Past Events

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Saturday, March 1st, 7pm

Reading & Book-signing with
Gin Phillips
author of
The Well and the Mine
(Hawthorne Press)

1931 Carbon Hill, Alabama, a small coal-mining town, nine-year-old Tess Moore watches a woman shove the cover off the family well and toss in a baby without a word. For the Moore family, centered on helping anyone in need during the Great Depression, the apparent murder forces them to face the darker side of their community and understand the motivations of their family and their friends. Most townspeople have no money for a newspaper and backbreaking work keeps them busy from dawn until well after dusk. For parents, it is a time when a better life for your children—one that involves clean fingernails and a desk—likely means sacrificing health, time, and every penny that can be saved. For a miner, the thought that you might not make it home from work is as much a part of the morning as a cup of coffee. But next to those daily thoughts of death and hard work are the lingering pleasures of sweet tea, feather beds, and lightning bugs yet to be caught.

Gin Phillips is a freelance writer whose features have appeared in American Profile, American Spirit, Platinum, and Woman’s World. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama. The Well and the Mine is her first novel.

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Monday, March 3rd, 7pm
Reading & Book-signing with
Gary Paul Nabhan
author of
Arab/American:
Landscape, Culture and Cuisine in Two Great Deserts
(University of Arizona Press)

Gary Paul Nabhan is a world renowned writer, lecturer, and biologist. A MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Conservation Biology, he is currently Director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University. Dr. Nabhan co-founded Native Seeds/SEARCH and became a leading voice for conserving and renovating native plant agriculture in the Americas. Over three decades, he has worked with more than a dozen indigenous communities on cross-cultural initiatives to revive indigenous foods to prevent diabetes, to restore ancient agricultural landscapes and to honor traditional knowledge. He is a currently a Board member of the Seed Savers Exchange. He is author of twenty books, including Coming Home to Eat, Why Some Like It Hot: Genes, Food and Cultural Diversity, Renewing America's Food Traditions, and Enduring Seeds. He and wife Laurie Monti raise Navajo-Churro sheep, Black Spanish turkeys and native crops in the pygmy woodlands near Winona, Arizona.

About Arab/American: The landscapes, cultures, and cuisines of deserts in the Middle East and North America have commonalities that have seldom been explored by scientists—and have hardly been celebrated by society at large. Sonoran Desert ecologist Gary Nabhan grew up around Arab grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins in a family that has been emigrating to the United States and Mexico from Lebanon for more than a century, and he himself frequently travels to the deserts of the Middle East. In an era when some Arabs and Americans have markedly distanced themselves from one another, Nabhan has been prompted to explore their common ground, historically, ecologically, linguistically, and gastronomically. Arab/American is not merely an exploration of his own multicultural roots but also a revelation of the deep cultural linkages between the inhabitants of two of the world's great desert regions.

Here, in beautifully crafted essays, Nabhan explores how these seemingly disparate cultures are bound to each other in ways we would never imagine. With an extraordinary ear for language and a truly adventurous palate, Nabhan uncovers surprising convergences between the landscape ecology, ethnogeography, agriculture, and cuisines of the Middle East and the binational Desert Southwest.

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Thursday, March 6th, 7pm

Reading & Book-signing
with writers from
VoiceCatcher
An anthology of Portland women's writings

VoiceCatcher presents new prose and poetry by award-winning and emerging women writers. This eclectic collection offers stories of bubbles and bicycles, hairdos and peanut butter, gratitude and loss, growing up and growing old, finding love and finding work, memories, dreams and other adventures in between. VoiceCatcher grew out of a community of women writers and is an offering to the wider community of readers. We are a non-profit entity – revenue from the sale of VoiceCatcher support its publication and funds scholarships for Write Around Portland writers.

This event will highlight the work of at least five local women authors, and editors will be on hand to accept submissions for the 3rd edition of VoiceCatcher.

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Saturday, January 26th, 3-5pm
Celebrate William Stafford's Birthday
with the Friends of William Stafford

Hosted by Willa Schneberg
The celebration will begin with featured readers:
Patricia Bollin, Cindy Williams Gutierrez,
Mike Langtry, Paul Merchant, Diane Stepp,
and FWS Board Member Paulann Petersen.

It will then be open for those in the audience who wish to read.
As your gift, please bring along a Stafford poem to read for the group!

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Friday, December 7th, 7pm
Keith Gessen and Chad Harbach
n+1

n+1 is a biannual literary magazine that publishes essays on politics, literature, and culture, as well as fiction. It was founded in 2004 by Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Chad Harbach, Benjamin Kunkel, and Marco Roth.

Awarded Utne Reader's citation for Best Writing last year, recipient of multiple Best American Essay awards, and profiled in publications from the New York Times Sunday Magazine to the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung, n+1's book-like form and unironic style have raised the question of a tradition of integrated critical thinking that stands to the side of the Internet, the culture of speed, and even the sharp back-and-forth of political opinion.

Editors Keith Gessen and Chad Harbach will read and discuss pieces from current and past issues of the magazine, on topics ranging from environmental apocalypse to writers and money.

