Calendar
BOOK LAUNCH | Between Two Worlds: My Fifty Years in the Gurdjieff Work by James Opie
Between Two Worlds: My Fifty Years in the Gurdjieff Work James Opie | Foreword by Jeff Zaleski
Published by Monkfish in 2026
James Opie is a well-known figure in Portland, having been a successful rug dealer here for several decades, before retiring to upstate New York in 2021.
He is also an accomplished author, having written well-regarded books on tribal rugs from Afghanistan, Iran, and surrounding regions. He has now written a memoir, Between Two Worlds: My Fifty Years in the Gurdjieff Work. It is an engaging and candid account of a full and interesting life.
The book effortlessly combines bildungsroman, travelogue, and personal accounts of the trials of building a successful business, and of spiritual search. It starts with several chapters on Opie’s early life, including his involvement with the counterculture in California, and the threat of conscription for the Vietnam War. Well-chosen stories provide intimations of future developments that seemed unlikely at the time.
As the title indicates, the central theme of the book is the author’s long engagement with the teaching of the Greek-Armenian spiritual master G.I. Gurdjieff, commonly referred to as ‘the Work’. Opie writes of the challenges faced by any spiritually centered community, alongside the opportunities for self-knowledge that an intentional community can provide. One highlight of the book describes how the business and spiritual worlds came together in Afghanistan, through an unlikely chain of events.
An online review observes: "In the end, this memoir-with-Gurdjieff reveals how inner efforts and fortuitous help incrementally make a man more mature and serious, though still remaining a beginner."
“A worthy memoir steeped in an underdiscussed philosophical and spiritual tradition.”-- Kirkus Reviews
BOOK LAUNCH | Civil Rights and Structural Attacks: Conversations with Jesse Strauss and Walter Riley - Hosted by Mic Crenshaw
Join us to celebrate the launch of Civil Rights and Structural Attacks: Conversations with Walter Riley (Legacy Left / AK Press) with Jesse Strauss and Walter Riley in person, hosted by Mic Crenshaw.
Eighty years of lessons from the Black freedom struggle, labor movements, and internationalism.
This text is a multi-generational conversation between legendary Civil Rights organizer Walter Riley and longtime friend and Oakland organizer, Jesse Strauss. Together, they reflect on the importance of political action as the primary venue for learning and reflection. Walter Riley has a never-ending commitment to building a better world and he'll challenge readers to avoid the paralysis of analysis that slows movements down and to avoid getting caught in the missives of ego. Includes a foreword by Walter Riley's son, Boots Riley.
Jesse Strauss is an anti-imperialist and abolitionist cultural worker, community organizer, musician, and journalist born and raised in Oakland and Berkeley (unceded Ohlone/Chochenyo land). He is an anti-zionist descendent of Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide and was raised by parents engaged in radical queer healthcare and immigration asylum access work in the Bay Area. As a journalist, Jesse has a long working relationship with KPFA Radio, where he co-created the first-ever daily abolitionist radio show, Law & Disorder. He was a producer for Al Jazeera during the so-called "Arab Spring" and "Occupy" movements.
Walter Riley grew up as a civil rights activist in the Jim Crow South, chaired Durham, North Carolina's Young Adult NAACP, organized voter registration, sit-ins, job campaigns, and was a Field Secretary for CORE in the Southeast Region. He became a San Francisco State University activist for ethnic studies, and was a member of the Black Student Union and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Riley has worked as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer since the 1980s. He is a loving father and grandfather.
Civil Rights and Structural Attacks: Conversations with Walter Riley will be published on June 23 on AK Press
BOOK LAUNCH | The Return of the 90s A Cultural History of the Present
BOOK LAUNCH: THE RETURN OF THE '90s
Wednesday, June 24 · 6:30 PM
Join us for the launch of The Return of the '90s: A Cultural History of the Present, edited by Madeline Lane-McKinley and Sean O'Brien.
This anthology dives into the contemporary fascination with the '90s. Plotting a playful course between sociology and cultural studies on the one hand, and giddy nostalgia on the other, the book charts decisive developments of the decade to fully apprehend its resonances today. Covering everything from 'girl power,' Star Trek and hip-hop, to queer cinema, anarchist counterculture and the erotic thriller, The Return of the '90s excavates key moments in '90s culture and uncovers its multiple reckonings in the present.
Madeline Lane-McKinley is a writer, editor, and cultural critic based in Portland, Oregon. Her books include Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times, Solidarity with Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy, and Fag/Hag. She is also an editor for Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry, a contributor to the Museum of Capitalism.
Poetry & Strings | A fundraiser for L’école buissonnière
On Friday, June 26, from 5-9 pm, please join us for a fundraiser to support ongoing payments on and improvements to the Historic Nathaniel West Building No. 1, home to Mother Foucault’s Bookshop and l'école buissonnière, a nonprofit dedicated to creating the conditions for art, literature, music, and subversive play to thrive. This fundraiser, a rare evening combining poetry and strings, will also support l’école buissonnière’s ongoing and upcoming programs and services.
The fundraiser will be held at Mother Foucault’s Bookshop, located on the border of Portland’s inner-southeast industrial district. Founded in 2009, Mother Foucault’s Bookshop specializes in books in translation, foreign language books, poetry, and philosophy. The bookshop offers a perfectly cozy, unique space to enjoy poetry and string music.
Tickets: Sliding Scale - $10-15. Please RSVP here and pay at the door (Cash or Venmo).
Doors at 5 pm.
Fundraising/Mingling 5-6 pm.
Event at 6 pm.
With Poetry Readings from
Maudie Ainsworth, Ed Skoog, Shawn Levy, Joshua Pollock, Kayla Kennett, Grace, Pablo Murillo-Edwards
Musicians
Hannah Morton - Kitchen Congregation (solo project of Hannah Morton) crawls under your skin and performs in your heart. She writes sincerely from memory and experience using vivid, surreal, dreamlike imagery. She gently sweeps us from the tender to the epic. Every song contrasting, and complimenting the wide array of complicated feelings we all share. There is an obvious attempt at honest self expression, and innovation within her chosen discipline. Her dedication to her practice is apparent in her confident poise. Hannah is an artist that makes those intangible ubiquitous feelings tangible with great effect.
Alexis Mahler - Michigan-made, and classically trained, Mahler has made a musical home for herself in Portland, Oregon. Quieting rooms with her intimate blend of classical, jazz, and folk - she has endeared herself to audiences across the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Her music contains thoughtful, elegant strings layered with memorable, and sweetly delivered vocal melodies. In her own words: “Music should be connective, accessible, expressive, expansive, often imperfect, healing - a release”.
The beauty and power that Alexis Mahler creates with her voice and cello is simply mesmerizing. With patient and confident phrasing, a soothing resonance of vulnerability and strength, Mahler has delivered a poignant and intimate EP titled Away that draws us directly into her being. Songs of heartbreak, taking space, rebuilding a life, self care, or maybe — self survival. These are pertinent emotions in a world that is pleading to wake up tomorrow more empathetic than it did today.” — Glide Magazine
Yucky Star - You may know Kate Koller as the player of dreamy cello lines that make you drool, yucky star is all the magic you’ve always known to come from kate & then some. What was once in danger of becoming a collection of unfinished songs is finally making its way to the ears of listeners in portland & soon beyond, and the world is all the better for it. Their stream of consciousness lyrics flow like honey. With distinctive guitar parts in sticky nonstandard tunings you might be tempted to steal.
