Iris Graville

Writing is a solitary art. Except when it’s not. Much as I revere Michael Ventura’s essay “The Talent of the Room,” I also know that writing is at times – sometimes at the best of times – a collaboration.

Iris Graville’s book, Hands at Work, is the perfect collaborative project. She paired with photographer Summer Moon Scriver to create 24 portraits and profiles of people who work with their hands. In it you’ll find stunning photos of a sculptor, a weaver, a car mechanic, a sign-language interpreter, a midwife, and more.

But that’s not the only collaboration at work. Iris Graville’s written profiles of the workers are thorough, respectful, understated and engaging. Why? Because in a real sense, Graville also collaborates with her subjects. On the page, she gives plenty of space to direct quotes – to the workers telling their stories in their own words – but she melds these quotes seamlessly with her own (craftily “I”-less) observation of the work. The prose is clean and tight and verb-driven, with precise attention to the objects (limestone, lug nuts, reef nets, bread dough) required to do work with your hands. She occasionally weaves in anecdotes from the subject’s past, and she focuses always on the work itself and what it means to the person doing it.

The book is flat out gorgeous, a great gift for anyone who has ever worked with her hands or admires those who do, which is pretty much all of us. And it’s won several major awards including the Pacific Northwest Bookseller Association’s “Buzz Book” of 2009 and the Independent Publishers Award 2009 for Outstanding Book – Most Life Changing.

The book is inspiring. So is Iris. As a first time self-publisher she’s already mastered the art. If you ever get a chance to hear her speak on the subject of creating your own book and taking it out into the world, it’s well worth your time. In the meantime, the book speaks for itself.

http://www.handsworking.com/

Linda Cooper

I’m no poet. So, despite having that master’s degree in the-language-I-learned-when-I-was-two, I’m not in any position to analyze poetry, much less to judge it. I don’t know exactly what makes poetry work, but I know what moves me. And Linda Cooper’s poetry moves me.

In her poems, familiar images from the natural world—leaves and rocks, insects and mosses, water and sky—suddenly have the capacity to startle me. Sometimes it’s the juxtaposition: the unlikely combination, the sound of this word with that. More often it’s a kind of seduction. I follow an idea where I think it’s going, then it takes a wild turn and evokes an emotion I didn’t even know was there: grief, exuberance, hope, fear, longing, emotions sometimes tumbling so fast, one after the next, that I feel off-balance. The experience is part-epiphany and part-healing, always a delight.

You can read examples in literary journals like Hayden's Ferry Review, West Branch, Third Coast, Willow Springs, Hubub, Elixir, Diner, Midwest Quarterly, and Redactions and at the links below.

http://weberstudies.weber.edu/archive/archive%20D%20Vol.%2021.2-25.2/Vol.%2022.3/Cooper%20Poe.htm

http://www.versedaily.org/2005/ponderousborer.shtml

http://www.versedaily.org/2005/vessellc.shtml

Wait! That’s not all! Linda Cooper is a nonfiction writer, too, and her essays have that same magic quality that her poems do with an extra-generous helping of her trademark humor. (Everyone I know who ever received one of Linda Cooper’s hilarious holiday letters has kept them to this day.) You can find her essays in Open Spaces: Views from the Northwest, and Concho River Review, and look for her collection, Echolocation, to appear sooner than later.


Little known fact (well, actually semi-well-known in some circles):
Linda Cooper also sings a mean karaoke version of “Dream On."


Steven Tyler beware!

David Oates

A couple of years ago, David Oates showed up in Stehekin looking for some quiet space in which to finish up his most recent book, What We Love Will Save Us. He’d arranged to stay in a small cabin near the river, but that wasn’t to be. Mid-visit the river rose with spring snowmelt and he ended up bunking on high ground at our place for a few days while we were out of town. Upon return, I joined him as he ventured out through the muddy slough to collect the gear he’d left in the riverside cabin. Here he is on that day, testing the waters, in his hip waders.

It’s a fitting image for David’s work. His long and prolific career, as a poet and essayist, has often taken him into turbulent waters. Whether challenging wilderness philosophy in Paradise Wild or lobbying for the crucial character of urban spaces in City Limits: Walking Portland’s Boundary (to which I contributed the short essay “A View from Teensy Town”) or always – in the forefront of his work or the not-so-distant background – telling his own story of coming out as a gay man in a strict Baptist household, his voice is courageous and steady, empathetic, and original.