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Saturday, December 8th, 10am
Joni Kabana
author & photographer
Torina's World: A Child's Life in Madagascar

This children's book, photographed and compiled by Joni Kabana, documents a day in the life of Torina, a Malagasy girl living in the bush area of Madagascar.

"This book shows how other children live (and survive) with so much less than we have, and still experience happiness. There's a whole world out there exisiting on the bare minimum of life's material things." - Maggi White, Oregon Public Broadcasting Host

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Thursday, December 13th, 7pm
Judith Li (Editor & contributing author)
& David Hatch (Contributing author)
To Harvest, To Hunt: Stories of Resource Use in the American West

To Harvest, To Hunt reveals how diverse peoples have valued and used natural resources throughout the history of the American West. Drawing on family letters, oral traditions, historical records, and personal experience, the book's contributors offer readers new perspectives on the land they live on, the harvests they consume, and the natural resources they manage. Editor Judy Li weaves a tapestry of cultures and voices - from Pueblo tribes in the Southwest and Chinese Fishermen in California to Mexican braceros in Oregon and basque sheepherders in Idaho - as she details the region's historical dependence on the land and sea.

About Judith Li's Lost China Camps: In the mild Mediterranean climate of northern California, the protected bays of San Francisco and Monterey produced a bounty of fish, shellfish, and other invertibrates for native tribes, Spanish colonists, and later, the flood of immigrants who followed the Gold Rush of 1849. This essay considers the role of Chinese fishermen in both these places.
Judith Li is a recently retired associate professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State University. She is a stream biologist by training, with particular interests in invertebrate food webs. Her interests in cultural ecology have been sparked by a course she teaches titled "Multicultural Perspectives in Natural Resources," which received a gold award from Agricultural Distance Educators and Communicators. Her ethnic roots as a second generation Chinese American have led her to study the role of Chinese in California, where she grew up.

About Dave Hatch's Resolution: The Siletz tribe fished and hunted in marine and fresh waters along the central Oregon coast. David Hatch shares childhood memories about his family in the central coastal town of Florence, during a time when his tribe lost their reservation lands. In 1977, the official status of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz was restored by the federal government and a portion of their reservation lands was returned to them.
David Hatch in Ike Martin's great-grandson, Nick Hatch's grandson, Ken Hatch's son, and Peter Hatch's dad. He is not a biologist, but his brother Keith is, so folks often mistake hime for a biologist. Actually, he's an engineer for the City of Portland. He also served on the Siletz Tribal Council, and is one of the founding members of the Elakha Alliance, which is dedicated to restoring the sea otter in order to restore the near-shore ecosystems.

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Saturday, Dec. 15, 1:00pm
Poetry Reading & bridge walk
Walking Bridges Using Poetry as a Compass:
Poems about Bridges Real and Imagined by 70 Poets, with Directions for Five Self-Guided Explorations

Sharon Wood Wortman, author of the Portland Bridge Book, and guide for Portland Parks and Outdoor Recreation, announces the publication of her newest book: Walking Bridges Using Poetry as a Compass.
This new book sets down Sharon's favorite bridge walks/rides/circles and seven of her many Portland poems. Accompanying her turn-by-turn directions and observations are 78 poems about bridges by 70 poets, plus maps and drawings by bridge engineer Ed Wortman.

Many of the poets in the book who will join Sharon in reading their bridge poetry!
Featuring:
Kirsten Rian (Portland), Elizabeth Archers (Portland), Eleanor Berry (Lyons), Josephine Bridges (Portland), Ed Edmo (Portland), Jean Esteve (Waldport), Nancy Flynn (Portland), C.A. Gilbert (Florence), Melissa Madenski (Portland), Amy Minato (Portland), Erin Ocon (Portland), Paulann Petersen (Portland), Rita Ott Ramstad (Brightwood), Carlos Reyes (Portland), Colette Tennant (Salem), Victoria Fairham Wheeler (Milwaukie), & Victoria Wyttenberg (Portland).
Audience members are also invited to read a poem about a bridge.

A bridge walk will follow the reading, for whoever wants to join. (weather permitting).

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Tuesday, November 13th, 7pm
Jules Boykoff author of
Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States

Focusing on a variety of movements for political, social, and economic change in the US, Jules Boykoff shows the tools used by government agents to undermine the long-term viability of opposition in this country. Despite the pretense of democratic ideals, the US government has ruthlessly suppressed dissent, using hard-to-detect and rarely acknowledged tactics. Boykoff breaks it down for readers, using a methodical, step-by-step analysis to open the government's bag of tricks for all to see. Beyond Bullets offers indispensable lessons to on-the-ground activists—those most likely to suffer the effects of infiltration, "snitchjacketing," surveillance, "black propaganda," and other insidious practices—as well as to those studying the forms of authoritarian rule in democratic societies.

