Bibliophile

Woman smiling with a small tan dog outdoors in a lush garden setting, surrounded by green plants and a tree branch, capturing a joyful moment in nature.

Facing Mortality With Humor: Liz Scott Explores Life, Death and Acceptance

interview by Cathy Carroll In the new memoir and essay collection You’re Going to Die But Not Me!: A Psychologist Wrestles Death, Portland author Liz Scott stares down death with a mix of humor, scholarly curiosity and vulnerability. A candid, self-aware narrator, she wrestles with her fear of annihilation, blending deep research with stories that are as tender as they are illuminating. From the ancient dreamers who sought immortality to modern labs probing the mysteries of near-death experiences, Scott delves into panpsychism (that all animate and inanimate things have a mind-like quality) and Buddhist detachment with the same energy she applies to the earthy realities of human composting. Her previous works include the memoir This Never Happened and Love Life: Confessions of a Psychologist. She will be in conversation at Portland’s Powell’s Books on May 17. » After wrestling with death from every angle, how has it shifted the way…

A portrait of a smiling woman with long brown hair, wearing a patterned dress and pearl necklace, featured in Oregon's 1859 Magazine, highlighting Oregon's culture, arts, and lifestyle.

Antidote for Buried Histories

Acclaimed new novel is a reckoning, unearthing horrors and shimmering possibilities interview by Cathy Carroll Karen Russell’s latest novel, The Antidote, is her first since Swamplandia!, one of The New York Times’ ten best books of the year and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received many awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list (she is now 43). Russell, who lives in Portland, also serves on the board of Street Books, a mobile library and community space for people living outside or at the margins in Portland. What drove you to incorporate magical elements with brutal historical realities? I’m sure my early reading history has a lot to do with it, as does growing up in Miami, where long before I knew how to read I learned how many streaming realities can coexist on a single city block. As…

Author Alison Jean Cole is redefining rockhounding for a new generation.

Modern Rockhounds

Portland author’s new book harnesses fresh energy and ethics around rockhounding interview by Cathy Carroll Alison Jean Cole is at the forefront of a new interest in the Northwest that’s no longer your granduncle’s pastime—rockhounding. Her second book on the topic, A Rockhound’s Guide to Oregon & Washington, has just been released amid a growing, youthful enthusiasm for the hobby that promises another way to connect with nature. The book covers rockhounding basics, sustainable collecting, Leave No Trace principles and, for sixty sites, the geologic history along with what types of rocks and fossils you may find. The region is a treasure trove for rockhounds who can explore ancient seafloors, epic lava flows, glacier-carved landscapes and evidence of 200 million years of tectonic action. This guide helps beginners find agates and jaspers in the volcanic Cascade Range, marine fossils along the Coast, petrified wood in the Owyhee Uplands and more….

Kevin Maloney deftly draws you into a Quixote-like tale that begins in Beaverton.

Pilgrim Power

Humor and drama on the journey to find the meaning of life interview by Cathy Carroll “This is the story of a pilgrim named Kevin Maloney,” we learn in the prologue to the novel The Red-Headed Pilgrim, autobiographical fiction by Kevin Maloney. Our hero hails from Beaverton, “a suburb of Portland the way the Monkees are a suburb of the Beatles.” A twisted JV football drill sends him running for the forest, sparking an existential crisis. His parents line up a therapist who offers him a copy of Siddhartha, and his pilgrimage eventually ensues. Think On the Road meets Napoleon Dynamite in the latest from this Portland-based author. You’ve said that half of writing is skill and half from how you live your life. Can you elaborate? When I was younger, I used to be dazzled by fancy sentences in books. I still am, but as I’ve gotten older, I…

Award-winning essayist Laurie Easter pens a rich memoir, All the Leavings.

Wild Terrain

A writer living off the grid navigates the wilds of nature and the human heart interview by Cathy Carroll Laurie Easter lives off the grid on twenty-eight forested acres in a funky little cabin on the edge of wilderness in southern Oregon. Her essays have been awarded fellowships by the prestigious Vermont Studio Center and Playa in Summer Lake, published in many literary journals and anthologies, nominated for a Pushcart Prize and listed as notable in The Best American Essays 2015. She holds degrees from Southern Oregon University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. All the Leavings, being released in October by OSU Press, is her first book. The memoir navigates the rugged terrain of an alternative lifestyle and the hazards of the human heart, from encounters with cougars and the dynamics of mother-child relationships, to the destructive power of wildfires, the home birth of her second child and community…