Emma Smith - Emma Smith is a cellist, guitar player and singer / songwriter based in Portland, OR.
Joe Kye - Joe Kye is a musician and storyteller based in Portland, Oregon. Joe’s music is a tapestry of his many influences as a Korean American immigrant. His latest project explores his roots, melding Korean traditional sounds with everything from jazz to electronic music. Tenderhearted and peaceful, Joe’s work fosters a sense of deep internal reflection, healing, and spirituality. Joe’s recorded a Tedx Talk, been featured on NPR’s The World, and was a 2023 Oregon Arts Commission Fellow.
“You’re a different kind of doctor. A soul doctor.” - A Filipino Mom
Andrew Jones - PDX Bassist, improviser, songwriter, arranger and recording / mixing engineer
Autumn Bradford - Cellist, collaborator and member of the post metal band - Larkspur - Autumn has performed on several pdx stages and become engrained into the PDX string scene since relocating to Oregon.
Twin Bridges - Twin Bridges (Zachery G) is a cellist & songwriter from New Mexico, currently in Portland, OR. Twin Bridges creates live loops on cello and the project features a band of friends playing woodwinds, brass, bass and drums. Twin Bridges songs can be described as pensive, dark and melodic. Twin Bridges will be releasing their second full band album this winter on AudioSport Records.
BOOK LAUNCH |Midwestern Death Trip by Meaghan Garvey
Propelled by her mother’s death into a half-life of drug-dealing boyfriends and shivery mornings, Meaghan Garvey finds salvation in dingy dive bars—and in being the stranger who is always moving on to somewhere else. When chance gifts her with a Cadillac with a blood-red paint-job and matching leather seats, Garvey sets out on an amphetamine-fueled road-trip through her native Midwest in the hopes of resolving the mysteries of her itinerant personal life through encounters with the places and characters that define her imagination: Water demons, lake camps; haunted houses; ship-wrecks; Truckers on speed; roadside waitresses; wise-cracking barflies and Jeffrey Epstein's personal exterminator. Part coming-of-age memoir and part 1940s film noir jail-break, Midwestern Death Trip combines the thrill of the open road amid a haunted landscape of back-woods diners and small-town bar tops. A speed demon’s encounter with the depths of American loneliness from the Hunter Thompson of the 2020s.
Meaghan Garvey
Meaghan Garvey is a writer from Chicago. Midwestern Death Trip is her first book
AUTHOR TALK | BACKGROUND ARTIST: THE LIFE AND WORK OF TYRUS WONG by Karen Fang in conversation with Jay Ponteri
Join us on Monday, June 29 at 6:30 pm for an author talk with Karen Fang, in conversation with Jay Ponteri.
You might not know the name Tyrus Wong, but you probably know many of the images he shaped, including scenes from the beloved Disney classic Bambi. Yet when he came to this country as a child, Tyrus was an illegal immigrant locked up in an offshore detention center. How did he go on to a long and prosperous career drawing animation cels, storyboards, and greeting cards that shaped the American imagination?
Background Artist is a kaleidoscopic story about the immigrant origins of some of America's best loved visual imagery. Sharing the inspiring story of Tyrus Wong's remarkable 106-year life, this biography showcases the artist's wide array of creative work, from the paintings and fine art prints he made working for Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration to the unique handmade kites he designed in his retirement to fly on the Santa Monica Beach. It tells how Tyrus came to the United States as a 10-year-old boy in 1920, at a time when the Chinese Exclusion Act barred him from legal citizenship. Yet it also shows how Tyrus found American communities that welcomed him and nurtured his artistic talent. Covering everything from his work as a studio sketch artist for Warner Bros. to the best-selling Christmas cards he designed for Hallmark and other greeting card companies, this book celebrates a multi-talented Asian-American artist and pioneer.
"The definitive new biography." —Smithsonian Magazine
Karen Fang is a film scholar and visual culture critic who writes and speaks for museums and film festivals around the world. Known for previous books about Hong Kong cinema and nineteenth-century British interest in exotic objects, Karen often writes about the intersection of eastern and western aesthetics.
Listen to this episode of Biographers in Conversation — film scholar Karen Fang joins Dr. Gabriella Kelly-Davies to discuss her biography of Tyrus Wong.
Jay Ponteri directs the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing program at PNCA. Somone Told Me was published by Widow+Orphan House in fall 2020. His memoir, Wedlocked, was published by Hawthorne Books, April 2013, and it received the 2014 Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. His chapbook of short prose, Darkmouth Strikes Again, was published by Future Tense Books, summer 2014. His essay “Listen to this” was mentioned as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2010, and more recently, “On Navel Gazing” was mentioned as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2015. He has published prose in Knee-Jerk, Essay Daily, Ghost Proposal, Seattle Review, Salamander, and Forklift, Ohio, among others.
Other People's Poems (OPP)
Other People's Poems (OPP)
Memorize someone else’s poem and come recite it (or just listen).
Friday, July 3
7 PM sharp
715 SE Grand Ave
POP-UP | Handmade Palestine
Join us Saturday, July 4th for a pop-up with Morgan Cooper Totah of Handmade Palestine at Mother Foucault's during regular shop hours.
Handmade Palestine is a fairtrade handicraft marketplace that supports and empowers female Palestinian artisans to sustain their livelihoods under military occupation. The social enterprise is run by a team of volunteers who work with many artisans and women’s cooperatives across the country.
It was founded by American, Morgan Cooper Totah, in 2013 with a small display in the corner of a local Ramallah cafe. From 2015 to 2021, Handmade Palestine built its first online community through Etsy, connecting artisans in Palestine with customers around the world. In February 2021, the brand launched its independent website, creating a permanent home for the growing network of makers and their stories.
What started with five artisan groups has grown into partnerships with more than 30 artisan groups and women’s cooperatives, alongside dozens of small businesses across Palestine. The artisans include generational silversmiths, olive wood carvers, brass artisans, micro-mosaic artists, ceramists, weavers, embroiderers, soap makers, designers, writers, and visual artists. Many are women sustaining their families and preserving cultural heritage through skilled handwork passed down across generations.
Handmade Palestine works closely with its partners to support fair income, international market access, and skills development. Each piece shipped abroad represents not only craftsmanship, but resilience, continuity, and dignity.
All profits from Handmade Palestine are reinvested into Mashjar Juthour, a regenerative land and arboretum project in Ramallah dedicated to protecting indigenous Palestinian trees, restoring biodiversity, and creating educational space for future generations. In this way, every purchase supports both artisan livelihoods and long-term stewardship of the land.
Handmade Palestine is more than a marketplace — it is a bridge between heritage and modern life, connecting global customers to the depth, skill, and resilience of Palestinian artisans.
Morgan Cooper Totah, is an urban farmer, designer, and the founder of Handmade Palestine. She is also the creator of Little Olea, a natural teething and nursing brand inspired by motherhood and olive wood craftsmanship.