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Thursday, November 15th, 7pm
Poe Ballantine, author
501 Minutes to Christ: Essays

Poe Ballantine’s second collection of personal essays follows in the tradition of Things I Like About America. Stories range from "The Irving," which details Mr. Ballantine’s diabolical plan to punch John Irving in the nose after opening for him before an audience of 2,000 people that launched the literary festival, Wordstock; to "Wide-Eyed in the Gaudy Shop," which tells how, in Mexico, the narrator met and later married his wife, Cristina; to "Blessed Meadows for Minor Poets," the devastating tale of how after years of sacrifice and persistence, Mr. Ballantine finally secured a contract with a major publisher for a short story collection that never came to fruition. Ever present in this collection of essays are the odd jobs, eccentric characters, boarding houses, buses, and beer that populate Mr. Ballantine’s landscape and make his stories uniquely his own. The title story, "501 Minutes to Christ," was included in the Houghton-Mifflin anthology, Best American Essays 2006.

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Thursday, November 1st, 7:30pm
Poetry Reading with Windfall poets:

David Hedges
Sean Patrick Hill
Kelly Sievers
Michael McDowell
Bill Siverly

Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place features poetry which captures the spirit of place as part of the essence of the poem."We particularly emphasize poetry which is written in the Pacific Northwest and which is attentive to the relationships between people and the natural world".

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Saturday, November 3rd, 10:00am
Storytelling with Sy James
for children age 2-6
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Tuesday, November 6th, 7:00pm
Honoring the poetry of Sarah Lantz
Author of Far Beyond Triage
Readings by Willa Schneberg & Don Colburn

Sarah Lantz passed on before the release of her first poetry collection: Far Beyond Triage. Now this incredible book stands as a memorial to a great poet, writer, thinker, and enthusiast for life. Her deeply spiritual poetry explores the longings of the soul and tests the penetrable boundary between the living world and the ethereal. Poets Willa Schneberg and Don Colburn will read selections from the new book on Sarah's behalf.

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Wednesday, November 7th, 7pm
George Byron Wright with his new novel
Roseburg 1959

On August 7th, 1959 in Roseburg, OR a truckload of explosives went off, destroying twelve city blocks. George uses this piece of local history as the starting point for his new noevl, which completes a literary triptych started with his previous novels Baker City 1948 and Tillamook 1952. The stories explore how traumatic incidents test and shape human lives. Roseburg 1959, along with the first two books of the Oregon Trio, is published bt C3 Publications.

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Thursday, November 8th, 7pm
Ann Vilesis author of
Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes from and Why We Need to Get It Back

Ask children where food comes from, and they’ll probably answer: “the supermarket.” Ask most adults, and their replies may not be much different. Where our foods are raised and what happens to them between farm and supermarket shelf have become mysteries. How did we become so disconnected from the sources of our breads, beef, cheeses, cereal, apples, and countless other foods that nourish us every day? Ann Vileisis’s answer is a sensory-rich journey through the history of making dinner. Kitchen Literacy takes us from an eighteenth-century garden to today’s sleek supermarket aisles, and eventually to farmer’s markets that are now enjoying a resurgence. Vileisis chronicles profound changes in how American cooks have considered their foods over two centuries and delivers a powerful statement: what we don’t know could hurt us. Revealing how knowledge of our food has been lost and how it might now be regained, Kitchen Literacy promises to make us think differently about what we eat.
Ann Vileisis is a writer and historian. She is the author of Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America’s Wetlands (Island Press, 1997), which won prestigious awards from the American Historical Association and the American Society for Environmental History. An avid gardener and cook, she lives on the Oregon coast.

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Wednesday, September 5th, 7:00pm

Publication Party, Reading & Discussion
with Paul Merchant

Join us in celebrating the publication of Monochords, Paul Merchant’s translation of the Μονόχορδα sequence by Greek poet Yannis Ritsos

YANNIS RITSOS (1909-1990) is one Greece's most prolific, distinguished and celebrated poets. He is the author of some 50 volumes of poetry. His Monochords can be read as miniature encapsulations by a master of the art of brevity Or they can be read as keys to his whole work, his lexicon of images and ideas. Ritsos, though a world reowned poet, is, unfortunately hardly known in the United States. Hopefully this translation of Monochords by Paul Merchant will help in spreading Ritsos' poetry by offering to American readers a 'sampler' of the Greek poet's work.

PAUL MERCHANT's translations of Ritsos, in his Greek issue of Modern Poetry in Translation (1968) and read by Ted Hughes on BBC radio in 1970, were among the first published in England. His volumes of poetry are Stones (1973), Bone from a Stag's Heart, a (British) Poetry Book Society
Recomendation for 1988, and Some Business of Affinity (2006). His other books include The Epic (1971), Wendell Berry (1991), Three Marriage Plays by Thomas Heywood (1996) and (with Vincent Wixon) two editions of William Stafford¹s prose (1998 and 2003). He recently collaborated with Doug Erickson and Jeremy Skinner on a bibliography of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and on a reprint of a rare Expedition text. Since 1996 he has been Director of the William Stafford Archives.

