When Carmen T. Bernier-Grand signed a book for Sophie at the Wordstock Festival, it was just the beginning of the relationship. For one week in March, Bernier-Grand became a writer in residence for Sophie’s 3rd grade class at Harney Elementary School.

Bernier-Grand led Sophie and her fellow students through a series of activities writing the first draft of a book. The guidance she provided in her week of residency will result in a bound book that each student will take home at the end of the year.

Bernier-Grand also hosted a Family Write Night at Harney. Over 100 students and parents participated in the activities. She runs her workshops in English and in Spanish, and she encourages her students to write in whatever language feels most comfortable to them.

Teachers say that her bilingual workshops, and personable demeanor that draws in children and parents equally, have created an open atmosphere for families who do not speak English at home. These parents have become more involved in their children’s academic lives as a direct result of her presence in the school.

You can meet Bernier-Grand, and hear her read from her children’s books, April 15th at the upcoming Reading Fair at the University of Portland. She will read her books in the Wordstock Reading Corner in the big red chair. Catch her there, because she soon returns to the classroom for more Family Write Nights and a classroom residency with Harney first graders.

Click here to learn more about Wordstock’s Classroom Residency programs, Family Write Nights, and more programs for students and their families.

Happy Birthday Charles Dickens and Christine White!

That’s right.  February is full of reasons to celebrate.

You know who Charles Dickens is,  but do you know Wordstock’s newest board member?  Meet Christine White, who happens to share February 7 with Mr. Dickens.

Wordstock: Why do you give Wordstock your time and money?

Chris: Because I firmly believe in the power of words to make the world a better place: to comfort, to inspire, to teach, to stimulate new thinking, to entertain and to draw us together.   I have worked in publishing and communication for most of my career and I see the value of literacy everywhere.  Whether content is delivered via an e-reader, a blog, or a good old-fashioned book, the power of good writing speaks for itself – and will continue to do so in the future. Wordstock nurtures and supports these efforts.

Join us in celebrating words and writers in February. Need something for your valentine, perhaps? See our February promotions.

Q: What do Beaumont Middle School, the month of September, and Wordstock have in common?
A: Author Mark Pomeroy!

In September, Mark Pomeroy became a finalist in the Wordstock Short Story competition, earning a coveted place in The Wordstock Ten Anthology, and Kirsten Parrott, a Beaumont teacher who participated in Wordstock’s Teacher as Writer program, contacted the Wordstock office looking for a professional writer who could share his passion for writing with students in a classroom artist residency. Not only was Mark Pomeroy the right fit for her writing goals for her students, but we also learned another way in which this residency was especially meaningful – Mark himself was a graduate of Beaumont in 1983, and it was his middle school creative writing teacher that encouraged him to pursue writing as a profession.

I had the pleasure of sitting in on one of Mark and Kirsten’s classes last week, where I saw seriously engaged 7th graders taking part in a variety of writing exercises to prepare them for writing a short story by the end of his residency week. The energy in the room was palpable, especially when he showed the students a picture of him as a Beaumont student in the early 80s. Mark finishes his residency work at Beaumont on Thursday, and we hope to share some of the student work with you after the holidays!

Guest post by: George Estreich

Author of The Shape of the Eye, George Estreich appears at the Wordstock Festival on Sunday, October 9 at 5pm on the Wieden+Kennedy Stage and will be leading the workshop Imagination and Diagnosis: A Workshop on Writing and Medicine on Sunday, October 9 at 1:30pm.

About ten years ago, I gave up writing poetry. I was thirty-six years old then, and since college, and then my M.F.A., I’d basically organized my life around writing poems. I had poems in little journals, a completed manuscript that had come painfully close in contests, and drafts in progress. But after my daughter Laura was born, then diagnosed with Down syndrome, I stopped altogether.

I write I stopped, using the active voice. In fact, it seemed less a decision than something already decided. Though Laura is a healthy, happy fifth grader now, and her extra chromosome is more asterisk than black hole, her early days were difficult for us. We could not imagine the fact of Down syndrome, or the subsidiary facts of heart surgery or intellectual disability, and with these things on my mind the world of line-breaks seemed distant at best. The old life, it seemed, was a hub, not a destination. I felt if I’d fallen asleep on the tarmac, and awoken to find the plane already in the air.

When we touched down again, when Laura’s medical problems had faded and the shock had worn off and we had begun the long, happy, difficult work of helping a disabled child succeed–her abilities increasing, our minds slowly changing, opening to the true problem, which is not Laura, per se, but the riven contradictions with which the world greets the disabled–I found I was writing prose, a memoir about raising Laura. At some point that memoir became The Shape of the Eye, and this spring it was finally published, by SMU Press.