In 2010, Morgan left academia to move to Palestine and build an arboretum with her husband on Ramallah Heritage Land. Since then, her work has centered on land stewardship, craft preservation, and building sustainable livelihoods for artisan communities.
She lives in Ramallah with her husband, Saleh Totah, and their two young children, in the home his father built. When she’s not working alongside artisan partners, she can be found fermenting vegetables, learning more about Palestinian heritage, and baking with her five-year-old on their urban farm.
handmadepalestine.com
https://www.instagram.com/handmadepalestine/
juthour.org
Author Talk — Robert K. Brigham | "This Is a True War Story"
Join us on Monday, July 13 at 6:00pm for an author talk withRobert K. Brigham.
Robert K. Brigham has had a substantial career as a historian of the Vietnam War, with a hand in nine books, a documentary, public history projects, and more. While many a historian has felt compelled at some point to write about a subject close to them personally, Brigham did not think he was doing that. But, at age fifty-eight, Brigham, who had long known he was adopted, discovered that he'd improbably and unknowingly been studying and talking about his biological father for decades. That man, Bruce Atwell, was a Marine Corps photographer who took some of that war's most indelible and widely reproduced pictures. Brigham had used those images over and over again in decades' worth of classes and public lectures, never knowing the truth.
Both Brigham and Atwell were products of the American foster care and adoption system, and both were defined professionally by Vietnam. In a story shot through with echoes and shadows, Brigham not only reveals his own history as an adoptee but opens a startlingly fresh vantage on the fragility of American families; the power of social norms and taboos to shape lives; and the forces that inequitably disrupt families, not least of them war. The result is an accessible and moving book that is at once both a powerful personal story and an illuminating social critique.
Free and open to all.
Other People's Poems (OPP)
Other People's Poems (OPP)
Memorize someone else’s poem and come recite it (or just listen).
Friday, August 7
7 PM sharp
715 SE Grand Ave
PALLIGRAPHY | the magic of end-of-life storytelling
Palligraphy - the magic of end-of-life storytelling
Sabrina Görlitz is a writer, hospice companion and palliative care lecturer from Hamburg, Germany.
She has invented "palligraphy", a short biography written at the end of life that captures the most important stages and formative memories of palliative care patients - a wonderful opportunity to securely record personal thoughts about life and death for family and friends.
Introducing her special approach based on Joseph Campbell's "the hero's journey" to the US for the first time, Sabrina will tell us more about the palligraphy process and share some very moving patient stories with us. They illustrate how the power of story can bring peace, healing and relief - even in the midst of utter heartbreak.
BOOK LAUNCH | John James — Extinction Song
Extinction Song combines fixed poetic forms with longform meditative lyrics to explore questions of agency in the Anthropocene. The book begins with a tender depiction of early parenthood, as the speaker cradles his newborn son while imagining a dystopian climate future. The poems open into a broader consideration of overlapping and interrelated systems, from the confines of received knowledge to the closed circuit of ideology to the circularity of pollutive environmental cycles. Attentive at the levels of sound and of visual architecture, these poems highlight both destruction and unseen possibilities. By turns meditative and probing, and sometimes slyly funny, these poems highlight the perils and the joys of our precarious climate future.
John James
John James is the author of two collections of poetry, The Delusion of Being Absolute (Milkweed, forthcoming 2028) and The Milk Hours (Milkweed, 2019), selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. He is also the author of three chapbooks, most recently Extinction Song (Tupelo, 2026), winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, New England Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere, and his work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, the Academy of American Poets, and the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. He holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia and is completing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley.
"The feeling and thinking in Extinction Song arise from the experience of fatherhood in a time of climate crisis. An immaculate craftsman, James has fashioned a prosody that holds in productive relation 'the real and imminent,' the provocative fact that life 'tends/in directions/almost infinite' even during the Sixth Extinction. Most intimate in their meticulousness, each syllable bearing his measured touch, these agile lines track the syntax of 'thought as it motions/through the channels of the mind' until the experience of 'feeling/thinking' comes alive with riveting immediacy. Calling upon the power of a visionary tradition that includes Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Duncan, and Inger Christensen, Extinction Song reveals the peril and terror within the way we love this world." —Brian Teare, author of Doomstead Days and Poem Bitten by a Man
BOOK LAUNCH & READING | "Of Women" by Naoko Fujimoto with guest Charity E. Yoro
Of Women is a collection of translations of Japanese waka-poems from the seventh century to the twelfth century, featuring twenty female poets from this period, when Japanese women’s literature flourished. This book includes poems by famous writers from the era, such as Sei Shonagon (The Pillow Book) and Murasaki Shikibu (The Tale of Genji), and introduces some lesser-known female poets as well.
Waka compacts much information in a short form: words with double meanings, unfamiliar phrases, habits foreign to non-Japanese speakers, and hidden historical backgrounds. Direct translations would fail to capture the author’s full intent, so Of Women takes several approaches to capture the original sensory images, including text collage and haibun, as well as short essays that provide historical context and introduce the author before each waka.
Naoko’s work has already garnered impressive praise from established voices:
Of women gathers the poems of twenty Japanese women, many unnamed, from the 7th to 12th centuries, who wove longing, politics, beauty, and defiance into the compact form of waka. Fujimoto makes brilliant use of a “thick” approach, contextualizing her elegant translations with haibun-style reflections and visual art that both honor and explode the forms of the originals. In these pages, forgotten voices are reclaimed and reimagined, speaking with clarity and grace to our time.
–Geoffrey Brock
Of Women: 20 Japanese Female Poets / 20 Waka Poems translated by Naoko Fujimoto is an astonishing collection that steals us into the most intimate chambers of the heart, its diamond-like facets illuminated by women poets of the Heian era, each as brilliant and original as Fujimoto’s remarkable renderings. Her haibun approach carefully nestles these Waka poems in striking historical and social contexts while providing both visual and phonetic interpretations that reveal not only the breath of each poem but the forbidden heat of each poet’s afterlight with sensorial pleasure. These poems transcend what one might know of translation, operating as layered maps through emotionally fraught labyrinths that swell with color and surprise, breathless when whispering: “So show me / your tears, / your crimson / forlorn.” Humid with longing or haunted by desires smoldering in the thick of personal and political entanglements, Fujimoto parts the clouds of anonymity so that each poet emerges majestic and full like the moon, gifting us monuments of spiritual fortitude and literary mastery that accompany us in the heavens through the long and pulsing night.
—Monica Ong
Here’s more information about the translator and her achievements:
Naoko Fujimoto was born and raised in Nagoya, Japan. She is a poet and translator. Her poetry collections are "We Face The Tremendous Meat On The Teppan", winner of C&R Press Summer Tide Pool Chapbook Award by C&R Press (2022), "Where I Was Born", winner of the editor's choice by Willow Books (2019), "Glyph:Graphic Poetry=Trans. Sensory" by Tupelo Press (2021), and four chapbooks.
She is a RHINO associate & translation editor and Tupelo Quarterly translation editor. She is a Bread Loaf Translation full scholarship recipient and the 2023 Visiting Teaching Artist at the Poetry Foundation. Her first translation chapbook is available from Toad Press in the fall of 2024.
