Mother Foucault's Bookshop

This fall and winter, L’École Buissonnière invites you to a monthly Café Littéraire, a French conversation class rooted in literature, seasonal culture, and thoughtful exchange.
Inspired by French cafés as places of ideas, debate, and imagination, these gatherings offer a slow, intimate approach to the French language.
Each 90-minute session opens a thematic doorway through short literary texts, guided conversation, and gentle creative practices.
The focus is not performance or fluency at all costs, but presence, curiosity, and pleasure in thinking together.
Each month highlights a seasonal cultural moment in France, including traditions that shape language and collective imagination.

Toussaint: Memory & Invisible Connections
La Toussaint : honorer les absents
Explore French traditions of remembrance, the symbolism of flowers and cemeteries, and the ways literature, photography, and seasonal rituals keep memory alive across generations.

Join us for Transformations: Wood / Metal / Stone / Sundry, from Raven Chronicles Press's celebrates the discovery of, and connection with, found objects that hide within landscapes of urban decay and nature. Objects that, when revealed, stand as testaments to time, place, and the transformative effects of nature and the elements. Editor Scott Martin, local poets dan raphael and Allison Green, plus other readers.

Join us for a poetry reading from Householding with Tom Blood, Shannon Baird, and Brian Hebb.

Tom Blood is the author of the sky position which was awarded the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Published the raccoon, dot dot, the act, if ever then always, exp, and exp3. He also performs as the lead vocalist in the bands rob walmart, Tom Blood and Jordan Dykstra and Dream Center. Tom is Published in journals in NY, SF, Portland, London, Seattle and elsewhere. He believes the only purpose in life is to communicate love.

Shannon Baird is a Portland native, real estate broker, and award-winning designer whose work reflects a longstanding appreciation for architecture, art, and the character of place. With more than 24 years in real estate and as the founder of SBaird Design, she brings a distinctive perspective to the relationship between people, homes, and the stories they hold.

Shannon conceived the idea for this collection of poetry, originally written to accompany actual real estate listings. What began as an unconventional approach to presenting homes evolved into a book celebrating the character, atmosphere, and individuality of the places we inhabit.

Working closely with book designer Fredrik Averin, Shannon guided the creative development and design of the publication. The collection features poems primarily by Tom Blood, with additional contributions from Shannon Baird and Brian Hebb. Charlotte Moore wrote the foreword and afterword, and Rory Sparks produced the foil-stamped covers.

The book reflects an appreciation for the ways poetry can reveal something beyond the physical details of a property—offering a more personal evocative perspective on the meaning of home, a subject of perennial longing.

Brian Hebb is a failed capitalist, former journalist and chronic penman for hire, furnishing other people’s ad copy and speeches with his favorite daydreams. For these sins, and others less relevant, he is at work on his first novel, The Last Days of Fake Bears, and a short story collection, Target Audience. He lives with his wife in Portland, Oregon where fleeting glimpses of their dead pets are most persistent.

Join us for the Portland launch of Any Time But This Time (Mad Creek Books), the debut story collection from LA filmmaker and author Adam Peterson, in conversation with Portland poet, novelist, and painter Zachary Schomburg.

The human condition is dire. We knew that. But it's also always been that way–we've always craved to be sometime else, from the first human woman (Denise, stuck with neanderthals) to the final man (Keith, losing all his language but the name of his girl–that, he'll save). In between, Peterson introduces himself as a shapeshifter, voicing a semi-delinquent and moderately depressed teenage Jesus in "Jesus Does a Hero;" a convincingly polyamorous prairie romance; 1983's fiber optic saleswoman to the local government of Shanghai, Barbara Roach; and a hormonal crop of teenagers sent to fight "the Schmoopys" once their orbit arrives and their hair has gone gray.

As they'll tell you, the findings are fairly straightforward. In all of human history, we have only been one thing: lonely. Well, two things. We've been horny, too.

Unrelenting, bold, and cynical in the way that only a child of Nebraska-gone-Hollywood could write, Any Time But This Time gifts us 300,000 years of humans destined to be alone, willing to give it all up for connection.