Writing that book, I soon came to see that giving up poetry was neither as decisive nor complete a change as it had seemed. Apart from the lines being right-justified, the memoir is a lot more like my book of poems than unlike: the voice is the same, concerned with family and inheritance, reliant on metaphor, devoted to questions more than answers. Much is different, of course: narrative, research, larger structures. But writing, word by word, felt much the same.

In time, I came to see that the abrupt-seeming break between writing poems and prose actually disguised a continuity. Poetry, as I write in the memoir, furnished the tools for prose. It is as if I had been a cabinetmaker, and had moved on to building houses. I had to scale up. That realization about writing paralleled a realization about Laura: that despite her chromosome count, she was not radically different from our older daughter Ellie, and so what we had learned with parents with Ellie did in fact apply to Laura. We had thought we were starting over, and we weren’t. What wisdom we had was both available to us and relevant. Our experience, our story, still counted, and Laura was a part of that story.

Writing that story was at once a way for me to imagine Down syndrome, and to help others imagine it too. The happiness of people with Down syndrome depends on their being accurately imagined, and telling Laura’s story was a way both to illuminate her individuality and bear witness to her value. It also offered room to critique the mistaken stories, the tragedies and saccharine feel-good stories and lists of woe, by which people with Down syndrome are too often misunderstood.

Can these goals be accomplished in poetry? Of course. But for me, and because I came to see my book as a work of both advocacy and imagination, a memoir was the way forward. It may not be right, but prose is normative in our culture, and people who wouldn’t touch a book of poems will at least think about reading a memoir. My goal was and is to reach the diverse audiences vested in the issues my book brings up–doctors, parents, specialists, people interested in our genetic future–and prose offers me the best chance of doing so.

Now that the book actually exists in print, a tangible, two-hundred-and-eighty-four-page physical object, I find myself with a larger challenge than switching genres from poetry to prose: I’m trying to publicize a book when the future of physical books is up in the air. We are crossing the border now, between what books were and what they will be. But that, as they say, is another story.

More information about George Estreich and his writings can be found at www.georgeestreich.com

Guest post by: Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

Author of A Tiger in the Kitchen, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan appears at the Wordstock Festival on Saturday, October 8 at 4pm on the Oregon Cultural Trust Stage, is part of the conversation Read My Lips: Telling Stories Through Food on Saturday, October 8 at 3pm on the Oregon Cultural Trust Stage, and is leading the workshop Digging Up Skeletons: How to Mine your Family History for Stories on Sunday, October 9 at 10:30am.

Standing on a rocky precipice, a mist of water enveloping my cheeks, I peered at my first Oregon waterfall and thought: “How did I get here?”

The year was 1995 and I had rather recently decided to leave the only real home I had ever known — faraway tropical Singapore — to travel across the Pacific and pursue my dream of becoming a writer.

Leaving Singapore was no small decision. I was female and had led a relatively sheltered life, sticking close to my parents and the tight-knit family we had in Singapore. And yet when I first confessed the desire to cross the ocean for university, to study journalism and writing and not business or medicine as my family would have much preferred (and respected), my father never dissuaded me. He had raised me in this modern yet still somewhat patriarchal country in Southeast Asia to believe that I, his firstborn child, could be and do anything. And he wasn’t going to waver.

And so it was that I eventually found myself at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and then traveling the country, living and working in places as different from Singapore as I could find. I spent a summer marveling at the vast fields of sunflowers in Kansas, watching lightning storms streak across its inky evening skies. A collection of 70-year-old Italian-American men in Chicago adopted me as their “Chinese granddaughter” when I started dropping by the clubhouse where they had been gathering for decades to play cards and cook against a backdrop of faded Playboy pinup posters from the 1960s.

In Portland, where I spent a spring semester interning at the Oregonian, I discovered my dormant love for the outdoors. Having grown up in a tiny country about ¼ the size of Rhode Island, with much of that land densely packed with tall buildings, I had never been hiking, much less seen a waterfall. Standing at Multnomah Falls that early spring afternoon, I realized how much I had missed — and would have missed had I not had the courage to leave the familiar.

Writing requires such fearlessness — the audacity to venture into the unknown, to trust in your uncertain footsteps to take the lead. The terror of possible failure, of perhaps, not being able to turn back, will often heighten your senses, open your eyes wider.

Many years later, after a journalism career that had led me through the newsrooms of the Baltimore Sun, In Style magazine and the Wall Street Journal, the undiscovered once again called to me. This time, however, it took me to a place that I recognized, but, I realized, only superficially. It took me home to Singapore.

