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.