Charity E. Yoro (she/her) is a poet whose writing has appeared on The Rumpus, poets.org, Tupelo Press Quarterly, West Trestle Review, PRISM International, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere, and has received Pushcart Prize and Orison Anthology nominations. Her debut poetry collection ten-cent flower & other territories (First Matter Press) was named the 2025 Oregon Book Award winner for the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry. Born, raised, and educated on the east side of O‘ahu, she currently lives west of Denver with her wild, loving family.
BOOK LAUNCH | Blue Selvage by Preeti Parikh
Blue Selvage reminds us that a revolutionary message often requires new forms of discourse.
The poems in Blue Selvage weave lyric, essay, documentary fragments, and historical reckoning into an exploration of skin, cloth, color, and form as living archives—where the gendered, racialized, and colonial histories inscribed on the body are continually exposed, resisted, and re-stitched through memory, touch, and language itself.
Preeti Parikh’s debut poetry collection is a mapping of boundaries, a (re)framing of fractured interiority, a text(ile) unfurling across shifting homelands. In this deeply embodied, formally daring meditation, the corpus is both archive and threshold, a site where “what’s felt becomes the body, what’s draped becomes form.” Here, passion for indigo, a medical-science informed perspective, fascination with the materiality of cloth and skin, and a journeying towards reclamation interlace with feminist inquiries and cultural examination to conceptualize the poems’ multivalent inhabitances.
Expansive in its rhetorical modes and landscapes, Blue Selvage is unified by a remarkable singularity of voice and vision through which Parikh skillfully invokes form as metaphor, performance, dramatization, and content. Throughout the book, recurrent vocabularies and silences—integument, selvage, gaze—operate as warp and weft, binding personal experience to collective striving, devotion, and survival. Meanwhile, on the page, multilingual textures and typographic openness resist closure, offering apertures for looking within and without. What emerges is a capacious field of attention, where intimacy and history press against one another, and where writing itself becomes an act of unstitching and re-making—an ethical, sensuous practice of staying with what the body remembers and what culture would prefer to erase.
Preeti Parikh is a poet and essayist with a past educational background in medicine and a recent MFA from The Rainier Writing Workshop. A Kundiman Fellow and National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant award and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence award. Parikh’s poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Margins, Zócalo Public Square, and elsewhere. Her writing is anthologized in Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World, the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, and The Last Milkweed, the last of which was also published by Tupelo. Parikh has been a Millay Arts resident and an AWP Writer to Writer Program mentee and has received staff scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Born and raised in India, she lives with her family in Ohio.
BOOK LAUNCH | THE WISDOM OF FEELING by Genny Rumancik
We can name our triggers, set boundaries, and explain our attachment styles—so why are we still stuck in the same patterns?
From TikTok therapy language to bestselling books on trauma and emotional health, a generation of readers is more self-aware than ever before. But awareness alone hasn't translated into change.
In THE WISDOM OF FEELING, educator and EQ School founder Genny Rumancik delivers what's been missing: a practical, real-world guide to what to do next. Blending emotional intelligence with tools drawn from therapy, nervous system science, and relational psychology, Rumancik shows readers how to move from insight to actual transformation.
Genny Rumancik is a mental health advocate, educator, and founder of The EQ School, which offers courses and online resources to improve self-awareness, emotional self-management, and relational health. Her work has reached a growing audience of more than 300K followers across social channels, alongside a thriving community of students and participants in her programs. Known for her grounded, compassionate teaching style, she helps people develop the emotional intelligence needed to build healthier relationships and more authentic lives.
BOOK LAUNCH | TEARS ARE EVERYWHERE by Kira Lynn Cain
Join us on Saturday, June 13, at 4pm for the launch of TEARS ARE EVERYWHERE, the debut book from artist and author Kira Lynn Cain.
Existing within its own teary universe, Tears Are Everywhere offers the concision of a children's book, the visual and tactile pleasures of an art monograph, and the interpretative contemplation of abstract art, all in one hardcover volume written and illustrated by artist and author Kira Lynn Cain. Immersive and minimal at once, Tears is a textural story, an invitation to a curious world, and an art book for all ages. Cain uses distinct mark-making and poetic language to share a new concept of what tears might be. This book, while informed by philosophy and contemporary art, takes its own idiosyncratic approach to tears, proving their ubiquity and tender power.
Tears Are Everywhere is published by Portland's own Buckman Publishing.
Free and open to all.
Monika Herceg |“Closed Season” Reading and conversation with Alicia Jo Rabins
Join us for an evening with award-winning Croatian poet, playwright, and novelist Monika Herceg, in conversation with Portland writer and musician Alicia Jo Rabins, celebrating her newest English-language collection, Closed Season.
Monika Herceg is an award-winning Croatian poet, playwright, and novelist, widely recognized as one of the most compelling contemporary literary voices from Southeast Europe. Her first poetry collection to appear in English, Initial Coordinates, was praised by the Los Angeles Review of Books as the work of "a major Croatian poet." Her newest English-language collection, Closed Season, transforms the idea of the "closed season", the brief period when hunted animals are protected into a devastating metaphor for women's lives under patriarchal violence. Fierce, formally inventive, these poems fuse the precision of physics with political urgency, exploring the body, power, motherhood, vulnerability, rage, and survival. Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk has described Herceg's poetry as "like a wound through which the world shines," praising its truth, anger, and hope for new stories
🎾 Portland Tennis Courterly: Big Issue Release Party
Portland Tennis Courterly: Big Issue Release Party
https://tenniscourterly.com/
Saturday, June 6, 2026
7:00 PM
Other People's Poems (OPP)
Other People's Poems (OPP)
Memorize someone else’s poem and come recite it (or just listen).
Friday, June 5
7 PM sharp
715 SE Grand Ave
Allen Ginsberg Centennial Reading hosted by Dan Raphael and Christopher Luna
Allen Ginsberg Centennial Reading
Hosted by Dan Raphael and Christopher Luna
Featuring Casey Bush, Darren Daniel, Katherine Factor, Benjamin Fisher, Mimi German, Leanne Grabel, Christopher Luna, Morgan Paige, dan raphael, Brian Rohr, Willa Schneberg, Alex Vigue, and Joe Wheeler reading poems by Allen Ginsberg on his 100th Birthday.
7-9pm
Learn more about Allen Ginsberg including information regarding other centennial readings planned across the country at the Allen Ginsberg Project: https://allenginsberg.org/
Nazis at the Watercooler | War Criminals in Postwar German Government Agencies
Mother Foucault's Bookshop is pleased to welcome Terrence C. Petty and Jacob Boas for a reading and conversation on Thursday, May 28 at 6:30 PM.
Germany has long been praised for the way it has confronted the Nazi past. But the accolades are only partly deserved, as meticulously documented by Portland author Terrence Petty in his book Nazis at the Watercooler: War Criminals in Postwar German Government Agencies.
Petty exposes a truth that German and American officials kept buried well into the 21st century: after West Germany’s creation in 1949, thousands of ex‑Nazis were hired into government jobs — including men involved in mass murder, in drafting antisemitic laws, in persecuting Hitler’s opponents, and in other depravities.
