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.

I’m seeing it all over town and in my conversations with Salem’s creative folk.

Salem’s very own Stephanie Lenox, poet and new mama has put together the brand-new issue of Blood Orange Review, a highly respected online literary journal, in-between her darling baby’s naps and working for A.C. Gilbert Discovery Village. It includes, among other strange, curious and beautiful things, an essay on roadkill that is something like a piece I once wrote after trailing around with the dude who picks it off Iowa highways for a living.

Hey, just cause I’m a mama doesn’t mean I can’t be interested in roadkill.

There is also a sweet poem about bees.

Will Bragg, all-around man-about-town these days, has opened up a downtown studio. He’s been photographing the people who work around him. Sure, this might seem like a routine and ordinary project, but look at this gorgeous woman who owns Glance Glasses! Hair, commence greyness!

All kinds of jealous of his recent photo shoot with Grand Duchy, Frank Black’s new project (you’ll remember they played their first show here in April of 2009).

Congrats to Will, for getting what all of us want. You know, a room of our own.

Jessica Ramey of Northwest Nest, a hero to mothers all who aspire to raise their kids and create their art at the same time (the impossibility of achieving flow — ask me about it sometime), launched a Salem Zine project that you may have heard about here, and here.

One quibble about the article about Jessica. She’s not one woman behind the trend in Salem. In this case, she IS the trend.

You can download her Salem zine here.

I don’t know about you, but I’m pooped from having just typed what other people are doing. But what about you? Have you managed to create something glorious in the scant idle hours of summer?

Hot off the presses: the C4 Academy downtown at Clockworks Cafe and Cultural Center just published its first-ever  Brochure of classes. Among the list of classes you’ll find there — all of which are free to the community in June and July — is a blogging basics course by yours truly.

A blog is just a vomitorium for navel-gazers and diarists with a penchant to overshare, right? Well, sometimes. Hundreds of millions of blogs have been launched. Very few survive in perpetuity (if that’s even possible).

This course is one for would-be writers interested in the blog form.

I’m not going to teach you how to set up a blog on WordPress or blogger in my class; it’s not really about the technical aspects of blogging. But I will teach you how to write a blog and craft a message through online media.

Blogging basics is for people with a story to tell, perhaps a product to sell,  looking for way to do it well.  I’m beta testing this course here in Salem before I pitch it to my colleagues at the University of Oregon, where I teach magazine writing, so you can bet it will be a step above your average free course.

Questions? Email me at emilygrosvenor@gmail.com. Interest? I’ll see you there!

Update: Some have been asking when the course is taking place. I am offering the same intro course on June 21 and July 12 at 6:00 p.m. at Clockworks Cafe.

It’s that time of year again, folks. It’s time to furrow your brow and shake your fist and cluck incredulously at how the public in Salem so often gets many of its own Best-of’s wrong. Say what you will, James Surowiecki, about the Wisdom of Crowds, but there are areas in our lives where it really helps to have a real taste maker tell you where to go and what to eat, what to see and what to do. Otherwise you might just end up eating your Cheap Eats in the charming digs of Costco instead of at La Perla downtown.

Some categories of the Statesman Journal’s annual best-of’s are obviously spot-on. Word of Mouth wins Best Breakfast? Yeah, I’ll agree with that one.

But man, are there some hilarious entries and hilarious winners in this year’s poll.

Best Place to Give Birth:

1. Silverton Hospital
2. Salem Hospital
3. At-home with midwife

What’s number 4? In the the back of your Subaru on the way to the hospital? Under the rotunda at the State Capitol building? Spontaneously in line at Fred Meyer?

Best Hot Dog

1. Casey’s
2. Costco
3. Mt. Angel Sausage Co.

I love a hot dog, but does the hot dog really warrant its own category? A better bet would be best grilled cheese. Casey’s would win that, too.

Best Coffee Shop

1. Dutch Bros.
2. The Grind
3. Starbucks

Love me some Dutch Bros. on the way down to Eugene to work sometimes, but people people PLEASE!, Dutch Bros. is not a coffee shop, unless you consider sitting outside on a lawn chair next to the water feature a coffee shop experience. Best coffee shop is the Beanery downtown. Best coffee SHACK is Salem’s Latte.

