A Balanced Diet

“BE A LITERARY OMNIVORE,” this year’s Wordstock advertising campaign
instructs. The campaign, with ads cooked up by Wieden + Kennedy’s
School for Gifted Youngsters (er, the Wieden + Kennedy 12), has been
ubiquitous: Red Wordstock ads appear on the shelves at Powell’s, on
your grocery checkout divider at New Seasons, on baguette bags from
Grand Central. In a town of militant vegans, the wisdom of marketing
your event by promoting the values of an omnivorous diet is debatable,
but never mind—the point is that once again Wordstock’s
programming emphasizes a diversity of genres over highfalutin literary
fiction (although there’s some of that, too).

“We’re a longtime literature and poetry organization, which we
love,” Wordstock Director Greg Netzer says, “but we also know that
there are a lot of people who read things that we don’t traditionally
cover. So last year we just started asking people what they’d like to
see.” And what did people want to see? Food writing, young adult
fiction, and memoir, this year’s featured genres.

Highlighting genres serves as an effective way of organizing and
enlivening the festival-going experience, but even that’s not enough to
offset the fact that the Oregon Convention Center is a pretty
unfortunate location for any event that isn’t a job fair or a marketing
seminar. So once again, Netzer and the 30-plus volunteers without which
the festival would not occur (Wordstock has a paid staff of two, down
from four—thanks, economy) have looked toward the broader
community to pad Wordstock’s roster with events outside the festival’s
traditional purview, from art shows to cooking demonstrations to live
storytelling events. As always, though—unfortunate location be
damned—it’s the two days of readings from authors around the
country that form the backbone of the festival.

Keep reading for some of our genre picks. Also check out “Reading
Rainbow” on for more of our festival picks, and see wordstockfestival.org for a
complete schedule of author appearances and other events.

MEMOIR
The much-maligned genre of memoir holds steady even as author
after author (James Frey, Margaret Seltzer, JT LeRoy, and counting)
demonstrates the inadvisability of investing too deeply in anyone
else’s version of the truth. Faddishness, too, often mars the genre,
cramming the shelves with trashy tell-alls, throwaway confessionals,
and the deformed bastard offspring of new and old media that results
when bloggers get book deals. When done right, though, a good memoir
serves as a kind of reassuring communion, an entry point into other
people’s messy, funny, and occasionally inspiring lives.

Live Through This
by Debra Gwartney
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Reading at the University of Oregon Nonfiction Stage, Sat Oct 10,
noon

I did not expect to fall for Debra Gwartney’s Live Through
This. Honestly (and in retrospect, somewhat misogynistically), I
thought it sounded like self-pitying mom lit, and I only picked it up
because Gwartney is married to Barry Lopez, a wonderfully sensible
author and environmentalist I sincerely wish was my uncle. (If Gwartney
got Lopez, I reasoned, maybe her book won’t be all bad.) Live
Through This describes how, after Gwartney divorced the father of
her four children and moved with her kids from Arizona to Oregon, her
two oldest girls abandoned their family for a life on the streets. It
seems a little sensationalist, right? Suburban! Teens! On the
streets! And yet that’s exactly where, and how, Gwartney’s book
succeeds: There’s nothing unusual in the story of her divorce, nothing
particularly exceptional in the anger and resentment she feels toward
her ex-husband, or the subsequent strain placed on children caught
between two warring parents. The only thing that’s unusual here is that
at ages 13 and 15, two of Gwartney’s daughters shrugged off any
obligation to their family, turning away from their Eugene home to a
life of clothing stolen from dumpsters, drugs bought on street corners,
and unrelenting hostility toward their mother.

The book takes its rueful title from a Hole album, Courtney Love
being one of the musicians Gwartney’s daughters began listening to
right around the time they started drinking and smoking, and stopped
coming home at night. Stephanie and Amanda listened to Hole and Bikini
Kill, dyed their hair and painted anarchy symbols on their walls,
skipped school and mouthed off to their mom—typical acts of
suburban-girl rebellion that, while exhilarating to any teen, are also
utterly conventional and generally harmless. Except that in the case of
Gwartney’s daughters, they weren’t harmless at all.

Gwartney’s background is in reporting—she’s worked for the
Oregonian and Newsweek—and her account is
accordingly straightforward. What indulgence she does allow herself is
chronological, as the narrative frequently skips backward and then
darts to catch up with itself again, a three-steps-forward, two-back
progression that mirrors Gwartney’s own struggles with her
children.