Petty documents how former Nazis who had established an early foothold in postwar government agencies helped each other get government work by writing letters of recommendation called Persilscheine. These “Persil Certificates,” named after a popular detergent, made an ex-Nazi’s recorded past just as clean as fresh laundry, Petty writes. Ex-Nazis were given preference for government jobs even over victims of Nazi policies and anti-Hitler resisters. They swapped Nazi uniforms for suits, Hitler salutes for handshakes.
Very few of these civil servants were ever investigated for potential war crimes, Petty shows. They worked until retirement, collecting generous government pensions, and many received plaques thanking them for their public service.
Based on six years of research, including Petty’s examination of declassified CIA and German government files, Nazis at the Watercooler reveals the depth and breadth of this long‑hidden injustice — and the reckoning Germany delayed for decades.
"A sharp-eyed look at a troubling past that still reverberates in modern Germany."—Kirkus Reviews"Nazis at the Watercooler has both intellectual and emotional resonance and stands as a meaningful contribution to the expanding body of scholarship on the enduring legacies of the Third Reich.”—Mikkel Dack, H-Diplo
Terrence C. Petty
Terrence C. Petty is a writer and retired journalist. He worked for the Associated Press for thirty-five years. Based in Bonn, Germany, from 1987 to 1997, he covered German and European affairs, the pro-democracy movement that toppled the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, neo-Nazi violence, and the fiftieth-anniversary ceremonies at Dachau, Buchenwald, and other former concentration camps. From 1999 to 2017 he managed the AP’s news operation in Oregon. He is also the author of Enemy of the People: The Munich Post and the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler. Petty, his wife Christina, their son Tristan, and two cats — Atticus and Helen — make their home in Northeast Portland, where they've lived for 26 years. A ninth-generation Vermonter, Petty has a bachelor of arts in history from the University of Vermont. He worked as a photographer, reporter and editor for newspapers in Vermont and upstate New York before joining The AP.
Jacob Boas was born in Transit Camp Westerbork (1943), the concentration camp in northeastern Holland from which the bulk of Dutch Jewry was sent to the killing centers in the East. Liberated in 1945, Boas grew up in Amsterdam and Montreal before moving on to California, where he earned a Ph.D. in history. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Patricia. His books include Boulevard des Misères: The Story of Transit Camp Westerbork (1985); We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust (1995); Mr. Holocaust (I Presume) (2005); Writers' Block: The Paris Antifascist Congress of 1935 (2016); Until Further Notice ... Theresienstadt on My Mind (2024), and Burden of Proof: Fragments of a Surviving Remnant (2026).
www.jacobboas.com
Howard A. Rodman in conversation with Shawn Levy
Howard A. Rodman is the author of the novels Destiny Express and The Great Eastern. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Black Clock, and elsewhere. As a screenwriter his films include Joe Gould’s Secret; August with Josh Hartnett, Rip Torn, and David Bowie; and Savage Grace with Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne.
On television, he’s written for Fallen Angels and staffed on HBO Max’s The Idol. He’s a vice president of the Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a past president of the Writers Guild of America West. Rodman is one of seventeen members of the Screenwriters Hall of Fame, and was knighted by the Republic of France as an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
As an academic, Rodman is professor and former chair of the division of screenwriting at USC; as a journalist, he’s published hundreds of articles beginning with his tenure as editor-in-chief of the Cornell Daily Sun. In 2011 Rodman organized the nationwide Fantômas centennial, and remains on the steering committee of NOIRCON. Those who lived through the post-punk era in lower Manhattan may have seen him play guitar with the bands Arsenal and MADE IN USA. A proud son of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Rodman currently lives in Los Angeles.
About Destiny Express:
Hailed as “caviar for the art-film buff” by Kirkus Reviews, the novel Destiny Express captures the glamour and the terror of an era, dramatizing the perilous moment when art, politics, and destiny converged on the tracks out of Berlin.
Berlin, the last day of February, 1933. The Reichstag lies in smoldering ruins, a new world about to spring from its ashes. And now for German filmmakers the choices are stark: stay and collaborate with a government that believes in cinema’s power to shape reality, or leave everything behind. Destiny Express is the story of Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, husband and wife, director and screenwriter—together, they made some of the greatest films of all time: M., Metropolis, Doctor Mabuse. As each day is torn from the calendar they watch as one by one Bertolt Brecht, Max Ophuls, Billy Wilder, take the next train out. Destiny Express follows Lang, von Harbou, and a host of real and fictional others––novelist-turned-minister-of-culture Joseph Goebbels, American café Surrealist Sam Harrison, Mercedes racing champ Otto Merz, film star Rudolf Klein-Rogge, a pair of not-so-secret police—as their paths converge, intertwine, and separate across the grid of Berlin, from the artificial daylight of the UFA soundstage to the artificial night of Berlin's most exclusive and decadent nightclubs.
Harsh lights, long shadows: the perfect setting for a deeply researched, deftly imagined tale, as one character puts it, of “crime, gambling, cocaine, jazz, stock exchange maneuvers, smuggling, hypnosis, counterfeiting, violence, Expressionism.” Destiny Express is the story of a marriage at the end of its passion, at the edge of history—all at the end of an era when film was to mean more than it ever would again.
About The Great Eastern:
From the shipyards of London to the ports of New York, from the undersea abyss to the halls of empire, The Great Eastern is a sweeping tale of invention, rebellion, and the war between creation and destruction.
A vast iron ship. Two legendary captains. A battle for the soul of an age.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the world stood on the brink of transformation. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the audacious engineer, dares to build the largest vessel ever conceived—the Great Eastern, a ship so immense it might stitch continents together with telegraphic wire. But beneath the waves lurks Captain Nemo, haunted genius of the submarine Nautilus, sworn enemy of empire and progress alike. When Nemo discovers Brunel’s plans, he vows to destroy both the ship and the world it represents.
Into this collision of titans steps another ghost of literature and legend: Captain Ahab, dragged from his watery grave, driven by obsession and vengeance, and drawn inexorably into the struggle between Brunel’s vision and Nemo’s rage.
At once a thrilling sea adventure and a subversive reimagining of classic myth, Howard A. Rodman’s audacious novel resurrects larger-than-life characters to tell a story that is as strange and wondrous as the century that gave birth to them. As Ricky Jay put it, “The Great Eastern is a nook of confabulations, real and imagined. Surprises on every page. A splendid and notable achievement.”
Howard A. Rodman will be in conversation with Shawn Levy.
Shawn Levy is the author of a dozen books, including the bestsellers The Castle on Sunset, Paul Newman: A Life, and Rat Pack Confidential and the prize-winning Dolce Vita Confidential. The former film critic for The Oregonian and KGW-TV, he lives and works and raises heck in Portland, Oregon.
CONCERT : Bryan John Appleby and Margaret Wehr
An evening of folk singer songwriters - Bryan John Appleby and Margaret Wehr at Mother Foucaults
Bryan John Appleby is a singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist based in Seattle. His folk-centric body of work meanders between mid-century pop, cinematic psych, and 70s crooner country.
With a body of work spanning two decades, he’s toured with Deep Sea Diver, The Head and the Heart, and Tomo Nakayama, and shared stages with Damien Jurado, Y La Bamba, Shaina Shepherd, Dean Johnson, Sera Cahoone, and many others. These days, the goal is to find more connective “human-scale” rooms to perform in, building regional DIY tours (preferably with routes near swimmable water).