What We Love Will Save Us is a collection of mostly very short essays that cover all of that terrain and more, wading into the contentious politics of the last decade – war, torture, scandal, and the rest -- and coming to the conclusion of the fabulous title: What We Love Will Save Us. “Our job is to work on what we love,” he writes. “Daily. With precision and determination.”

You can check out the title essay as it appeared originally in High Country News:
www.hcn.org/issues/332/16642

And you can read more about the book here:
http://www.whatwelovewillsaveus.com/

Jerry Gabriel

As promised I'm planning to spend the weeks before Test Ride appears discussing lesser-known writers I admire.

This week I start with Jerry Gabriel. His first book represents the culmination of more than ten years of work. And it paid off. Not only did Drowned Boy win the 2008 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction from Sarabande Books, the book has also been chosen a Barnes & Noble "Discover Great New Writers" selection and is 2010 Barnes & Noble Discover Award finalist.

What I most admire about these fabulous linked stories set in rural southeast Ohio is the seamless way that landscape and longing and community combine in prose that’s honed, spare, and often, astonishingly, funny. The dialogue between the two main characters, Nate and Donnie Holland, brothers as different as day and night, is wry and affectionate, snappy and original.

In the title story, a grief-struck teenager considers geological history: “The idea that a river might change direction had captivated Samantha at a time when almost nothing sparked any real interest in her.” In “Marauders,” a whole slew of old-timers latch onto the local elementary school basketball team like rock star groupies: “We traveled like gypsies to these little towns—places called Mudsock and Comersville and just plain Water.”

You read a lot these days about a “sense of place” in writing, usually it means extra-lyrical prose about extra-pristine landscapes. (Yep, guilty as charged.) These stories evoke place plainly, and therefore elegantly. They show how places – pristine and, especially, not-so-pristine – mold us irrevocably, then shift unexpectedly. In the closing story “Reagan’s Army in Retreat,” Nate goes looking for Donnie only to stumble upon a house fire after which all that remains is a talking robot trivia game on eight track tapes stuck in the snow, a game that had once belonged to the boys. If there’s a more poignant image of loss, I can’t conjure it. And if a better book of short stories comes out this year, I’ll be surprised.

Foot dragged into the future .. uh, the now

So I started a facebook fan page. http://www.facebook.com/business/dashboard/#/pages/Ana-Maria-Spagna/359334945433

And as an antidote to all this embarrassing self-promotion, starting soon, I plan to dedicate this space to some of my favorite lesser known writers. Stay tuned!

Never say never

There are some topics I never figured I'd write about. Christmas is one. But things change. Here's "Christmas Naked" from the current issue of Mountain Gazette. It's not nearly as risque as it sounds. And I'm forever grateful to John Fayhee, the brilliant curmudgeonly editor at MG, who keeps throwing these unlikely topics my way.

http://www.mountaingazette.com/news/mountain_notebook/christmas_naked/

"Spawning in Mud," meanwhile, is a title that Laurie gets full credit for. An oldie of sorts, about the 2003 flood that changed things a lot in Stehekin, it appears in the current issue of Watershed journal from Brown U

Fast words, slow words

For several years now, ever since we got our satellite Internet connection, I’ve been thinking about how many words I spit out each day – in emails, student critiques, press releases—and whether any of that counts as writing. The answer is sort of. But not really. It’s kind of like the difference between fast food and real food.

When my first book, Now Go Home, came out a reporter asked me how long it took me to write an essay.
“About a year,” I said.
He nearly fell over laughing.
“Is it getting any easier for you?” he asked.

I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure I wanted it to get any easier. The long process of writing, revising, then writing some more, was, I thought, the whole point. Every writer I knew and admired had spent years on a single essay or story. Maybe not every single essay or story, but still …

Truth is, five years later, the process is easier for me. Essays come faster. Sometimes in less than a week. But the books I love the most simmered for a long time. And the writers I admire the most are the ones who have stuck at it for years. They’re not necessarily bestselling authors, but they are real writers, who have what Michael Ventura calls the “Talent of the Room.”

http://www.michaelventura.org/writings/LA4.pdf

That is, I suppose, what I aspire to.