Where do the little red dots of literary love come from? Who thinks up and writes the lovely little nuggets of book wisdom and word nerdry? For the first time ever, those dots of brainy flair were created by none other than Art Spark participants. The one found to be the most supreme bit of wise & witty wonderfulness by representatives of January Art Spark’s esteemed featured groups and by the entire congregation of participants, will have the honor of being published on a limited-edition, 1” red button geared toward year-round promotion of Wordstock, our education and cultural programs and, of course, writing.

The theme for the contest in this year of elections was If Writing were running for president, what would Writing’s campaign slogan be? It was quite a difficult task choosing between all the great entries, and our thanks goes to our celebrity judges from The 100th Monkey Studio and Em Space, as well as our fellow groups and attendees at the Art Spark January Event Fair for their aid in making the decision.

Congratulations to the winner of the Wordstock Art Spark Button Contest:

a pen is a pen is a pen
Michael D’Alessandro

In addition to being published on a limited-edition, 1” plastic button read by 20,000 Wordstock attendees, Michael will also receive:
• Free admission to the 2012 Wordstock Book & Literary Festival
• His name listed on the website and at the Wordstock membership and merchandise table
• Facebook and Twitter announcement about winning

And we’d like to extend a big thank you to the dedicated folk at Art Spark that made the night possible and of course everyone for who came out to the event and entered submissions!

Thank you for giving us so much to celebrate! We finished an action-packed 2011 by breaking our 2010 Willamette Week Give!Guide record. You helped us raise $4,440.50 to provide writing instruction to teachers, students, parents, and writers throughout 2012. Thank you! The Meyer Memorial Trust joined you in your support with a grant “to provide core support for literary events and programs in schools and communities”. Thanks to you, Wordstock will be in residence at Sitton, Rosa Parks, Beach, King and Harney elementary classrooms this Spring and preparing for our annual celebration of books, writers and storytelling, the 2012 Wordstock Festival!
Save the dates, October 11-14, and may your new year be full of words.

We’ve wiped the sweat off our brow and boxed up our festival supplies. We’ve had a moment to take a breath and reflect on this year’s festival, and all we can say is “Wow.”

We are amazed at how many people came out to the convention center over the course of the weekend, more than any other year.

We are overwhelmed with the energy and ideas that our authors and vendors brought to the weekend, and from the feedback we’ve gotten so far, the feeling is mutual.

We are awed by the dedication and hard work of the more than two hundred and fifty volunteers who showed up and made the festival possible.

The only thing left to say now is thank you. Thank you to each and every person who participated and made the festival wonderful. We can’t wait to see you all next year!

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