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Saturday, September 8th, 10:00am

Storytelling
for pre-schoolers
with Sy James

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Thursday, September 13th
7:00pm

Poetry Reading
with
Kathleen Halme
author of Drift and Pulse
and
Nancy Pagh
author of No Sweeter Fat

About the poets:

In Drift and Pulse, her third book of poems, Kathleen Halme is fascinated with the domain where matter is experienced as mind. Drawing upon brain science, anthropology, and biology, these poems take aim at the big questions of form and death. The persistent “longing for shapes as elegant as instinct,” the rituals and fictions we invent to meet the needs of a ceaselessly revised universe animate the poems. Between “drift and pulse,” the capacity for transcendent experience is expressed as a hard-wired process of human brain architecture.
Kathleen is the author of two previous full-length books of poetry, Every Substance Clothed, which won both the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series competition and the Balcones Poetry Prize, and Equipoise, brought out by Sarabande Books. An earlier chapbook, The Everlasting Universe of Things, was selected as winner of the Harperprints Poetry Chapbook Competition by Edward Hirsch.
Kathleen Halme grew up in Wakefield, a post-mining town in Michigan's upper peninsula. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, where her work was awarded the Hopwood Creative Writing Award. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry and a National Endowment for the Humanities summer fellowship in anthropology. She lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon.

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Thursday, August 23rd, 7:00pm

Dr. Claire Michaels Wheeler

10 Simple Solutions to Stress:
How to Tame Tension & Start Enjoying Your Life

Stress. We all struggle with it. We know it can shorten our lives, age us prematurely, make us fat -- yet we can’t seem to escape it. One more thing we know is that, ultimately, we’re the only ones who can stop stress from taking over our lives. So what are you waiting for? This little book offers ten simple solutions you can put into practice right now to reduce stress. Based on positive psychology, mind-body medicine, and cognitive behavioral therapy, the ten simple solutions in this book offer powerful antidotes to stress. These practices and stress-rescue techniques will help you to cope effectively with stressful moments throughout your day. Try them and, in no time at all, you’ll start enjoy better health and a balanced, more fulfilling life.

Claire Michaels Wheeler, M.D., Ph.D. is a physician, psychologist and professor of integrative medicine at Portland State University, a professor of family medicine at Oregon Health & Science University and on the faculty of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington , D.C.

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Wednesday, August 29th, 7:00pm

Following in their Footsteps:
What travel was like for women before the modern era.
Reading & Book-signing
with
Adele Birnbaum
author of
The Santiago Tales: An Uncommon Pilgrimage
and
Susan Lilly
author of
Dearest Shortness: Letters ~1905 to 1915

Dearest Shortness is a collection of letters documenting, among other activities, Mamie Resinger's train travels from her home base in York, Pennsylvania to Washington DC and Frankfort, Kentucky in the years 1910-1915. The letters are edited by Mamie's granddaughter, Susan Lilly, instructor at Lewis and Clark College.

The Santiago Tales is the chronicle of a modern walking pilgrimage to Santiago in Spain undertaken by retired english professor Adele Birnbaum. Inspired by a line in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, she followed the ancient Camino (pilgrim's way) after discovering that tens of thousand of pilgrims still make this pilgrimage every year, medieval-style.

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Thursday, August 9th, 7:00pm

Reading & Book-signing
with
K. B. Dixon
Author of
The Sum of His Syndromes:
A novel

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Harry Potter # 7 is coming!

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Join us for an evening of Magic, costumes, and Fun!
Friday, July 20th, 10pm
Books go on sale at midnight!
Bring the whole family!

10% off pre-paid orders
Reserve your copies now!

For more info, or to reserve your copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, please call 503-227-4760

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Poetry Reading
Thursday June 14th, 7:00pm
with
Penelope Schott
author of
A is for Anne:
Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonweath

About the book: This engrossing collection of poems explores the life of Anne Hutchinson, the dissident Puritan thinker and speaker who played a pivotal role in the emergence of American religious freedom. The multiplicity of voices and Schott's varied techniques create a nuanced, unforgettable portrait of its subject.

About the poet: Penelope Scambly Schott, a long-time New Jersey poet, now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and their dog. She has published a novel, A Little Ignorance; two collections of poetry, The Perfect Mother and Baiting the Void; and two previous narrative poems, Penelope: The Story of the Half-Scalped Woman and The Pest Maiden: A Story of Lobotomy (also from Turning Point). She has received four New Jersey poetry fellowships, a senior fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center, a Dodge Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, and a residency at the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico.

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Sunday, May 20th, 4:00pm

A Reading
with novelist

Richard Wiley
and two of his books
Soldiers in Hiding

Commodore Perry's Minstral Show

 

About Richard Wiley: Born in California though he grew up in Tacoma, Washington, Richard in the prestigious Iowa Writer's Workshop and receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing-fiction from the University of Iowa. He later served as a volunteer in the Peace Corps in Korea, taught English in Japan and has lived in Kenya and Nigeria. Soldiers in Hiding, originally published in 1986 and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, is a novel about a Japanese-American jazz musician drafted to fight against the U.S. in World War II and the guilt and horrors of battle that follow him even thirty years later. Portland's own Hawthorne Books has now re-published Soldiers in Hiding as one of their Rediscovery titles. Richard's newest novel, Commodore Perry's Minstral Show (University of Texas Press), is a piece of historical fiction set in Japan in 1854 against the backdrop of the clash of cultures when Japan was opened up to America by Matthew Perry and serves as a sort of long-awaited prequel to Soldiers in Hiding.