Gwartney’s matter-of-fact retelling of her story only emphasizes
how, well, normal the whole thing is. A conventional divorce, a
conventional Eugene home, and a teenage rebellion that’s conventional
until it isn’t. This book will hit home with anyone who’s ever ignored
the teenagers downtown asking for change, as well as anyone who’s ever
felt righteous for helping out a street kid—Gwartney struggles
with the knowledge that maybe her daughters would’ve come home sooner,
had well-meaning strangers not provided them with drug money. There are
no right answers, and no wrong ones, either—things just happen,
Gwartney tells us, and we do the best we can, and sometimes it just
isn’t enough.

MORE MEMOIR
Giulia Melucci—There’s a depressing preponderance of
memoirs about middle-aged women and their romantic failures, but I
Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti promises to be among the most
spirited of the bunch. Powell’s Books Stage, Sun Oct 11,
noon

Ronault L.S. “Polo” Catalani—An Indonesian-born lawyer
writes of his experiences working with Portland’s immigrant community
in Counter Culture: Immigrant Stories from Portland Café
Counters. McMenamins Stage, Sun Oct 11, 4 pm

“Truth and Story”—Memoir is such a conflicted genre
that it requires its own panel discussion, about capital-T Truth.
University of Oregon Nonfiction Stage, Sat Oct 10, 3
pm

YOUNG ADULT
Like graphic novels, young adult books will always be snubbed by a
certain portion of the adult population. And that’s fine—such
genre litmus tests are a quick ‘n’ easy way of immediately determining
who likes fun and who is dead inside. You don’t need us to namedrop any
of the young adult titles that’ve crept into the mainstream in recent
years, so we won’t.

Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck
by Dale E. Basye
(Random House)
Reading at the Target Children’s Stage, Sun Oct 11, 3 pm

Rapacia is the second book in the Heck series, a “middle reader” series in the vein of Lemony Snickett: arch,
macabre, and full of winks for any grownup who might be reading along
at home. As the title of the first book in the series informs us, Heck
is “where the bad kids go,” an “otherworldly reform school” that
functions as a sort of Hell-lite for (dead) underage miscreants, until
they turn 18 and can be subject to due heavenly process. Rapacia is, of course, the second circle of Heck, falling right after Limbo
(Next up? The sensitively titled Blimpo, about the circle of
hell reserved for gluttons). Children who find themselves in Rapacia
are forever taunted by the specter of “Mallvana” hovering just
overhead, a sort of über-mall where all sorts of earthly delights
hover just out of reach, inspiring a persistent and insatiable
longing.

The series’ protagonists are Milton and Marlo Fauster, a brother and
sister duo who first experienced the perils of Heck in Heck: Where
the Bad Kids Go, when a shoplifting scheme went horribly awry,
resulting in their deaths and subsequent banishment. Marlo, who
orchestrated the scheme, belongs in Heck, but her younger brother
Milton was an unwitting accomplice who ended up in there as the result
of some sort of bureaucratic oversight (Heck is managed just like an
elementary school; there’s even an overworked principal, named—of
course—Bea “Elsa” Bubb). In book two, Milton has managed to
escape from Heck, returning to his recently vacated earthly vessel only
to find his soul doesn’t fit inside his body quite as well as it once
did. Meanwhile, in Heck, Marlo is contending with mean girls and giant
talking rabbits as she tries to make it out of Rapacia in one
piece.

The book’s content isn’t quite commensurate with its excellent
concept—it’s hard to imagine any but the most precocious kid
catching all the references here (there’s a stylish “devil’s advocate”
named Anna Couture and a three-headed Pomeranian named Cerberus;
Eleanor Roosevelt drops in from heaven to provide an inspirational
lecture during a school assembly). And for all the book’s furious
winking, making it clear that adults as well as kids are encouraged to
partake, it’s hard to imagine even the most gung-ho adult staying
chipper in the face of Basye’s relentless punning. But with seven more
circles of hell to explore, it’s clear that Basye’s books are going to
be here for a while, so we might as well make a little room on the
shelf, somewhere between Lemony Snickett, Terry Pratchett, and Philip
Pullman.