His latest full-length, Underwater Easy Breathing, exemplifies his distinct production palette. Lush, coastal, and synth-laced, the album is a natural next step in his wandering, often densely layered repertoire. Previous works include The Narrow Valley (2015), a cinematic, maximalist concept album drenched in dreamy, orchestral layers and experimental sounds, and Fire on the Vine (2011), a darker collection with more conventional folk structures and organic instrumentation.
Margaret Wehr is a Portland-based singer-songwriter, violinist, vocalist, and member of queer folk group, Lo Pony.
Known for her intuitive harmonies and ability to seamlessly blend with any vocal texture, Margaret has recorded and performed with more than 80 bands over the past two decades. She has had the honor of collaborating with Sleater-Kinney, Y La Bamba, Chris Pureka, Anna Tivel, Jacob Miller, Alexis Mahler, MAITA, Moorea Masa & The Mood, EL VY, Haley Johnsen, and many others, happily making her mark on the Portland music scene from side stage.
Rooted in an eclectic blend of country, classical, and pop influences, Margaret grew up listening to The Chicks and Christina Aguilera, Martina McBride and Sara Bareilles, orchestral film scores and whatever radio show host “Delilah” was playing. You know the one. These days, she draws inspiration from her favorite musical storytellers: Madison Cunningham, Anna Tivel, Adrianne Lenker, and Angie McMahon.
As a songwriter, Margaret pairs vulnerable, honest storytelling with rhythmic acoustic guitar and intricate fingerpicking, creating songs that feel both intimate and expansive. She approaches the voice not just as a vehicle for lyrics, but as a fully expressive instrument, weaving delicate, ethereal melodies with a quiet precision and grounded clarity that elevate and transform the emotional core of her music.
You can follow her musical adventures and upcoming shows at margaretwehr.com and on Instagram @margaretwehr.
Translation Tuesday at Mother Foucault's
Translation Tuesday at Mother Foucault's
Tuesday, May 19, 2026
7:00 p.m.
Translation Tuesday double feature with Jeremy Klemin reading translations of fiction and non-fiction by Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes, and Jen Mendez reading excerpts from their translation of German author Hans Peter Richter's YA historical novel. The reading will be followed by a short Q&A.
Refreshments will be provided!
Jeremy Klemin’s writing and literary translations appear in AGNI, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. His work has received support from the Fulbright Program, Disquiet International, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from Oregon State University, and was named a 2026 Literary Arts Oregon Literary Fellow to support his in-progress essay collection about skateboarding, disability, and public space.
António Lobo Antunes, who has been called “one of Portugal’s preeminent writers” by The New York Times, was born in Lisbon in 1942. The son of a physician, he too became a doctor and then spent four years in the Portuguese army during the Angolan War. His book on that war, South of Nowhere, was internationally praised and followed by other widely translated and much-honored novels, including Act of the Damned, Explanation of the Birds, and The Natural Order of Things. He passed away in March 2026.
Jen Mendez is a German to English translator with a focus on literary translation. Originally from Seattle, they now reside in the Portland area, where they graduated with a BA in German Language and Literature from Portland State University. At the beginning of 2026, Jen stepped into the position of Vice President of the Northwest Translators and Interpreters Society (NOTIS), a regional chapter of the American Translators Association, and they frequently commute to Seattle to attend events with the organization’s NW Literary Translation Division. Jen is currently hard at work on a secret translation project that is set to be released in 2027.
Hans Peter Richter is an award-winning German author and academic from Cologne. Having come of age during WWII, Richter served as a lieutenant between 1942 and 1945, where his experiences inspired the trilogy of semi-autobiographical young adult novels for which he is best known: Friedrich, I Was There, and The Time of the Young Soldiers. The book Friedrich was awarded the prize for best young adult novel from the Sebaldus-Verlag in 1961. More than just an author, Richter studied psychology and sociology after his time in the war, and from 1973 on, he taught scientific methodology and sociology at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences.
THE FAMILY BAND PRESENTS
Readers:
Vanessa Veselka
Leni Zumas
Paul Susi
Musicians:
Andres Avila JR
Marcus Gibbon
THE FAMILY BAND
Monthly Café Littéraire — French Conversation Classes “The Art of Argumentation à la Française”
This winter and spring, L’École Buissonnière invites you to a monthly Café Littéraire, a French conversation class rooted in literature, seasonal culture, and thoughtful exchange.
Inspired by French cafés as places of ideas, debate, and imagination, these gatherings offer a slow, intimate approach to the French language. Each 90-minute session opens a thematic doorway through short literary texts, guided conversation, and gentle creative practices.
The focus is not performance or fluency at all costs, but presence, curiosity, and pleasure in thinking together.
Each month highlights a seasonal cultural moment in France, including traditions that shape language and collective imagination.
MAY 3rd | The Art of Argumentation à la Française
L’art de l’argumentation à la française
Seasonal focus: La Fête du Travail — le 1er mai & le muguet
From 10:30 to 12 pm (90 minutes)
📍 Practical Information
When: First Sunday of each month, February–May
From 10:30 to 12pm (90 minutes)
Where: Mother Foucault’s Bookshop
Group size: Limited to 10 participants
Pricing: Full bundle: $90
→ Includes all 4 sessions + a convivial Garden Party (a French-style apéro) celebrating French culture at the end of the cycleSingle session: $20
Drop-in: $25
POSTAL SOCIAL 💌
Write letters and postcards while drinking tea and also somehow socializing.
We’ll provide pens, typewriters, stationary, envelopes…bring yourself, a friend, your favorite quill pen if that’s your thing…and drop by between 2-4 pm
CONCERT: Low Tide Ritual, Furnace, Club Head
An evening of alt / rock / emo - Low Tide Ritual, Furnace, Club Head at Mother Foucault's
Wednesday, Apr 29th
Donation - $10 (cash / venmo at doors)
RSVP Online - Cash or venmo tickets collected at doors
Doors @ 6:30 pm
Music at 7 pm
is a Portland-based alternative rock band blending the emotional urgency of emo with the angular precision of post-punk and math-rock influences. Their sound pairs tightly wound guitar work and driving rhythms with atmospheric textures and introspective, haunting lyricism. Balancing intensity with restraint, the band crafts songs that build tension and release in equal measure.
Furnace is a 3 piece indie hardcore band from Portland, Oregon formed in 2020.
Drawing inspiration from bands like Title Fight, Tigers Jaw, The Menzingers, and Jawbreaker, Furnace fuses indie music with their hardcore roots. With lyrics about grief, love, pain, and loss, their music is best described as "sad songs for retired hardcore kids".
club head is a trio from Portland, OR building new nostalgia from the wreckage of rock, psychedelia, post-punk, and folk, only to tear it all down in the length of a pop song. DC DuBois, Brad Larson, and Jacob Cline create heartache, sleazy guitar, pounding grooves, and melodic swirls. it's quiet until it's not. Follow the crow.
Concert : Star Family Singers, Kitchen Congregation
Star Family Singers, Kitchen Congregation
Join us for an evening of indie /alt singer songwriters.