"[Soldiers in Hiding] is a work of exceptional power and imagination, especially in [its] portrayal of the protagonist's "listless remorse" and cross-cultural alienation." - Publishers Weekly

 

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Thursday, May 31st, 7:00pm

Join us for an evening honoring the poetry of
Emma Howell

A reading from the newly published collection:
Slim Night of Recognition

Emma Howell began writing at an early age and published her first poems at fifteen. She took writing workshops at Portland State University and was a creative writing major at Oberlin College, where she also studied literature, languages, folklore, and African dance. She spent a year studying in Spain and six months in Brazil, where she died at the age of twenty. This book is her first collection.

"Sometimes, while in the presence of a great talent and youthful passion, we glimpse a maturity that resides in its own singular moment. For me, this revelation arises out of reading Emma Howell’s
Slim Night of Recognition, a marvelous collection of poems that the heart can trust.
Here’s a book destined to live, to tug its readers back to its pages again and again.
Slim Night of Recognition is a momentous treatise of emotions and feelings."
—Yusef Komunyakaa

“These poems possess an uncanny authority. They swerve in clean and unsettling ways, and hit distinct,  wonderfully unpredictable and always right-feeling notes. They're truly stirring. There seems a haunting presience in many of them, so quietly there. Astonishing to think she wrote them at so young an age, given their tender authority and patient, graceful movement. Still they feel more than promising, though they are that-- they feel fulfilled. It is a real beauty of a book."
—Laurie Sheck

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Thursday, May 3rd, 7pm
An event with
Jack Hart
author of:
A Writer's Coach
An Editor's Guide to Words That Work

A practical, innovative step-by-step approach to the writing process from one of the most acclaimed writing coaches in the country

In A Writer’s Coach, Jack Hart–a managing editor at The Oregonian–shares the wisdom with which he has coached reporters to Pulitzer Prize—winning success. He gives invaluable advice on gathering ideas, writing theme statements and outlines, and using the “ladder of abstraction” to add variety and texture to writing. He provides a lexicon of lead sentences. He shares his ideas for composing and sustaining powerful writing, and for ensuring that what you write will be accessible to your audience. Discussing the ways writers can trip themselves up–procrastination, writer’s block, and excessive polishing, to name just a few–Hart demonstrates how to overcome each obstacle. Excerpts from writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Joan Didion, and from articles gathered from magazines and newspapers, provide inspiration and instructive examples of both inadequate and exemplary writing.

Like a personal, portable writing coach, A Writer’s Coach will be a boon to writers, editors, teachers, and students.

Join us!

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April is National Poetry Month
Celebrate with Looking Glass Bookstore!

Poetry Readings in April:

Friday, April 6th, 7pm
Deer Drink the Moon
Book Launch!

Featuring:
Margaret Chula, Floyd Skloot, Paulann Petersen,
Jim Grabill, Barbara LaMorticella, & Leanne Grabel

Join us for an evening with 6 incredible Oregon poets!
Deer Drink the Moon brings together thirty-three poets to create a masterpiece of poetry about the state of Oregon. Organized thematically into seven of the state's ecoregions, this collection takes the reader on a statewide tour through poetry: beginning at the Pacific Ocean with William Stafford's "Waiting by the Sea," traveling through the Willamette Valley with Margaret Chula's "Soliloquy on Rain," and ending in the high deserts of Eastern Oregon with Vince Wixon's "Eastern Oregon." Through memorable imagery, the poets create a tribute to Oregon that is painted in lyrics, harvested in poetry, and grown in the hearts of artists

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Thursday, April 19th, 7pm
Jane Glazer
Renowned Portland Poet, author of the recent Memoir:
Cornsilk: Growing Up Green

Cornsilk is an engaging memoir of a rural Iowa childhood in the period between the two world wars. It is a lyrical evocation of a way of life that has all but vanished.

Jane Glazer's books of poetry include: Some Trick of Light, a finalist for the Oregon Book award in 2004, and Go Where the Landshed Takes You, published in 2003.

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Thursday, April 26th, 7pm
Windfall Poetry Reading

Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place features poetry which captures the spirit of place as part of the essence of the poem.

Windfall editors Bill Siverly and Michael McDowell will be joined by contributing poets: Dan Raphael, Bette Lynch Husted, and Wendy Willis.

"We particularly emphasize poetry which is written in the Pacific Northwest and which is attentive to the relationships between people and the natural world".