"As history tends to shave off the weird bumps and ridges of our past, it's exhilarating and unsteadying to read a collection that ambitiously seeks to provide a kind of bizarro reimagining of our world. Any Time But This Time is odd and hilarious and yet so tenderly human, so unafraid of cataloging all the strange desires and cruelties and moments of true connection that have somehow gotten us to this moment in time, and then it rockets beyond that to imagine an even stranger future. This is wildness of the highest order, unforgettable and highly original."
—Kevin Wilson, author of Now Is Not The Time To Panic

"The stories in Adam Peterson's Any Time But This Time are funny, but, like, really, really funny, but like, the kind of funny that make you laugh and laugh and then make you question your own soul, or whether you even have a soul, because Adam Peterson has slyly tricked you into laughing at some of the worst possible things, the most terrible of people, the most dire of situations. He has made you laugh the kind of laughter that keeps you honest, makes you see the world as it really is. This is a fabulous, unrelenting collection of stories, full of gorgeous, punchy, compulsively readable prose. Do yourself a favor: pick it up, take it home, and start reading."
—Manuel Gonzales, author of The Miniature Wife and other stories

"Deeply entertaining, the stories in this collection crackle with the spark of imagination, invention, and compassion. Peterson writes with a satisfying blend of humor and pathos, fearless in both wit and empathy. For lovers of George Saunders and Haruki Murakami, with a dash of Aimee Bender, this collection also feels somehow entirely fresh."
—Aja Gabel, author of Lightbreakers

"Each story in this collection is a window into unseen moments of history, and deftly conveys the "incomprehensible beauty, all too comprehensible horror" of the human experience. Peterson's voice carries an almost prophetic weight, masterfully balancing the lyrical, existential, heartbreaking, and humorous with a skill and style akin to writers like George Saunders and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. From the first cave woman to identify as human, to the unraveling of language as our species dies off, I was enraptured by this book, and felt genuinely changed after reading it. Uniquely funny, profoundly moving, and innovatively written, Any Time But This Time is a rare and exciting feat of literature."
—Erin Slaughter, author of A Manual for How to Love Us and The Dead Dad Diaries

Adam Peterson is a writer and filmmaker living in Los Angeles. He's the author of the prose poetry collections My Untimely Death, The Flasher, and [SPOILER ALERT] (with Laura Eve Engel). His short fiction has appeared in Epoch, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and a mess of other places. His films have played at HollyShorts, Fantasia Fest, and Just for Laughs, among many other festivals.

Zachary Schomburg has written books of poems like Wool Moon (Black Ocean, 2026)and a novel, Mammother (Featherproof, 2017). And he's a painter too. In fact, he once painted a painting owned by Adam Peterson. He lives in Portland with B and Y.

Join us for a reading and celebration of Paul Maziar’s Junebug. The evening with feature musical guests Kelli Schaefer and Drew Grow.

When asked for eight words to describe Junebug, Maziar channeled Agent Cooper: “Everyday, once a day, give yourself a present.” But did he mean the present? Either way, Junebug is a gift.

Junebug situates Paul Maziar’s latest acts of listening and attending, transmission and transcription. He’s built a modular space suggestive of both the theatre and the gallery, performance and (inter)play. The aphoristic title sequence hones sharp accessibilities — we find words available to us, for our limbs and limbics to hold, hurrumph, to slap our knees and share. A mysterious dramatis personae pervades Junebug’s expanse across the mental maps Maziar graphs as he organizes streets of words and questions what their design might reference. We encounter, among others, Toulouse-Lautrec, Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, Jack Whitten, Colette, Robert Walser. Who are all these characters in Maziar’s parade? Maybe there’s some insight in the final serial sequence, “Hives,” which states that “The real thing is inside of what everything appears as.” The real in Junebug asks us to admire the distance between the surface and the subject. We already have the right tools.

Charles North: From short poems to prose poems to the wonderful fragments collected in its title poem, Paul Maziar’s writing revels in imaginative discontinuity. Junebug is smart, witty, surprising—and inspiring—throughout.

Merrill Gilfillan: These works step up in the name of Poetry and its heartwood, its ever-salvational “What’s on the river today?”

Tetra Balestri: Maziar manages to resurrect a conversation started sometime in the early to mid-20th century that cuts through the present-day pandemonium with polish and swagger. Junebug is a pair of pants worth trying on.

Simone Kearney: Reading Paul Maziar’s Junebug, I feel the tightrope walker’s high-wire balance between the forces of levity and gravity, the contexts of interior and exterior, the concocted and the perceived, thought and overheard speech. These poems make me wonder how it is that we move through the world, which is also a moving-through language.

I’m reminded that language bears a strange mystery. It’s always received and always being made at the same time; it’s a material we inherit and get to play with. In Maziar’s work, overheard phrases and sayings arrive solidified, brick-like things. The language resembles the fragments of familiar tunes — an echo, or memory of one — appearing as the freshest, strangest thing newly imagined.

