurosawa’s beautiful humanist drama Red Beard, John Waters’ appropriately outlandish Female Trouble, and Kim Ki-Duk’s poignant Buddhist exploration Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring. It all adds up to a film history class that I can manage at my own pace and is blessedly free of homework. —Robert Ham

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Harry Potter Reads Harry Potter to You
Now this is comfy-couch quarantine content done right: Spotify, the once spunky music-streaming upstart that is now a media juggernaut and podcast empire all-in-one, is using its power for good with Harry Potter at Home, a star-studded read-along of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Those stars include Harry himself, Daniel Radcliffe, as well as Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), Hermione Granger (Noma Dumezweni), David Beckham (Mr. Sporty Spice), Dakota Fanning (what the hell, that's a Twilight star!) and many more, with special guests sure to pop up before the last chapter of Harry's first Hogwarts adventure is done.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show
Earlier this week we talked about the impact on television made by writer/producers Garry Marshall and Norman Lear, but they weren't at all the only giants in the '70s making consistently groundbreaking TV. The Mary Tyler Moore Show (Now streaming, Hulu) premiered in 1970 with a pilot script from writer/producer James L. Brooks, whose name you might recognize from other successes such as Taxi and an animated program called The Simpsons. Of course, Brooks had a headstart like almost nobody else in television, because his star was one of the best and most beloved actors the medium ever saw. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was the sitcom equivalent of Phil Jackson getting to coach Michael Jordan. And while classic TV makes for great binge-watching in ways both completely intentional (but often very much not), The Mary Tyler Moore Show is a great lockdown go-to because Mary's work, Brooks' writing, and the chops of the ensemble cast that filled in around her (Ed Asner! Ted Knight! Betty White!) wasn't just top-notch for the time, it's still ahead of the game even now.

Pickathon Presents: Built to Spill
Hopefully you've been checking in daily with Pickathon's response to COVID-19 trying to squash everyone's outdoor festival fun, and enjoying the gems from their vault on a regular basis. Today's gem (premiering at 1 pm on YouTube) is one of those uncut kind—a 2018 performance from the Woods stage by Northwest indie-rock heroes Built to Spill. Are they the best thing to ever come out of Boise, ID? After watching this set, you can make one hell of a case for that statement being irrevocably true.

The Eddy
The latest burst of jazz-flavored drama from Oscar-winning writer/director Damian Chazelle (La La Land, Whiplash) isn't lighting up a big screen (because that doesn't really happen anymore unless you've got one of those fancy projector setups in your house or whatever), it's on Netflix. Debuting this past Friday, The Eddy seems like it should be a kind-of-chill slice-of-life about a guy (Andre Holland) running a jazz club in Paris and trying to be a good parent to his estranged daughter (Amandla Stendberg). But because it's Chazelle, it's also a crime-drama about an exile from the States just trying to stay relevant musically while ducking shady underworld types coming after him, that plays out its eight-episode run like an actual jazz ensemble giving its players a lot of room to solo.

It Was Good Until it Wasn't
R&B used to be one of the most tried & true genres of music, a place you could go to and just know what kind of soothing, soulful vibes you'd find. But in 2020, R&B is one of the most fluid genres of music around, redefining itself with standout releases by adventurous young artists almost every month. The latest vanguard is Kehlani, who has definitely been around for a minute—she helped the Biebs on his last tour through Portland, in fact, but couldn't get him for a guest spot on It Was Good Until it Wasn't. No disrespect to Justin's increasingly irrelevant hesher-lookin-ass, but Kehlani didn't need him on this one. Especially not when she's got guests spots from Masego, Tory Lanez, Jhene Aiko, Lucky Daye, and James Blake.

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