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Grand Re-opening Party!
Wednesday, March 21st, 5-8pm
7983 SE 13th Ave
(In the heart of Sellwood, near SE 13th & Nehalem)

Join us in celebrating our new location, the Spring Equinox, and our wonderful customers, new and old.

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*Our first event at the new location!*
7983 SE 13th Ave

Poetry Reading

with
Oz Hopkins Koglin
and
Don Colburn

Thursday, February 15th
7:00pm

Oz Hopkins Koglin is a long-time friend of Looking Glass, a wonderful writer, and we are pleased to host her debut poetry reading! Don Colburn recently published his first full-length book of poetry, As if Gravity Were a Theory, which won the Cider Press Review Book award. We are delighted to have Oz and Don read for this inaugural event at the new location! Join us!

*This will event will be held at the new location!*
7983 SE 13th Ave
(In the heart of Sellwood, near SE 13th & Nehalem)

About OZ: Oz Hopkins Koglin, a former community activist and journalist, grew up in St. Louis where she was selected as a Metropolitan Fellow of the Danforth Foundation's program to reconcile the races. She graduated from Reed College in 1974.  Her reporting career began in 1960 at The St. Louis Argus, one of the oldest African-American publications in the country, and in 1972 she became the first full-time female African-American staff member of The Oregonian Publishing Company where she mainly reported on medical science issues, including the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.  Her poems have been published in Hubbub, a poetry magazine, Poetry Southeast, an online publication of the Department of English at Louisiana State University; The Oregonian, and selected by the Friends of William Stafford for the Trinity Episcopal Arts Commission's Peace Exhibit in Portland. She often writes about growing up during America's Jim Crow era, also known as American apartheid. 

About DON: Don Colburn is a health reporter for The Oregonian -- and a poet. Two collections of his poetry won national contests and were published last year. His chapbook, Another Way to Begin, won the Finishing Line Press Prize, and his first full-length book, As If Gravity Were a Theory, won the Cider Press Review Book Award. Colburn has an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including the current Poetry Northwest. Twice he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry, and he also has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. He is a board member of the Friends of William Stafford.

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Celebrate William Stafford's Birthday!

Join us for a poetry reading commemorating
Oregon's late poet Laureate.

Thursday, January 18th, 7:30 pm

8 poets will read a poem by Stafford and one of
their own poems written in the spirit of Stafford's work.

Hosted by Willa Schneberg.
Featuring: Patricia Bollin, Ronault (Polo) LS Catalani,
Angie Chuang, Lynn Darroch, Ellen Goldberg,
Sarah Lantz, Edith Mirante, and FWS Board Member Joseph Soldati.

As your gift, bring along a favorite Stafford poem to read
for the rest of the group.

Event co-sponsored by the Friends of William Stafford

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Reading & Book-signing
with
V.O. Blum
author of
Split Creek
War Novel of the Deep West

Thursday, January 11th, 7:00pm

It is 1943. Freidrich Dassen is a German POW interned by the US War Department in
the American West. Back in Berlin, his mother, Helge, subverts German fascism.
But here in the US, his lover, Helen, follows the opposite course...

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Slide Show, Booksigning, & First Thursday Reception

One Summer
Across America
By Bobby Abrahamson

Thursday, Dec. 7th, 7:00pm

Photographer Bobby Abrahamson’s first book of photography, ONE SUMMER ACROSS AMERICA, presents a poignant and lyrical portrait of America in a series of 50 color photographs shot by Abrahamson during his three-month Greyhound bus trip across the country during the summer of 2001 The work was completed just before the attacks of September 11th.  The book contains a touching afterword by acclaimed photographer Robert Frank, author of the seminal photo book THE AMERICANS in the form of a personal letter addressed to Abrahamson, and also includes a critical essay by Thomas W. Southall, curator of photography of the Harn Museum of Art.

“Abrahamson captures the 21st century version of the America that Frank and Kerouac saw: happiness and despair, old men chatting in the barbershop, a young man slumped in exhaustion at the Greyhound station, a guy with piercings and a pet snake, a child face-painted with the Stars and Stripes.” JERRY CULLUM, Atlanta Journal Constitution  

Join us for a reception, book signing and slide lecture of the book images. There will be a one-night exhibit of a small number of limited edition signed and framed photographic prints available for sale.  

Bobby Abrahamson is a freelance photographer, filmmaker, documentary artist, and media educator with 18 years of professional experience teaching media production and producing documentary work. He currently lives in Portland , Oregon . His clients have included The New York Times, TIME, Fortune , US News & World Report, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, and the advertising firm Wieden & Kennedy.  Abrahamson has worked as an assistant to renowned photographers Robert Frank, Eugene Richards and James Nachtwey. Abrahamson’s work as an artist has been presented in six solo shows and numerous group exhibitions in the United States and Europe . He currently teaches at Pacific Northwest College of Art ( Portland ).