After more than 15 years of living in the United States, the culture of my Singaporean girlhood started drawing me back. More specifically, the food of my girlhood — dishes I had grown up eating and loving but had no idea how to make — began beckoning. As a rebellious girl who had been determined to make my mark as a writer and not a good wife who knew her way around a kitchen, I had rejected the lessons the women in my family had wanted to teach me. Years later, however, in my American kitchen, I was suddenly gripped with a sense of yearning for my late grandmother’s pineapple tarts, my aunties’ braised ducks, my mother’s green bean soup.

It was time, I decided, to go home. And over one lunar calendar year, I traveled to Singapore, entering a domain I had always shunned — the kitchen. At the woks of the women in my family, I finally learned how to cook. Painstakingly, we churned out mooncakes, dumplings, Singaporean coconut jams and more. But above all that, they told me stories of poverty, illegal gambling dens, multiple wives and opium addictions that pockmarked my family’s history — tales I never would have heard had I not decided to take that leap, to slow my life down and finally listen.

My quest is detailed in “A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family,” a story I look forward to sharing on Saturday afternoon (at 3 p.m. and at 4 p.m.) with you.

Whenever I’ve shared the story of my quest to rediscover my culture and Singaporean girlhood through cooking, I’ve often wondered what my Singaporean grandmothers would think. The telling of their story, I realize, would probably be immaterial to them. It’s the courage that led to it that would have made them proud.

If you would like to join me for a Southeast Asian lunch on Sunday, Oct. 9, I will be at Pok Pok (3226 Southeast Division Street) at 1:30 p.m. with the Asian American Journalists Association. Books will be for sale at the lunch and a signing will follow. Admission is $5, and the regular lunch menu will be available. Proceeds of the event will benefit the Asian American Journalists Association-Portland chapter’s stipend fund for Oregon-based interns. Please RSVP to portland.aaja@gmail.com if you would like to attend.

More information about Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan and her book can be found at www.cheryllulientan.com or www.atigerinthekitchen.com

Guest post by: Diana Abu-Jaber

Author of Birds of Paradise, Diana Abu-Jaber appears at the Wordstock Festival on Saturday, October 8 at noon on the National Endowments for the Arts Stage and part of the conversation Read My Lips: Telling Stories Through Food on Saturday, October 8 at 3pm on the Oregon Cultural Trust Stage.

It was Wednesday, another book tour stop, and we were in a little barbeque joint in Memphis talking about Troy Davis.

My friend told me this place had the best barbeque in town. The owner welcomed us to the modest seating area: she wore an all-white suit, a sweet smile, and a gun in a black holster slung on one hip.

After we ordered, they brought us ribs, barbequed chicken, beans, coleslaw, white bread for the sauce, and iced tea. We ate and talked about whether it was too late, whether anything could be done.

When we’d finished, a young man with a sweet smile appeared and cleared away our dishes. He was in the 9th grade, he said. He attended a nearby high school where they’d recently switched from 4 lunch sessions to only 3. “We barely get time to eat,” he mused. “Sometimes you just sit down and they tell you to get on to your next class. So I just don’t eat.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. “How can you learn anything that way?”

“I know!” His smile was tremendous. “I’m very concerned with food too, because I’m a growing boy and I got a stomach!”

He stacked our dishes and complimented us on how hungrily and thoroughly we’d “cleaned up” our plates. He hung around with us for a few minutes, told us he followed his school’s football team and said they were on a winning streak. Then he had to hustle back to work.

That evening, my friend took me on a brief tour of Memphis. We slowed down to peer at the Lorraine Hotel, where Martin Luther King had been shot—and the nearby glass front door where his assassin had climbed the stairs to lay in wait. For a moment, the two places seemed to shimmer with a dim, uncanny light, as if history had cleared, revealing this sorrowful, moonlit tableau, utterly unchanged.

We went on to Beale Street, famous, my friend said, as one of the reputed birthplaces of the blues. The street glittered with colorful diamonds of lights, shining over mobs of wandering tourists.

That night, Troy Davis was executed.

After I turned off the news, I found myself thinking about the young man who’d cleared away our dishes earlier that day. I thought about the reports on how dangerous it is to be a young black man in this country, about the swirl of guns, violence, prejudice, and economic hardship that surrounds their lives. That night at my elegant hotel, the room service waiter, a young black man, hesitated and explicitly asked permission to enter my room, even after I’d swung the door open for him. I’d said, “Of course, please do come in,” but even as he did he’d kept his eyes lowered.

