Readings

I don't go to many readings, and I don't do many. However, I jump at any chance I get to read in Eastern Oregon. Invite me to La Grande, Enterprise, Baker, and I'll be there! The last time I was there was on an Oregon Book Award tour.

The last reading I did was a couple years ago on Mississippi Avenue. I only did it because the street is special to me, where I lived in 1967 when I first starting publishing in the literary magazines. Where I became a writer. I went and wasn't disappointed. I read my very short story, "Meeting Nicole Kidman," and it went over well.

Today I'm going again for reasons of place and nostalgia. I was asked to participate in a neighborhood festival where I haven't lived for over a decade, but I was a visible presence when I was there. Fond memories of those times, the 80s in NW Portland, when (according to my NY agent at the time) the neighborhood was "the way Greenwich Village used to be." Long gone and no more. But I'll take the stage for fifteen minutes and relive the past a little, before gentrification crucified Portland's soul.

I'm reading from Christmas at the Juniper Tavern by request. I'll read a few monologues from the play and close with two logging poems by Fred Ross, the Poet of Juniper Mountain, including this short one, my favorite:

His hickory shirt was glazed with dirt
as he stepped up to the bar.
"Gimme a shot of rotgut whiskey
and the butt on an old cigar.
I'm in from the cold where the vine maples grow
and the dogwoods bloom in the spring.
I've been in the woods for thirty years
and I haven't accomplished a thing."