I feel the intimacy and elusiveness of unspoken thought in the poems: words not yet uttered, still inside the mind. This makes me feel the dynamics of inside and outside that are part of the human drama. Am I looking at something the poet is looking at, or am I inside his head? Maziar lets us inhabit uncertainty. This is living language just being breathed, catapulted from lips, cemented into freshly-thought speech.

Junebug lets me delight in the way language can tend to trip over itself: “I’d rather stimulate than simulate”; “a certain vigor (or vinegar?).” Decontextualized, speech is absurd, funny, strangely moving: “I’m not going anywhere until I see a horse.”

What emerges is a tour de force composed of song, slogan, slip of the tongue, reverie, note, advertisement, fragment, nonsense, musing, hiccup, rupture, tidbit, epiphany. “The only faith he had was in the confusion of his experiences,” Maziar writes, suggesting that one thing we can do amid such confusion is continue to place words onto the page — in relation to ourselves, to others, to images, and to other words. And those words keep coming to meet us: flat, full, flowing, tired, zippy, and ready for more.

Kelli Schaefer's latest record, Even Still, could be the soundtrack to a modern gothic, a playlist for a trudge through a muddy forest or the accompaniment to a subconscious mantra. She demonstrates deftness in refusing to confine herself to a single genre. Schaefer excavates her past while planting herself deeper into the avant-garde, offering a fresh take on the age-old singer-songwriter trope, delivering haunting melodies over swirling woodwinds, piano, classical guitar, and upright bass.

The Pacific Northest's beloved troubadour, musician/artist Drew Grow (Slang, Modern Kin, Pastor's Wives) is back with new songs and a new stripped down method. Spotted playing solo shows around Portland this summer, he is out on his own, debuting new music and packing a wall of little guitar amps. It's new digs for the artist. Drew's solo approach, raw and exposed, is even more striking than the bands of his past. His powerful voice still ringing through as ever, magnetic and arching over the solo guitar and twisted old amps. The sound is momentous and vulnerable, seeming to come from a deeper place. What have you brought us?

A $10 ticket supports our musical guests, Kelli Schaefer and Drew Grow.

Join us for a poetry reading presented by Spare Room, featuring Ariel Resnikoff and Ivan Sokolov.

Ariel Resnikoff's recent works include Raisin in Every Bite (Furniture Press, 2022), A Paradise of Hearing (The Swan, 2021), and Unnatural Bird Migrator (The Operating System, 2020) which was awarded an Anne and Robert Cowan Writers Prize. His newest poetry collection, Poems with Friends and Ghosts, is forthcoming from Chax Press in 2027. With Pierre Joris, he is also the co-editor of In Between, Keep Moving: A Pierre Joris Reader (Contra Mundum 2026). Ariel is a translator of Yiddish, Hebrew and Spanish poetry and prose, and his own writing has been translated into German, French, Russian, and Mandarin, among other languages. In 2025 he was a visiting writer and translator in China at Central China University in Wuhan and the University of Fudan in Shanghai. Ariel lives in El Cerrito, California – the little hill – with his partner, the artist Rivka Weinstock and their kiddo. With E. Tracy Grinnell, he co-directs Litmus Press and Ether Sea Projects.

Ivan Sokolov is a poet, translator and critic from St. Petersburg, Russia, currently based in Portland. Author of five books of poetry in Russian, he also translates the international avant-garde, from Gertrude Stein to Paul Celan. His Russian version of Ron Silliman's "You" and a translation of Richard Foreman's "Samuel II" were recently published. Sokolov's translations from contemporary Russian writing are available in World Literature Today and the Back Room. His own work has been featured in a Deep Vellum anthology Verses on the Vanguard.

A public lecture and discussion exploring Freud's 1917 essay "Mourning and Melancholia," and what it still has to teach us about loss, attachment, and the unsettled life of the mind. In partnership with L'école buissonnière.
Featuring Kellye McBride, philosopher and editor.

Kellye McBride holds an MA in Contemporary European Philosophy from Kingston University London, completed through a joint program with Université Paris 8, and a BA in Philosophy with departmental honors from the University of Oregon. She has taught philosophy in university and public-humanities settings, including Chemeketa Community College and Portland's People's Colloquium. Her teaching emphasizes critical engagement with primary texts, lively discussion, and making complex theoretical ideas comprehensible without sacrificing their intellectual depth. Kellye is also a professional editor and writer and the creator of Melancholia, a podcast exploring philosophical, psychoanalytic, literary, and cultural approaches to melancholy. Her interests include Continental philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis, death, desire, and the relationship between intellectual inquiry and everyday life.

Tuesday, November 17, 2026
6:30 PM 8:30 PM
Suggested donation $10

This event will also introduce the upcoming six-week seminar In Praise of Melancholia, beginning in January.
The seminar is organized in partnership with L'école buissonnière.

