Desperately Seeking Salem

If you’re active in the Willamette bubble, you may have heard that local fiction writer,  Scott Nadelson, who had a great essay in the most recent Oregon Humanities magazine, recently became the Hallie Ford Chair in Writing in the English Department.

Nadelson is one of those people here in town who are assuring that Salem achieves the robust literary culture that it deserves.

One of his first tasks as chair? To put together a roster of must-see, have-to-genuflect-before visiting writers who are speaking on campus this fall.

I do hope they get him a good seat for hosting these talks.

All events will take place at 7 p.m. in the Hatfield Room of Willamette’s Mark O. Hatfield Library, and all are free and open to the public.

September 30: An Evening with Fiction Writer Manuel Muñoz.

• Muñoz, who writes about Chicano/a communities in California’s Central Valley, is the author of two collections of short stories: Zigzagger (Northwestern University Press, 2003) and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007). He has received pretty much every distinction out there that you can get for short story writing, including the 2008 Whiting Writers’ Award and a 2009 PEN/O. Henry Award for his story “Tell Him About Brother John.”

October 12: The Art of Playwriting with Andrea Stolowitz.

• Stolowitz is a graduate of the MFA playwriting program at the University of California San Diego and is currently teaching at Willamette. With names like TALES OF DOOMED LOVE and BAD FAMILY, you can bet she writes the kind of approachable, funny stuff for the stage.

December 1: New Voices Showcase: Poet Keetje Kuipers & Fiction Writer Elissa Minor Rust.

• Kuipers is a native of the Northwest.  She earned her B.A. at Swarthmore College and her M.F.A. at the University of Oregon.  In 2007 she completed her tenure as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, which provided her with seven months of solitude in Oregon’s Rogue River Valley.  She used her time there to complete work on her book, Beautiful in the Mouth, which was awarded the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published in March 2010 by BOA Editions.

(ok, kind of jealous after typing out that one…)

• Rust lives and works in Portland, Oregon and is proud to call herself a Northwest writer. She teaches writing and literature at Portland Community College, and publishes fiction and nonfiction in national literary magazines and anthologies. Her short story collection, The Prisoner Pear: Stories From the Lake, was published in December 2005 by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice pick.

The audience at the Salem Public Library fell into a hush when Diana Gabaldon took the stage in a purple, black and gold sequined cardigan yesterday to read from her latest novel from the Outlander series, An Echo in the Bone.

A fan had bought the sweater for her.

“Why did someone buy you a sweater with sperm on it?” her husband had asked her.

Gabaldon isn’t your ordinary novelist — she’s kind of like the Stephen King of historical fantasy romance.

And this wasn’t an ordinary reading. In fact, it was the raunchiest, sexiest, most stifled giggle-producing reading I think I’ve ever been to.

Gabaldon opened with the story of her launch as a writer — a lot like what I wrote of in the little preview I did for Salem Monthly — but she fleshed in that story with some very funny anecdotes and lots of talk of the compelling image of men in kilts, who feature prominently in her books.

“A German journalist once asked me: Why men in kilts?” she said. “I explained to him that it was the idea that you could be up against the wall with him in a minute.”

Judging by the crowd — many women aged 18-65 — it’s easy to see who she touches with her stories of a time-traveling 20th century nurse and her 18th century Scotsman husband, whom some have called “the most perfect man on earth.”

And then she read from the book itself.

She picked a sex scene.

Gabaldon stayed for an hour or so, answering questions about the fate of beloved characters, filling in details of plot sequences that have spanned seven books. And then she went out into the hall to wait for about 150 people to get their books signed.

It was a near-perfect book event. She even threw in a bawdy rhyme that got the gals hollering.

In days of old
When knights were bold
And condoms not invented
They strapped some socks
Around their cocks
And babies were prevented.

Who wouldn’t like to see more of these around town. Readings by great authors, I mean, you cheeky monkeys. Who wouldn’t like to hear more salacious Highland rhymes performed by hot women in their 50′s? These things aren’t always confined to the space between women and their books.

Just got word that Diana Gabaldon, author of the fabulously successful “Outlander” series, will hold a free reading at the Salem Public Library on October 5 at 12:30 p.m.

The catch? Well, the mid-day event scheduling may pose a problem for some of you, but if a woman can be a 20th century time-traveling nurse married to a 17th century Scottish Highlander (the premise of her series), I’m pretty sure you can wrest some time away from your cubicle over lunch to sit at the feet of Ms. Gabaldon, probably the biggest-name author to read in Salem in a while.

Yes, the tickets are free. But the library will start doling them out at the reference desk beginning September 1, with a limit of four per customer.

Gabaldon first came on my radar when I was living in Germany, where her books are ubiquitous bestsellers and she is much more of a household name.

This new book, An Echo in the Bone — the seventh in the Outlander series out of nine planned — is a narrative juggling act of an epistolary novel. She’s got the usual: time-traveling wife, romance and conflict across centuries, cameos from historical figures. But she adds to the mix letters that tell the story of the wife’s parent’s love story.

Sounds like a wormhole to me. I’m game for climbing in.

Either way, I’m stoked for the event.