Donation - $10 (cash / venmo at doors)
RSVP Online - Cash or venmo tickets collected at doors
Doors @ 6:30 pm
Music at 7 pm
715 SE Grand
Kitchen Congregation (solo project of Hannah Morton) crawls under your skin and performs in your heart. She writes sincerely from memory and experience using vivid, surreal, dreamlike imagery. She gently sweeps us from the tender to the epic. Every song contrasting, and complimenting the wide array of complicated feelings we all share. There is an obvious attempt at honest self expression, and innovation within her chosen discipline. Her dedication to her practice is apparent in her confident poise. Kitchen Congregation is an artist that makes those intangible ubiquitous feelings tangible with great effect.
Star Family Singers
The Star Family Singers are a songwriting duo who write music to explore the mystical powers of love and friendship. Always a real world venture, they live in a 2003 Toyota Highlander and tour the DIY circuit, eating gas station hot dogs, exploring their craft and pursuing the effervescent mystery of music itself!
International Day of the Book at Mother Foucault’s Bookshop!
Mother Foucault's Bookshop is bringing International Day of the Book to Portland.
International Day of the Book is an annual event organized by UNESCO to promote reading and publishing. It has its roots in the Catalonian celebration of St. George's Day, or the Day of Books and Roses, during which lovers exchange books and roses as tokens of affection.
A celebration of literature, love, and Spanish and Catalan language and culture, the event will also support local nonprofit Street Books, a mobile library that provides community, resources, and advocacy for people living outside or at the margins in Portland.
12 pm — Open to All
The event is free and open to the public. The Bookshop will have books and roses—as well as other flowers—for sale. 10% of their proceeds will go to Street Books, who will join the celebration by providing services outside the shop.
7 pm — Evening Program
The nonprofit l'école buissonnière will present an evening program inside Mother Foucault's Bookshop inspired by the traditional celebration of St. George's Day in Catalonia. Readings of Catalan and Spanish-language literature will accompany music and a version of jocs florals (floral games, a Catalonian literary competition similar to an open mic). Refreshments will also be served.
The evening's readings will be organized by two Spanish Language Scholars, Andreu Borrego Asensi and Angeles Bellitti.
““It is a pleasure to celebrate this day with Mother Foucault’s Bookshop, who also maintains the hope that things can be done well despite the constant onslaught; they also see in books the gathering point of their community. Even though Spain and the rest of the world enjoy Book Day, in Sant Jordi something extraordinary happens: the festivity of the book but also of love. To unite both concepts is not a coincidence: annotations, doodles, recommendations, underlining, presents... all manifestations where the traces of a social space struck by literature are observed… There is something extraordinary in a population that dedicates one day to books and its literature.””
BOOK LAUNCH Mary Walling Blackburn : Cream Psychosis
Please join us on Wednesday, April 22, at 6 p.m. for Mary Walling Blackburn's book launch - Cream Psychosis (2026), published by Sternberg Press.
The lumpen and the miscreant walk a long, long way together into a bar. That bar is a landmass, is an empire, is an institution, is a painter, is insistent laughter through death. Deep gallows (sometimes humor) built for survival. The lumpen are kin to that famous glom of the proletariat. The miscreant treads earth in overlapping circles.
This book of essays, written by the artist Mary Walling Blackburn between the 201 0s and the present, moves with near-psychedelic precision across American time and its surrounding spaces. It begins near the annals of the Arkansas Lunatic Asylum, March 1883. Conspiring sugar planters, descendants of missionaries, overthrow indigenous Hawaii in 1895. A child learns how to split screens: hardcore film, documentary, destruction, and queer care in 1970s Times Square and in SROs in 1980s Salt Lake City. In 2020, protestors meet BORTAC-trained soldiers under skies choked with noxious propellants.
Facing a spiraling empire, Blackburn insists on showing volumes of teeming, vibrant, life. The essays and works collected here are movies of America in parallax view.
Mary Walling Blackburn was born in Orange, California. Artist and writer Walling Blackburn’s work engages a wide spectrum of materials that probe and intensify the historic, ecological, and class-born brutalities of North American life. She is the author of Quaestiones Perversas (2017) co-written with Beatriz E. Balanta.
David Hedges Book LaunchCapillary Action: Verse in a Light Vein
Not every laugh is a belly laugh. There are chuckles and giggles as well as guffaws. But one thing is certain in this troubled world: Laughter beats the pants off gloom and doom. As poet David Hedges, a master rib-tickler, informs the reader in his title poem: “Gravity is for the grave.”
In the late 1940s, Hedges spent Saturday afternoons in the confines of Portland's Blue Mouse Theatre, soaking up the slapstick antics of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy — and the ribald banter of W.C. Fields and Mae West. He and older brother Joe staged comic backyard theatricals. He went on to edit the Beaver dam, the Oregon State College humor magazine of the mid-1950s, and later, pen a humor column for a small daily newspaper.
There's something here for everyone. Chuckles and giggles, to be sure, and maybe even a guffaw. And — on the cover and scattered throughout the book — hilarious illustrations by Portland’s inimitable Jim Agpalza!
As a bonus, a subset of the indie rock band Hedgefire will play at both ends of the reading.
Praise for David Hedges from the late X.J. Kennedy
X.J. Kennedy, author of nine collections of verse, received the Poets’ Prize, the Robert Frost medal from the Poetry Society of America, and a prize for light verse from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Cover blurb for A Funny Thing Happened on My Way to a Geology Degree (Finishing Line Press, 2011):
“Here’s a heartening, hilarious, and hugely enjoyable saga drawn from the experience of dropping out of college into poetry. In New York’s teeming Village of the late fifties, our protagonist revels in a world bequeathed him by the magnificent drunken poet Dylan Thomas. Imagine! — poems that keep you fastened to your chair, expectantly turning the pages! I’m a Hedges fan for life.”
Cover blurb for Prospects of Life After Birth: Memoir in Poetry & Prose (Road’s End Press, 2019):
“David Hedges has given us a major work of literature — an account of his early life, in vivid, masterfully crafted verse. Characters are drawn memorably. Readers will find Prospects of Life After Birth a startling mirror of their own growing up, and a rare view of growing up given by the incisive mind of a first-rate writer.”
Excerpt from a profile of David Hedges by X.J. Kennedy in the Winter-Spring 2020 issue of Light: A Journal of Light Verse:
“E. B. White’s conviction that writing light verse is just as hard as writing heavy poetry may well apply to David Hedges. He has written both with tremendous skill. Hedges has proved himself among the country’s most able and versatile poets.”
A TROPHY FIT FOR A KING
“South African lions eat ‘poacher,’ leaving just his head”
—BBC News headline
A poacher set out with the aim
Of dispatching South African game.
With his Nitro Express
He was primed for success
And a shoo-in for fortune and fame.
The lions he happened to meet
Were delighted and made haste to eat
Both his lip-smacking haunch
And his succulent paunch
Not to mention his hands and his feet.
The lions heard voices and fled
Without taking the late poacher’s head.
Their intent? To come back,
Mount his head on a plaque
For display on the wall of their den.