MORE YOUNG ADULT

Scott Westerfeld—The author of the popular
Uglies books, about a world in which the government makes
everyone pretty (and stupid) at the age of 16. His newest,
Leviathan, goes steam punk. Powell’s Books Stage, Sat Oct 10,
noon

Blake Nelson—You’re not really a Portlander until
you’ve read Blake Nelson’s seminal Girl. And after that,
consider picking up his sharp, witty sendup of teenage rebellion,
Destroy All Cars. Target Children’s Stage, Sat Oct 10, 2
pm

Mandy Hubbard—While Pride and Prejudice and
Zombies is more our speed, we can see how Hubbard’s Prada and
Prejudice might have its appeal. Target Children’s Stage, Sat
Oct 10, 4 pm

FOOD
Though history is dotted with food-writing luminaries like M.F.K.
Fisher, James Beard, and Julia Child (all of whom have been tragically
relegated to the realm of “cookbook authors” at one point or another),
it seems they’ve been few and far between. While the last decade or two
has seen a precipitous rise in the popularity of food television and
celebrity chefs, it’s only been in the past several years that our
growing obsession with what, and who, feeds us has begun flood
bookstores.

People have been writing about food since we first scrawled
pictographs on cave walls. Those line drawings of hunched bison in the
Cave of Lascaux could be considered the first spark of what we now know
as food memoir: Eat Prey, Hunt! The only thing humans seem to enjoy
more than eating is talking about what they eat—now more than
ever.

The Ramen King and I
by Andy Raskin
(Gotham)
Reading at the Powell’s Books Stage, Sun Oct 11, noon

After years of failed relationships marked by an inability to
remain monogamous or truthful with his partners, Andy Raskin finds
himself nearly 40 years old, alone, and banished from his favorite
sushi restaurant. Finding some comfort in obsessive dating through
Craigslist, the string of random women he dines with, sleeps with, and
eventually cheats on does nothing to solve his central question:
“What’s wrong with you?“

But a fateful bowl of ramen, a gall bladder removal, and a magazine
article lead Raskin to the one man who may be able to help him discover
himself and find redemption: Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant
ramen noodles.

Raskin, a contributor to the New York Times, NPR, and This
American Life, has imbued his brutally honest memoir with the
dreamlike sparkle of science fiction, the lonely watchfulness of travel
writing, the pacing and structure of creative modern fiction, and the
sensory wallop of good food writing.

On his journey to find guidance from the man he’s chosen as his god,
Raskin reveals to us the sights and sounds of Japan. We are witness to
the flash, noise, and flavors of food courts, markets, and restaurants.
We are given an intimate glimpse into the desires of a culture whose
history of brutal losses and precipitous gains shaped the man who would
give the world instant ramen, without which the bellies of college
students would be forever rumbling.

We are also given an intimate look into Raskin’s own history of
desire, laid out in intensely open and humorous letters written to the
aging chairman of Nissin Food Products. It’s a series of unflattering
confessions that lead Raskin to the understanding of what Momofuku Ando
called the “Fundamental Misunderstanding of Humanity.” The problem is
trying to overcome that misunderstanding.

The Ramen King and I is really the perfect book to represent
all that is good about Wordstock: It’s humorous, entertaining, and
ultimately enlightening, leaving you hungry, if not for a bowl ramen,
then at least another filling read. PATRICK ALAN COLEMAN

MORE FOOD
Piper Davis—The Grand Central head baker shares trade
secrets in The Grand Central Baking Book. Columbia Sportswear
Stage, Sat Oct 10, 4 pm

Isa Chandra Moskowitz—It’d be presumptuous to call
Moskowitz Portland’s favorite vegan chef, but we’re tempted to do so
anyway—Vegan Brunch: Homestyle Recipes Worth Waking Up
For, anyone? Wieden + Kennedy Stage, Sun Oct 11, 4 pm

Kate Hopkins—Also known as “The Accidental Hedonist,”
handily one of the best food bloggers on the whole wide internet.
McMenamins Stage, Sun Oct 11, 11 am

OUTSIDE THE BOX

Sure, food, memoir, and YA fiction are getting highlighted
this year, but not every writer’s work is so easily categorized. Here
are a few more great authors you won’t want to miss.

James Ellroy—One of the finest crime writers in
America, The Black Dahlia author James Ellroy concludes his
Underworld USA trilogy with his newest, Blood’s a Rover.
Powell’s Books Stage, Sat Oct 10, 2 pm

Richard Dawkins—The author of The God Delusion returns with The Greatest Show on Earth, in case you
still don’t believe in evolution. Ticketed event at Special
Events Stage, Sat Oct 10, 3 pm, $22 (includes copy of book)

Sherman Alexie—Sherman Alexie is prolific, powerful,
and just about to come out with yet another book: War Dances, a
collection of short stories. Ticketed event at Special Events Stage,
Sun Oct 11, 2 pm, $18 (includes copy of book)

Ethan Canin—Let it not be said that Wordstock has
abandoned literary fiction. The author of For Kings and Planets and America America has unimpeachable literary bona fides,
including a position on the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Columbia Sportswear Stage, Sun Oct 11, 4 pm