News, Other Stuff

Luis Humberto Valadez is a writer/poet/educator/musician from Chicago Heights, IL currently serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in China.  "Out of Context" will be a blog Luis will write for us documenting his experiences in China.  He is the author of two collections of poetry, "what i'm on" (2009, University of Arizona Press) and the book/CD "Valid Lush" (2012, Plumberries Press). His music and poetry can be found at luishv.bandcamp.com. Previous to leaving Chicago, he was Program Director for Chicago HOPES, an organization that provide education and enrichment programming for children living in homeless shelters. Hit him up with thoughts, questions, etc. at luisvaladez8@yahoo.com. He is truly exploring the nature of his being outside of the context he has grown accustomed to. This writing merely reflects his perspective of his experience and does represent that of other Peace Corps Volunteers or Peace Corps as a whole.

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Zhe ben shiji gei ni wo zai xiang shenme.

Today, I’ll eat dinner at the same time that you many of you will drink your first beverage of the day, however caffeinated it may be. Today is my fourth day living in Neijiang. I arrived here Monday afternoon, sharing a ride with an 19 year-old Australian volunteer whose Chinese is so good I can’t help but look like an asshole every time we speak to the same people. I’ve spent the better part of this week cleaning up and settling into an apartment that has had many a former PCV as its inhabitant. More on this will be said at another time, however. Today, I’d like to focus on my last week of training in Chengdu. It’s been an eventful last couple of weeks, hence the absence of an update last weekend.

Actually, I need to clarify that I didn’t actually train in Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan Province. Though my group trained at Chengdu University, the University is located outside of Chengdu in a small town named Shi Ling.

A year ago today
I published my first book.

I had been waiting 100 years to write a book.
I waited patiently for characters and plots and arcs and endings
to present themselves and cursed them when they never came.

Then someone made me realize none of those things were important.
The most important thing was to just WRITE
and I'd been writing stories since I was seven.

One morning that person woke me up and over coffee
he handed me 150 pages of a neatly printed manuscript
with a giant paper clip.

I looked down at it and said:
What is this?

He said: This is your book. You have a book now.

The cover page read: Piano Rats.

As I flipped through the pages, I cried.
He was right, it was my book.
All the stories I had written for myself over the years,
they finally had a home.

He sipped his coffee nonchalantly and said:
This is good and you better print it.
And after ripping it to shreds a few times,
I finally did.

You never know when an ordinary morning
can change your entire life.

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*Photo by Stephanie Bassos, Chicago-based photographer.

Franki Elliot is a 20-something author from Chicago and blogs for us every Monday.  Curbside published her first book Piano Rats (October 2011). We are publishing her second book KISS AS MANY WOMEN AS YOU CAN in late spring 2013.  This week is the one-year anniversary of PR.  For more Franki typewriter stories visit http://frankielliottypewriter.tumblr.com/

Music and books are two of our favorite things, which is why we, duh, like to publish books, and we like to throw parties that feature music.  So, as a natural extention, one of our favorite sites is Largehearted Boy, a blog that features authors writing about the music that influences their work.  Thus we're excited to see LHB publish an essay about the songlist for our newest book MAY WE SHED THESE HUMAN BODIES in the author Amber Sparks's own words.  Check it out. 

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Largehearted Boy MAY WE SHED Playlist

This is part VIII of an VIII part series by Portland author Aaron Gilbreath consisting of his interviews with members of Portland's homeless population.  See Part VII here.  Stay tuned for an affordable e-book edition of Aaron's series that will feature a new piece not previously published.

Aaron Gilbreath is a burrito-obsessed essayist, journalist, and housesitter. He resides in Portland and his work can be found all over the place.  Click here to learn more about him. 

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Introduction

Like all interesting people and places, Portland, Oregon is a multifaceted character. There is Portland the socially progressive utopia of artists, food carts and environmentally conscious urbanism. And there is the Portland of pretension, heroin addiction, racial separation and rampant homelessness. The city occupies a county that has over 15,000 homeless people. That figure includes not only people who sleep on the street and in shelters, but those who sleep on friends’ couches and in cars and in transitional housing. In 2009, Oregon ranked first in the nation for homelessness per capita.

Those of us who have lived here long enough to have watched the city change from a sleepy little low-rent secret to a globally hyped mecca of gastronomy and marketable eccentricity know that no matter how empathetic your constitution, the sheer scale of homelessness here means that you can easily became immune to the presence of it. Two soiled feet sticking out from under a blanket, a body curled in a doorway atop cardboard slabs – to Portlanders, these sights can become as unexceptional as a sign at a coffee shop advertising gluten-free muffins. I don’t like growing accustomed to human suffering. Empathy should never grow callouses. Yet overly accustomed is what I’d become. Here I was, surrounded by the homeless, yet I knew close to nothing about them or their lives. So I spent the summer of 2011 speaking to them on the street.

About two years ago we published our first book, the awared-winning coming-of-age novel Sophomoric Philosophy by Victor David Giron (yes, me).  SP was influenced in part by JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, along with books like Joe Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned and movies like Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused.  Though the book is set in the early 00's, most of it takes place in the first-person narrator Alex's recollections of his teenage years in suburban Chicago.  So it seems appropriate that author / illustrator Nathan Holic would write an in-depth essay for Burrow Press Review analyzing SP in the context of Catcher in the Rye and his own reflections on being a new father. 

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Sophomoric Philosophy - Burrow Press Review