Fall Readings at #PAMLA2015 and #WesternLit2015

A father-son portrait from "Thanksgiving for Aurelia"

November 8, 2015 -- This fall, RBM brought new chapters of a prose manuscript-in-progress, The Land of Infinite Variety, to the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association's 113th annual conference in Portland, and to the Western Literature Association's 50th annual conference in Reno (PDF).

At Friday's PAMLA session on "brief prose forms," organized and moderated by Megan Spiegel of Western Washington University, RBM read from a lyric essay on motherhood, "Thanksgiving for Aurelia," modeled after Dinty W. Moore's "Son of Mr. Green Jeans: An Essay on Fatherhood, Alphabetically Arranged." Glimmer Train recently shortlisted (PDF) a related work of fiction as a finalist for the magazine's Short Story Award for New Writers.

Slides from "The Archivist and The Voyager"

At October's WLA session on "intergenerational memoir," moderated by Megan Riley McGilchrist of the American School in London, RBM read from "The Archivist and The Voyager," another alphabetically-arranged essay. This chapter from RBM's forthcoming collection juxtaposes accounts of the American West from two journals of the late 1930s: that of his grandfather, and that of French tourist Antoine de Seynes. The story of the latter "voyager" and two companions was recently documented in a feature-length film, Voyagers Without Trace (2015), which debuted in Portland. (RBM served as a post-production associate producer; there's more on this acclaimed project at OPB.org.) Below is a brief excerpt from RBM's reading in Reno:

One fragment, from that first westerly passage, stands out from the rest. Some measure of redemption, let’s say, for our collective memory. It’s an image of descent, under the noonday sun of 1930-something, from the high plateau of the Old West into the fruit valleys of the Northwest: peaches, pears, apples, toilets, electricity. Men crawling like so many insects over something called the Grand Coulee. Such wonders, says my great uncle, in his eulogy. The three boys gazing the whole time, I’m told, from the rear window of a 1929 Chevrolet. 

The car rolls to a stop at a big painted lodge in the basin. The youngest boy, the one usually last in line, steps out first, now suddenly a tourist. Just then, something peculiar catches the boy’s eye—a glinting transom at the peak, the very zenith of the roofline. And so the young archivist scurries up the railing to have a look. 

Staring back, through the beveled glass, is the boy’s own reflection—the sight of which sends us both tumbling back to earth.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at an Island

July 10, 2015 -- From a week of kayaking the Salish Sea with a Sigma zoom lens (100-300 mm), thirteen views of Sucia Island, an early home to the Lummi people. The island's cryptic geology, which alarmed Spanish explorers, owes its designs to intertidal erosion and the sculpting of countless organisms. Stony clams protruding from the walls of Fossil Bay, for example, tell a story 80 million years in the making.

The View from (Another) Long Island

May 25, 2015 -- Pictures from a long weekend exploring Washington's Long Island, where lumber production doubled in the postwar years, and surrounding Willapa Bay, one of North America's most extensive estuaries.

The Agronomist as Hero

February 6, 2015 -- RBM is thrilled to have new nonfiction, "The Agronomist as Hero," featured in the current issue of Quarterly West, a literary journal based at the University of Utah. Here's a brief excerpt:

My father stands at another intersection, inspecting another column of green that did not have permission to materialize. In the photo I take after turning on the recorder, he has this gleeful look about him, all rounded spectacles and crossed arms, because these spreading trunks and star-shaped canopies are now beyond question. They’ve always bordered the elementary school and the playground and the best sledding hill in town. 

For more prose, poetry, and new media from issue 84, visit the journal's dandy-looking website. Or for more on "courage, love of adventure," and "the nature of landscape," you can find a similarly-titled essay on Claude Lévi-Strauss, by Susan Sontag, over here.