Join us for the Mountain Writers Series readingswith:
Gerald Costanzo & Michele Glazer

Gerald Costanzo’s Badlands: First Poems, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 1973, and in 1974, In the Aviary, won the Devins Award. Other of his poetry collections include Nobody Lives on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard (BOA, 1992), The Laps of the Bridesmaids (Bits Press, 1992), and most recently, Regular Haunts (Nebraska, 2018). Founder of the Carnegie Mellon University Press (1972), Costanzo served as Director of the Press, also teaching writing and literature courses at Carnegie Mellon University, until he retired in 2024. Costanzo has edited numerous anthologies, among them Three Rivers, Ten Years: An Anthology of Poems from Three Rivers Poetry Journal, and American Poetry: The Next Generation. He has received two N.E.A. Creative Writing Fellowships as well as two Pushcart Prizes for his poetry. He divides his time between Mt. Lebanon, PA and a home on the Oregon Coast.

Michele Glazer is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, fretwork (Iowa, 2021). Others include On Tact, & the Made Up World (Iowa, 2010); Aggregate of Disturbances (Iowa Poetry Prize, 2004); and It Is Hard to Look at What We Came to Think We’d Come to See (Pittsburgh, 1997; AWP Award). She has published poems in The New Yorker, Boston Review, and Lo-Ball, among others. Glazer was the founding director of the MFA Creative Writing program at Portland State University and has been a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and at the University of Montana as the Richard Hugo Chair in Poetry. She lives in Portland.

An evening of singer songwriters - an Album release from Seattle's Claire Conway and an EP release from Essie Hum supported by Arran Fagan

Donation - $10 (cash / venmo at doors)

RSVP Online - Cash or venmo tickets collected at doors

Doors @ 6:30 pm

Music at 7 pm

715 SE Grand

Claire Conway(Seattle)

(Album Release)

Blending heartfelt, confessional lyrics with intimate instrumentation, Claire Conway is a songwriter and storyteller with an ear for authenticity. Raised on country radio in Charleston, South Carolina, Claire began writing music at ten years old, played her first gig at thirteen, and released her first EP while still in high school. Now residing in the Pacific Northwest, she’s shared local stages with contemporary folk touring artists Lowland Hum, Matthew Fowler, and The Head and the Heart’s Josiah Johnson.

From her 2019 EP "Missing" to 2021's "Be Good," Claire's early songwriting exhibits a clear-eyed intimacy and a wise-beyond-her-years level of poise and introspection, drawing listeners in with hushed guitar melodies, warm vocals, and compelling lyrical meditations on the birth and death of love, growing up, and self-discovery.

After years of writing, recording, and performing throughout the PNW and internationally, Claire is set to release her debut album in November 2026, produced by Lacey Brown and Damien Jurado in Seattle, WA.

Essie Hum

(EP Release)

Of Portland, OR - Essie Humberston’s storytelling and chants anchor an ethereal, shoegazey dreamscape.

Arran Fagan - Praised for his introspective lyrics and vivid storytelling, Portland-based folk artist Arran Fagan has garnered a following in his native Oregon with his uncanny ability to weave the personal and universal. After getting his start in the grassroots music scene of Southern Oregon, Arran has spent the greater part of his life pursuing music, creating wistful and evocative songs that explore themes that connect us all—loss, addiction, change, and the endless passage of time.

Join us to celebrate the release of Exorcising the Patriarchy: Leonora Carrington’s Plays and Scenography by Abigail Susik, published by Eberhardt Press

Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) is best known as a painter associated with international surrealism, but she was also a prolific dramatist and scenographer who activated these mediums in her overarching critique of patriarchal society. Replete with production photos and Carrington's artwork, Susik's book examines two of her plays and their scenographies, "Penelope" and "Opus Siniestrus: The Story of the Last Egg". Susik uncovers extensive archival documentation and hypothesizes Carrington's talismanic approach to theater as a "concentrated transformer" of anti- and post-patriarchal horizons.

"'Exorcising the Patriarchy' sheds timely light on Leonora Carrington’s theatrical practice, revealing it as a process of exorcising patriarchal violence. Through its exploration of archival material related to the revolutionary plays 'Penelope' and 'Opus Siniestrus: The Story of the Last Egg', as well as their scenographies, Susik delivers a thought-provoking study that deepens our understanding of Carrington’s use of consciousness as a weapon."
—Karla Segura Pantoja, translator and editor of "Leonora Carrington’s L’Œuvre écrit: Théâtre, vol 3" (Fage, 2022)

Abigail Susik

About the author: Abigail Susik is an art historian based in Portland, Oregon. Her book "Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work" was published by Manchester University Press in 2021, and she has edited several volumes on international surrealism and antiauthoritarianism.