David Hedges served six years as president of the Oregon Poetry Association and has been a member of the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission since 1988. He co-founded, with State Librarian Jim Scheppke and Poet Laureate Lawson Inada, the Oregon Poetry Collection at the University of Oregon’s Knight Library, and received the 2003 Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award from Literary Arts, Inc. for outstanding contributions to Oregon’s literary life. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Poet Lore, Measure, Trinacria, Able Muse, and Light: A Journal of Light Verse — and, closer to home, Northwest Magazine, Calapooya Collage, Left Bank, and Windfall.
Book Launch: Burden of Proof - Jacob Boas
Burden of Proof plots the coordinates of Holocaust remembrance from the vantage point of a survivor who was and wasn't there. Part I, Name and Address, traces the arc of Nazi persecution, 1940-1945, on a cross-section of Amsterdam Jewry, including the author's family, and postwar restitution processes. In Part II, Memorials Against Forgetting, Burden confronts the "unmasterable" past in a variety of settings: as a participant in a film "visiting the ghosts of the past" in Bergen-Belsen; a "special guest" of the Federal Republic of Germany out to polish its self-image; a botched commission to write up the story of "the Angel of Belsen," and finishes with a bizarre episode involving a Holocaust sculpture dug up in the backyard of a suburban home on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon.
www.jacobboas.com
Monthly Café Littéraire — French Conversation Classes “Read Little, Read Together”
This winter and spring, L’École Buissonnière invites you to a monthly Café Littéraire, a French conversation class rooted in literature, seasonal culture, and thoughtful exchange.
Inspired by French cafés as places of ideas, debate, and imagination, these gatherings offer a slow, intimate approach to the French language. Each 90-minute session opens a thematic doorway through short literary texts, guided conversation, and gentle creative practices.
The focus is not performance or fluency at all costs, but presence, curiosity, and pleasure in thinking together.
Each month highlights a seasonal cultural moment in France, including traditions that shape language and collective imagination.
APRIL 5th | Read Little, Read Together
Lire peu, mais lire ensemble
Seasonal focus: Poisson d’Avril médiatique & la tradition du chocolat et des œufs de Pâques
From 10:30 to 12 pm (90 minutes)
📍 Practical Information
When: First Sunday of each month, February–May
From 10:30 to 12pm (90 minutes)
Where: Mother Foucault’s Bookshop
Group size: Limited to 10 participants
Pricing: Full bundle: $90
→ Includes all 4 sessions + a convivial Garden Party (a French-style apéro) celebrating French culture at the end of the cycleSingle session: $20
Drop-in: $25
Imaginary power and insurgent art: A conversation with Richard Gilman-Opalsky and Abigail Susik.
Imaginary power and insurgent art: A conversation with Richard Gilman-Opalsky and Abigail Susik.
Saturday, April 4
6:30 PM
Richard Gilman-Opalsky is a professor of political theory and philosophy in the School of Politics and International Affairs at the University of Illinois, where he is also a professor in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. He is the author of nine books, including Communist Ontologies, Imaginary Power, Real Horizons, The Communism of Love, Specters of Revolt, and Precarious Communism. His work has been translated and published in Greek, Spanish, French, and German.
Abigail Susik is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Willamette University and Joint Series Editor of Bloomsbury’s Transnational Surrealism imprint. She has published numerous books, including Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance (Penn State, 2022), and Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester, 2021). Her new book on surrealism and anti-racism is forthcoming from Verso in 2027.
Postal Social 💌
Sat April 4 - Join us for Postal Social Club 💌
Write letters and postcards while drinking tea and also somehow socializing.
We’ll provide pens, typewriters, stationary, envelopes…bring yourself, a friend, your favorite quill pen if that’s your thing…and drop by between 2-4 PM
BOOK LAUNCH : BY THE WATERS OF PARADISE by Clare Kinberg
By the Waters of Paradise is a riveting family history that paints a startling portrait of racism and antisemitism and the lasting effects across generations.
In 2016, author Clare Kinberg discovered her estranged Aunt Rose's death certificate on the internet. What followed was an unearthing of contradictions of what "family" means in a segregated United States.
In the 1930s, Rose, an Ashkenazi Jewish woman, married Zebedee Arnwine, an African American man. The Arnwines faced a multitude of barriers due to their interracial marriage, and Rose faced familial and community ostracization for her choice. Her siblings, including Kinberg's father, kept her existence a secret from their children while building a strong sense of family and reinforcing the segregation between Jewish and Black communities. Some eighty years later, Kinberg, whose wife and daughters are descendants of the African diaspora, traced the life and legacy of her aunt. This masterful memoir weaves the genealogical and historical journeys of Rose and Zebedee with discussion of Rose and Kinberg's Jewish ancestry in Romania and Ukraine and investigates their mutual decisions to settle their interracial families in Michigan.
By the Waters of Paradise is more than just a memoir—it is a reckoning with racism in a day and age when it is needed more now than ever.
"By the Waters of Paradise is both an intimate memoir and a history of racism, religion, and politics, Kinberg reveals her aunt's story with sensitivity. She discovers the jagged intersections of Jewish and Black history in the United States, where white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and capitalism delimited each group's opportunities in turn—and sometimes in startlingly entangled ways." ——Lila Corwin Berman, professor of history and of Hebrew and Judaic studies, New York University
About the Author: Clare Kinberg is a writer, editor, and activist. She is the publisher and editor of the Washtenaw Jewish News and was the editor of Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal from 1989–2011.
CONCERT: Francis Pigeon, Yucky Star, Chandler Trey
An evening of ethereal indie / folk songwriters - Francis Pigeon, Yucky Star, Chandler Trey Johnson at Mother Foucaults
Saturday, March 21st
Join us for an evening of indie /alt singer songwriters.
Donation - $10 (cash / venmo at doors)
RSVP Online - Cash or venmo tickets collected at doors
Doors @ 6:30 pm
Music at 7 pm
715 SE Grand
With ~
Yucky Star - You may know Kate Koller as the player of dreamy cello lines that make you drool, yucky star is all the magic you’ve always known to come from kate & then some.What was once in danger of becoming a collection of unfinished songs is finally making its way to the ears of listeners in portland & soon beyond, and the world is all the better for it.Their stream of consciousness lyrics flow like honey. With distinctive guitar parts in sticky nonstandard tunings you might be tempted to steal.Their voice hits that sweet spot between your ears and your eyes & the lyrics will not only sit with you THEY WILL FOLLOW YOU AROUND.After seeing your first yucky star set you’ll wonder why you never heard them before & when you’ll get to hear them again.
Francis Pigeon -Known by few as the dream queen, Francis Pigeon blends the lines of reality with her honest, ethereal and journeying lyricism. Her songs take on a world of their own as she navigates the dynamics of the human condition, carefully considering each outlook with ripeness. Don't be surprised if the effects of her siren songs portal you into inner territory you haven’t yet explored. Like it or not, Ms. Pigeon will coerce you into contemplation, but never leave you without a lifeline. She is currently frolicking along the sidewalks of Portland Oregon, befriending raindrops, rats, and of course, pigeons.
Multi - Instrumentalist Chandler Trey Johnson's full band
Learn more about our events.
To organize a reading or book launch, call (503) 236-2665.