I think of the glitter over Beale Street, how the blues has been transmuted from a rich, full tone to sparkling attraction. My friend, a blues aficionado, says he never goes to Beale Street: “The vibe isn’t right any more.” But the music, the blues, he says, that’s still the same. “Some things never change.”

Tonight, he’ll be driving to Birmingham, Alabama, it’s another day, the next stop on my book tour. I’m going to ask my friend if we can listen to the blues.

More information about Diana Abu-Jaber and her books can be found at www.dianaabujaber.com

Guest post by: Scott Poole

Author of The Sliding Glass Door, Scott Poole appears at the Wordstock Festival on Sunday, October 9 at 4pm on the Attic Institute Stage.

One of the rarest species in the literary world is the humorous free-verse poem. In every other form of literature you have a well-known humorous version of that form. Plays and television shows are called “Comedies”. There are humorous novels and the humorous essay. These are all commonly accepted. So what the hell happened to the humorous poem?

I love to write funny poems and it has always intrigued why there aren’t more. To me it seems like a perfectly suited literary form for humor. Its form is so like the form a joke. It has the setup and the punch line, the quick change of direction, the Riff, the building of an idea to absurdity, the sudden leap from one idea to another. Poetry, like a joke, has them all. To me, the finest standup routines equal poetry.

The funny thing about poetry, excuse the pun, is that poetry is often considered as having only one genre. If someone doesn’t like a poem, they will usually say “I don’t get/like poetry.” Then it’s bye bye poetry, Baby with the bathwater. However, when someone doesn’t like a novel they’ll usually say “I don’t like that writer.” That reader doesn’t give up on novels as a whole. Poetry has genres just like fiction. Humor is just one of them.

There are many fine humorous poets to try when you’re sick of tragic and historical poems and need a little comic relief. Here’s a sampling: Russell Edson, Charles Simic, James Tate, Tony Hoagland, Billy Collins, Philip Dacey, Michael Earl Craig, Kay Ryan, Tom Wayman and Wislawa Szymborska. There’s a couple U.S. Poet Laureates and a Nobel prize winner in there, so you know it can’t be all that bad. So give poetry another chance. Poetry may seem like a sullen Goth loitering in the literary town square, but get to know her and you’ll see she has a sense of humor under all that black eye makeup.

More information about Scott Poole’s book can be found at https://www.colonuspublishing.com/the-sliding-glass-door-promotion-page/

Guest post by: Sara Ryan

Author of The Rules for Hearts, Sara Ryan appears at the Wordstock Festival as part of the conversation Smells Like Teen Spirit on Sunday, October 9 at 2pm on the Oregon Cultural Trust Stage.

I have a Designated Writing Zone in my house. I’ve written many thousands of words in it, and I’ve even blogged about it. But sometimes I need other voices, other rooms. Fortunately Portland has many places where you can park yourself for extended periods of time to work on your manuscript. Here are four I recommend:

Backspace Cafe — This cafe is also an all-ages music venue, so if you arrive in the afternoon and stick around into the evening, expect to experience a shift in the atmosphere. Plus there’s a gaming section, so if you’ve made your wordcount goal and want to reward yourself with some time in World of Warcraft, you totally can.

Press Club — When a restaurant names its menu items after authors, you know they’re the sort of place you can linger with your laptop. The Press Club also has a fine selection of literary and arts magazines, so if inspiration lags, you can be inspired by the works of others.

Southeast Grind — This coffeeshop, which serves the ever-popular Voodoo Doughnuts among its other snack options, is open twenty-four hours. Need I say more?

Sterling Room for Writers, Multnomah County Library — You need to apply to use the Sterling Writers Room, but the application is short and you can fill it out online. You can write elsewhere inside the Central Library, too, of course — but it’s pretty cool to write in an official Writers Room, right?

More information about Sara Ryan and her books can be found at sararyan.com

Guest post by: Jennifer Lauck

Author of Found: The True Sequel to Blackbird, Jennifer Lauck appears at the Wordstock Festival on Sunday, October 9 at 5pm on the Oregon Cultural Trust Stage and is leading the workshop Seven Steps to Writing a Sensational Scene on Saturday, October 8 at 10:30am.

Why would anyone spend eighteen years writing about her own life? Self absorption? Narcissism? Insanity? All of these might be true but maybe not. The truth is, I wrote to answer a very specific question: What happened to my mother?

Let me put my quest in perspective. In the United States, more than one hundred thousand children are adopted annually. This statistic isn’t to judge the practice of adoption but to speak to the fact of the American experience. America is an adoption nation.

And I am one of millions who have been adopted.