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Reading & Booksigning
with
Joyce Maynard
Author of
Internal Combustion
The Story of a Marriage and a Murder in the Motor City

Wednesday, November 8th, 7:00pm

"Painful, intimate and blood-spattered: a gripping true-crime tale." Kirkus Reviews

On Mother's Day night, 2004, fourth grade teacher Nancy Seaman left her home in Farmington Hills, near Detroit, Michigan, and drove in a driving rain storm to Home Depot, to purchase a hatchet. Three days later, police discovered the mutilated body of her husband- a successful auto industry engineer, softball coach and passionate collector of vintage Mustangs - in the back of the family's Ford Explorer. As the shackles were placed on her wrists, Nancy Seaman asserted that her husband had been beating her, and she'd killed him in self-defense. At her trial, two radically different stories emerged. One of the couple's sons, Greg, testified that his father had been abusing his mother for years. The other, Jeff, testified for the prosecution, charging his mother as a cold blooded killer.

Joyce Maynard's chilling work delves beyond the events of the crime itself, to explore the lives of an American family who seemed to have everything. As in her previous books - including To Die For, based on a true crime, and her best selling memoir, At Home in the World - Joyce Maynard's themes here involve family secrets, the deep fissures that lie below the surface of the glittering exteriors, and the deep, potentially fatal, fissures in the American Dream.

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Join us for a Poetry Reading
with poets from

Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place

Featuring:
Paulann Peterson
David Oates
Celia Carlson
Bill Siverly
Michael McDowell

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26th, 7:00pm

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Join us for a Poetry Reading
with
Willa Schneberg
&
Angie Chuang

Thursday, October 5th, 7:30pm

Willa Schneberg's new book of poetry, Storytelling in Cambodia, is beautiful and heart-wrenching collection of powerful poems about Cambodia awakening from the killing fields to the dawn of free elections. This moving, rich cycle of linked poems journeys from Cambodia’s ancient mythic times to the killing fields and to the U.N. presence during Cambodia’s first free elections. It bears witness to the plight of the Cambodian people and to all who have endured holocausts. The reader viscerally experiences the sweet-sour tastes both of jungle fruits and of blackened, dead potato patches; the sights and sounds of the bombed Cambodian countryside and of its fecund cities – as well as the humanity of others and ourselves.Willa Schneberg has received numerous awards for her poetry, including an Oregon Book Award for Poetry.

Annie Chuang is a journalist who writes about race and cultural issues for the Oregonian. She also writes literary non-fiction, as well as poetry. From Ho Chi Minh City to Vietnam, Kabul to Afghanistan, Annie Chuang's writing peels back the curtain from places in history and in the news. Her poems appear in Calyx, The Grove Review, and she has a forthcoming essay on rural Afghanistan published in a Lonely Planet collection titled Tales from Nowhere.

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Join us for a Reading, Book-signing, and Discussion
with
Nomi Prins
author of
JACKED: How "Conservatives" Are Picking Your
Pocket -- Whether You Voted for Them or Not

Thursday, October 12th at 7pm.

Author, journalist, and Wall Street expert Nomi Prins examines the effects of Republican policies, scandals, and blunders by conducting a guided tour of a typical American wallet. Each chapter matches a wallet item to a set of political topics. The driver’s license leads to a discussion of gasoline prices, energy policy, and Iraq; the Social Security card leads out to the administration’s efforts to “reform” Social Security by weakening it; the credit card points to bankruptcy legislation and credit card company profits; the health insurance card is a reminder of soaring medical and insurance costs, and the cutting of Medicaid and Medicare, and so on. Crisscrossing the country to gather the personal experiences of a wide variety of Americans, Prins tells their stories, shows them trying to make ends meet, and questions why the government is failing them. Taken together, these lively, accessible chapters link the “conservative” record to its disastrous effects on ordinary people and tell us what we can do about it.

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Joseph Soldati's poetry has appeared in a variety of literary magazines, journals, reviews and anthologies. Soldati is a retired English professor who was twice a Fulbright Fellow - in Egypt and in Cote d'Ivoire, West Africa. He is a member of the Board of Trustees for the Friends of William Stafford. He lives in Portland.

Don Colburn has been awarded numerous awards for his poetry, which has appeared in various publications. His new chapbook, Another Way to Begin, won the Finishing Line Press Prize. He lives in Portland, and works as a reporter for the Oregonian newspaper.

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THURSDAY, JUNE 8TH, 7:30PM
A Conversation with

GARTH STEIN
author of
How Evan Broke His Head and Other Stories
Winner of the 2006
PNBA Book Award

&

JOHN DANIEL
2006 PNBA Award Winner for
Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone

Join us for an evening with two of the Northwest's best contemporary writers.

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Looking Glass Books & the Northwest China Council Present:

Reading & Booksigning
with
Mel Gurtov
author of
SUPERPOWER ON CRUSADE:
The Bush Doctrine in US Foreign Policy

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MARK DANNER

author of

THE SECRET WAY TO WAR
THE DOWNING STREET MEMO AND THE IRAQ
WAR'S BURIED HISTORY

Friday, April 7th, 7:00pm
at the First Unitarian Church
1011 SW 12th Ave.