Best Food Cart

1. Casey’s Cafe
2. Capitol Dog
3. Adam’s Rib Smokhouse

Do these restaurants really have food carts or are they just selling food cart food? Someone please enlighten me. Where are the Salem food carts? I know there are a few on Silverton, and there’s a Latino fruit cart that parks sometimes on Savage Road. Can we count Canby Asparagus Farms at the Chemeketa St. Farmer’s Market as being a food cart? If so, they win.

Best Bookstore

1. Borders
2. Book Bin
3. Tea Party Bookstore

I’m done talking about how much Borders sucks. But here’s a note in case you’ve forgotten. My friend and I meet often at Borders for our Bored Meetings. Can’t find a book there because they never have what I want or need. I heard they carry Twilight, though.

Best Adult-related Business

1. Santiam Wine Co.
2. Enigma Adult Toy Boutique
3. Eve’s Boutique

That’s not a best-of list, that’s a recipe for a kinky Saturday night!

Ah, best-of’s. You say so much about Salem. I’m nominating this mobile from our nursery for Best Sculpture AND Best Zoo.

Sometimes I think my house has become this celestial dumping ground for Salem’s stories — all in service of making this blog a place  where Salem’s true character can come alive in fits and short starts.

Why else would someone have sent me this poem inspired by Salem’s ongoing chicken debate?  It was penned in black ink on the back of a “nike school innovation fund” pad of red-lined paper, and looks to be hand-written by a woman.

Also, it has these ridiculously cute line drawings of chickens pecking at specks of black feed. Yummy full stops about as big as a period at the end of the lines of poetry.

Check it out the text — it’s got an ABCB rhyming scheme and is fleshed out in four stanzas.

WARNING: THIS IS NOT FOR YOUNG CHILDREN OR FOR CONTENT NAZIS.

—

On Bringing Back Chickens to Salem

It takes me back to the good old days
when chickens ran the yard.
My cock would come out every morning
and stand up straight and hard.

And then from the top of the chicken coop
he’d wake you from your bed.
My cock was a friendly, neighborhood bird
who liked you to pet his head.

But everyone had a cock back then.
It was the regular thing to do.
People were happier with cocks all around,
and the hens seemed happier too.

We’d like to bring those old days back,
but the law’s put that dream to bed.
So we’ll be walking the same old dogs
and petting our pussies instead.

—

Did anyone else notice that this writer doesn’t seem to understand that the group advocating for chickens in Salem isn’t talking about bringing roosters back, just hens?

No matter. I guess hens don’t lend themselves very well to innuendo. Either way, I’m kind of shocked and besmirked by this gift from a stranger. And I kind of love the idea that there is this underground world of rhyming poetry inspired by Salem. Beats a slam poetry night any day of the week.

Were you one of the estimated 1.597 million people in Salem who decided to go to Value Village last Saturday at 2:00 p.m. to see what the second-hand retailer had in stock for Halloween? I was. It was a mistake I won’t make again.

We were actually looking for some furniture, but got distracted by all of the 1960s loungewear and gold facepaint and all of the people walking around dressed like [insert favorite cartoon character here].

My ability to walk straight down an aisle of clothing is inversely proportional to the number of people in said aisle, so it wasn’t long before we threw up our hands in exasperation and screamed “Screw it!” let’s just find something at home.

And that’s how Adam ended up a Devil’s Advocate — easy, all you need is some horns and lawyer’s garb — and I made good on my promise to be a Zombie Emily Dickinson.

You know, a dead poet. They have societies for these things.

Sadly, no one at the Halloween party we attended recognized Ms. Dickinson, perhaps because she so staunchly refused to be a part of the public eye. Seriously, what did her diary read like?

Woke up this morning. Wore white. Wrote some poems.

The party guests did reconize me as that pus-spewing little girl from The Exorcist, though, so I walked around yelling obscenities and trying to make my head spin.

Zombies.

I’m still thinking about them.