Another factor in the American experience of adoption is confusion around the impact on the most silent member of the story—the infant. Do we really understand the science of a babies mind or her connection, in utero, to mother, family, lineage? To ask these kinds of questions makes many in our culture nervous or even angry. Adopted people are told, for the most part, to get over it, move on, be happy they were adopted. A series of articles on Huffington Post show that the debate is active, highly political and charged with emotion. It seems everyone has an opinion about adoption.

From personal experience, I can say the loss of my mother at birth became such a beacon of confusion that left me without a true sense of identity—coupled with the general ignorance of American culture—that the only direction I found available and hospitable was writing.

What began as a question about what I thought was an investigation into the life and death of my adoptive mother (resulting in my first memoir Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found), turned out to be a journey back to find my original mother (resulting in my recent memoir: Found: The True Sequel to Blackbird).

And look. I found my mother. Here is she is. Beautiful, radiant, unique and like me. We have been reunited for many months now and we are enchanted to get to know each other after a forty four year separation. My life makes sense and her long, silent suffering has finally come to an end.

Eighteen years of writing inward, using memoir as my tool to self-awareness, has been the greatest journey of my life. What began as an odd choice has turned out to be nothing less than the reclamation of selfhood and identity. That, for me, has been a worthy quest and a worthy use of my time.

What quest have you gone on that seemed, to others, insane, self absorbed or even narcissistic and yet bore substantial fruit?

More information about Jennifer Lauck and her book can be found at www.jenniferlauck.com

Guest post by: Kevin Renner

Author of In Search of Fatherhood: A Mother Lode of Wisdom from the World of Daughterhood, Kevin Renner appears at the Wordstock Festival on Sunday, October 9 at 5pm on the Wieden+Kennedy Stage.

In the time it takes to read this, about 500 daughters will be born around the world, and about 200,000 will be born today. Some will never know their fathers. Did you? Others will wish they didn’t. Do you?

Still others will treasure the men who helped nurture them through childhood and adolescence, and into womanhood. If that’s you, count your blessing. You drew the long straw.

No one taught your father how to raise his daughter. While growing up men are coached in little league, swim lessons, boy scouts, drivers’ ed. We’re taught how to golf. Manage businesses. Paint houses. Care for sick patients. And yet we’re painfully unguided when it comes to perhaps our most important task: raising our daughters. What we don’t know about fathering daughters has profound consequences for the decades-long trajectory we set them on by our presence or absence in their lives.

Two years ago, at 52, I looked hard at myself and my daughters, then nine and thirteen years old. I realized I’d been so wrapped up in my problems at work and within my marriage that I really hadn’t been the father that I’d wanted to be.

I wondered what I had left to teach my daughters in the little time we had remaining together. I wondered what they’ll long for as women that they didn’t get from me. Or if there was something that they’d in fact absorbed from me that they would treasure.

I had a lot of questions. And not many answers. So I decided to go out into the world and talk with experts. I decided to learn about fatherhood from the hearts and souls of grown-up daughters.

I spent the following year with a digital recorder and 50 women from around the world who shared with me their life stories and how they were shaped by their fathers. I had an up-close view of the pain and joy that fathers fill their lives with, and that set them on a spiral that goes up, down, or sideways.

Over the course of hundreds of hours I took in stories of heroic and horrific fathering. Kara Goucher, the U.S. Olympic runner, lost her father to a drunk driver a week before she turned four. Jeanne’s Zucker’s father, in his late teens and early twenties, lived in a cave and under a barn for three years while hiding from the Nazis. He was nearly killed twice.

Courtney’s father raped her; she pulled his German Luger on him when she was twelve. Wendy’s single father raised her while he attended medical residency; she proposed to him when she was four. Kim’s father came to love her openly and unconditionally after she underwent transgender surgery and treatment and became his daughter, at mid-life.

I had 1,500 pages of transcribed material when I was done, from women across seven decades and seventeen countries. They were rich and poor, well-known and anonymous. I spoke with former Supreme Court justice Betty Roberts and a sex worker. I interviewed executives and women who were homeless or unemployed.

These 50 women gave me the most privileged education of my lifetime. It came together for me this summer as, In Search of Fatherhood: A Mother Lode of Wisdom from the World of Daughterhood. Steve Sanders of WGN TV in Chicago called it, “A playbook for fathers.” That’s true, but it’s also a guidebook for daughters—for women of any age—who want to understand the very essence of their emotional lives and who they’ve become.

I look forward to sharing it with you all on Sunday.

More information about Kevin Renner and his book can be found at www.kevin-renner.com