Guest post by: Benjamin Percy

Author of The Wilding, Benjamin Percy appears at the Wordstock festival on Saturday, October 9th from 12:00-1:15pm for a writer’s workshop in room B119, as well as October 9th at 2:00pm on the Columbia Stage and 4:00pm on the Wieden + Kennedy Stage.

Oregon will eat you. That’s what I told the filmmaker James Ponsoldt (whose excellent Off the Black starred Nick Nolte and Timothy Hutton) before we scouted locations in Central Oregon for the adaptation of my story “Refresh, Refresh.” Every year Mt. Hood crushes people in avalanches, swallows them in snowstorms. Every year hikers vanish in the woods. Every year the riptide sucks swimmers out into the ocean and fills their lungs with water. A wrong step takes someone tumbles off a cliff in the gorge. A wrong turn sends someone down a logging road from which they will never return. I went to school with a girl who skied into a tree and died. I went to school with a boy who snow-mobiled into a tree and died. In Central Oregon, where I grew up, turkey vultures turn in lazy circles, coyotes gnaw on bones, black widows scuttle under porches, and scorpions burrow under rocks.

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