I had a plan to write November’s Desperately Seeking Salem column about something kind of altruistic and Thanksgiving-y that I’ve been doing here in Salem, but I couldn’t help myself. Zombies are an image that fits well with what I see as the hunger for cultural products in Salem.

And I’ve been pretty excited to see what Salem’s Culture Shock Community Project has cooked up with zombies over the past month. Those guys deserve some recognition.

Their brains taste good.

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.

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.

If there is a book that one should absolutely not read while pregnant, chances are good that I have it stashed in my library rotation.

Deformed children?

Check.

Lost pregnancies?

Check.

Doom and gloom?

Most definitely, check.

Give me your destructive narratives your poorly protaganists, your no-win scenarios and I will be drawn to it like dry rot to your front porch. And though every pregnancy book I have read warns strongly against surrounding yourself with books that might bring you down (you’re depressing your baby, too!) I keep picking them up and holding them to my chest and snuggling with them before discovering the scenes and moments that make it oh so clear that this is not a book I should be reading at this moment in my life.

Indeed, my pregnancy canon is looking a little too much like Law & Order: SVU.

The worst book of all? Portland writer Brian Doyle‘s The Grail: A Year Ambling & Shambling through an Oregon Vineyard in Pursuit of the Best Pinot Noir Wine in the Whole Wide World.

Yes, if you really want to make yourself feel bad about all that you are giving up by having kids, I suggest you read  Mr. Doyle’s frilly, funny, delightfully comprehensive book about the year he spent at Lange Estate Vineyards in the Red Hills.

Doyle’s style can take a little getting used to. After Thomas Mann and James Frey, he’s the world’s biggest fan of the run-on sentence (Check out that subtitle to his book! Even if the marketers are the ones who make up the titles, it is clearly inspired by his prose).

Also, his personality is all over the page. If you don’t go for cheeky writers who don’t take themselves too seriously (and like to see them interacting with serious people), it can grate a bit.

But by a few chapters in, I rather enjoyed sitting at the table with someone so clearly unafraid to take himself out of a story. And what a story it is.

Winemakers! Originally from Iowa! In Oregon! Making the best wine in the world! And doing it that oh-so-Oregonian way of complete commitment to craft without the rubbings of pretension.

Love it.

How unpretentious can they be,  you ask? Well, I’ve heard through the grapevine har har that quite a few of the main players at Lange haven’t even read the book (though they sell it in their tasting room).

And why would they, other than to get a great primer on pinot, a cultural history of the grape, an anthropological study of the winemaker’s persona, and captivating descriptions of vintages that they get to try every single day.

Man, I really need a drink.

I invite someone to take me out for a glass of Lange pinot in exactly 1.5 years.

Make that a bottle.

I’ve been going back and forth over where I should set the novel I am working on. I’m still in the planning stages — writing out character sketches and scene sketches and charting the, hopefully, rip-roaring roller coaster of a plot that will leave millions and millions of readers turning pages until the wee hours. But the setting is giving me a hard time. It’s poking me in the forehead, it’s ripping off my sheets in the middle of the night, it is rousing me from my other work.

It is by all accounts a glorious little bugger that  won’t sit still and hasn’t gelled in any meaningful way.

See, I have a big problem. I have been thinking a lot about place over the past half year (obviously) and how place informs character, and much as I would like to set a novel in Salem, I haven’t found the right real-life locations to make the book gratifying. You know, toothy in the way that real places are, but fascinating enough to inspire some major  imaginative leaps (don’t tell me the fault could be my own, I’ve already gone there).

A note about the novel: It’s post-apocalyptic. That’s all I’m saying at this point.

So, a request. I am asking you to tell me about the greatest unsung places in Salem. The best dark alleys, the scariest chambers, the brightest spots, the most mysterious corners. With so many people out hailing Salem — and acting as the city’s PR agents — I’m getting a little bogged down in waves of “Salem’s an undiscovered gem” nonsense.  I’m convinced that people won’t think Salem’s interesting until it is shown to be interesting.

I’m going to try to do that.

By the way, get a load of this pic of Salem circa 1900. [Sigh]. Now that’s a city I can see being torn apart by the warring factions of the post-apocalypse!