The United States went to war in Iraq to eliminate the threat from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction—which turned out not to exist. There exists crucial and little-publicized evidence that lets us understand the secretive, even deceptive, way that the the US launched a war of choice in the Middle East in March 2003. The "Downing Street Memo" -- the leaked secret minutes of a July 2002 meeting of senior British intelligence, foreign policy, and security officials.

The memo made clear that eight months before the invasion of Iraq, President Bush had already decided on war. British officials were told that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," that the US wanted to avoid consulting the UN, and that few plans were being made for the aftermath of war.

Danner explains how the Downing Street Memo clarifies the broader—and largely concealed—history of the events leading up to the Iraq war. And he argues that in the face of the memo's clear evidence of deception, the press, public, and Congress still have not held the administration responsible. The Secret Way to War, with a preface by by Frank Rich, includes Danner's strongly argued analysis of the Downing Street Memo as well as the complete text of the memo and seven other leaked British documents.

Mark Danner, longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, and contributror to The New York Review of Books, has been honored with many awards, including a National Magazine Award, three Overseas Press Awards, and an Emmy. He is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College.

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POETRY READING & PUBLICATION PARTY
with
Floyd Skloot

In celebration of his new collection of poetry:

The End of Dreams
(Louisana State University Press, 2006)

THURSDAY, APRIL 6TH, 7:30PM
at Looking Glass Bookstore
318 SW Taylor St. Portland

Floyd Skloot is one of Oregon's finest poets, and a long-time friend of Looking Glass Bookstore.
In addition to poetry, Floyd writes memoir and creative fiction,
and has won numerous awards for his writing.

The End of Dreams is a celebration of the human capacity for adaptation amid the cycles of loss and renewal that characterize our intimate lives.

Floyd Skloot mixes dramatic monologue with meditative and narrative verse in poems that explore family experiences, the lives of artists, historical crisis, love, nature, illness, and sudden, unpredictable change. The poet describes moments rich in complexity: when a grandfather’s intentional loss at cards is really a victory of love; when Flannery O’Connor’s waxing and waning illness becomes a merciful strengthening of her faith in death and resurrection; when dreams and reality merge for a man in his final seconds of life. Musical, sometimes funny, sometimes deeply poignant, twining nostalgia with a hard-earned acceptance of the present, these accessible, emotional poems probe the power of our transformative imagination.

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Join Ooligan Press & Gobshite Quarterly for a taste of
the new Croatia

Ooligan Press's Croatian Series includes
Edo Popovic's Zagreb Exit South
&
Gordan Nuhanovic's The Survival League.  

Both writers made their English-language debuts
in Gobshite Quarterly.

As your Rosetta Stone for the New World Order, Gobshite Quarterly continues to introduce
English-language readers to Croatian writers.
(& Algerian & Argentine & Cuban & Swiss....)

Thursday, February 16th, 7 pm
at Looking Glass Bookstore

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Looking Glass Bookstore is proud to host:

WRITERS READ

Featuring emerging voices from the Northwest Writing Institute
at Lewis & Clark College

Thursday, Feb. 9th, 7 pm

A number of writing groups have formed out of workshops at the
Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College. We are creating
a network of groups to share ideas, circulate writing, and to do
public readings together.

This reading will be the first of its kind. Join us to hear emerging voices of this
wonderful group of writers. We invite community members to attend and help us celebrate
the work of the NWI and the new William Stafford Center.

For more information about the upcoming reading, please
contact Diane McDevitt at 503-768-6162 or mcdevitt@lclark.edu.

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Celebrate William Stafford's Birthday!

Thursday, January 12th, 7pm

Bring a favorite Stafford poem as your gift.

The celebration will be hosted by Harold Johnson,
and will begin with readings by the featured poets,
and then will be open for those in the audience who wish to read.

Featuring:
Lois Baker
Ron Bloodworth
Maggie Chula
Leanne Grabel
Diane Holland
Paula Lowden
Sandra Williams
& FWS board member Don Colburn

Sponsored by Looking Glass Bookstore and The Friends of William Stafford.

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Laila Lalami
author of
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits
(Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)
&
Jess Row
author of
The Train to Lo Wu
(The Dial Press)

Tuesday, December 20th, 7pm

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Join us for a poetry reading!

With poets from
Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place

Featuring:

Clem Starck
Katy McKinney
Carlos Reyes
and Windfall editors:
Bill Siverly
Michael McDowell

Thursday, October 6th, 7:30pm

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Looking Glass Bookstore & Gobshite Quarterly proudly present ...

a Reading & Book-signing with

LUISA VALENZUELA

Monday, May 2 at 7pm

Luisa Valenzuela is one of Argentina ’s most significant writers, and one of the most widely translated female South American authors. Her writing weaves politics, feminism, eroticism, and the people and culture of Argentina into incredible narratives that shimmer with magical realism. Her many novels include The Lizard’s Tail, Black Novel with Argentines, He Who Searches, Clara, and Symmetries. 

"Luisa Valenzuela is the heiress of Latin American fiction. She wears an opulent, baroque crown, but her feet are naked." --Carlos Fuentes