Join mother and daughter duo Sara Kolp and Lola WK as they read from their new graphic novel, Wild Years.
The book (a true story) follows their mother/grandmother Cindy through her teenage years in the 1970’s, navigating a world of pimps, half-legal mafia brothels, squats, a notorious ashram, weeklong acid trips and cross-country bank robberies. Cindy wrote the text of the book; Sara and Lola illustrated it. This is the work of three generations of women: you don’t want to miss it! Reading and Q&A!

Join us for the one year anniversary of the Just Above/Just Below series, featuring ensemble Latourel, composer Caroline Miller, and the Seattle-based free improvisation duo of Rebecca Novak and Silas Morrow.

The series is inspired by the following quote:

‘The cut I Imagine making might be visualized as what lies just below and just above “music”, as presently understood. This seems at first like an impossible space in which to operate: below music (nothing but “raw” sound and “silence”) and just above music are the primary materials (i.e. chords, scales, durations, etc.). And yet this is the vicinity in which many of us continue to find things to do.’ - Michael Pisaro-Liu

Latourel creates soundscapes with viola and percussion inspired by natural processes of movement, transformation and reverence for the space between notes.
https://latourel.bandcamp.com/

Caroline Louise Miller (they/them) is a US composer based in Portland, Oregon. Common themes addressed in their work include affect, ecology, labor, tactility, and materiality of media, often within dreamlike musical spaces incorporating field recordings and found sounds, romantic melodic lines, ethereal harmonies, and dense noise-based textures. Their music is performed internationally, and they have received commissions and grants from numerous ensembles and organizations, including Seattle Modern Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, Sonic Matter Festival, Matt Marks Impact Fund, SPLICE Ensemble, Chamber Music America, Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble, Ensemble Adapter, Guerilla Opera, Transient Canvas, and others. Their multimedia installation Here There: (Re)collecting Labor on the American Railway, co-created with artist Stefani Byrd and featuring a score recorded with Alarm Will Sound, incorporates field recordings and video footage taken on an expedition to endangered historic sites in Northern California, and has been exhibited internationally. Their 75-minute electroacoustic opera, Deep Water, produced in 2026 by New Wave Opera, explores resilience, play, and climate grief. Caroline is currently Assistant Professor of Sonic Arts at Portland State University, where they teach electronic music composition, songwriting, studio production, music for visual media, and live electronic performance.
https://www.carolinelouisemiller.com/

Rebecca Novak & Silas Morrow

First convened in a Seattle basement in the summer of 2024, the free improvisation duo of Rebecca Novak & Silas Morrow conjure electroacoustic landscapes with cornet, banjo, homemade clarinet, objects and feedback. In the summer of 2026, the duo collaborated to explore the acoustic dimensions of beeswax through a site-specific installation and performance at Coffin Farm in Redmond, Washington using field recordings, collaged text, and beeswax sculptures as hand built acoustic listening devices.

This fall, L'École Buissonnière invites you to a monthly Café Littéraire, a French conversation gathering rooted in literature, art, seasonal traditions, and thoughtful exchange.

Inspired by the French tradition of cafés as places of ideas, curiosity, and imagination, these 90-minute gatherings offer a slow and welcoming approach to the French language. Each session opens a cultural doorway through short literary texts, visual arts, historical references, guided conversation, and gentle creative practices.

Rather than striving for perfect fluency, we cultivate something different: the pleasure of reading the world in French—through stories, images, memory, and conversation.
Each gathering explores a seasonal theme that reveals how language, literature, and everyday traditions continue to shape French culture and the wider Francophone world.

Winter Lights & Traditions
Lumières, calendriers et traditions de la Table
Discover French winter traditions—from Lyon's Festival of Lights to Advent calendars, Provençal customs, and everyday rituals that bring warmth, beauty, and meaning to the darkest season.

Blue Selvage reminds us that a revolutionary message often requires new forms of discourse.

The poems in Blue Selvage weave lyric, essay, documentary fragments, and historical reckoning into an exploration of skin, cloth, color, and form as living archives—where the gendered, racialized, and colonial histories inscribed on the body are continually exposed, resisted, and re-stitched through memory, touch, and language itself.

Preeti Parikh’s debut poetry collection is a mapping of boundaries, a (re)framing of fractured interiority, a text(ile) unfurling across shifting homelands. In this deeply embodied, formally daring meditation, the corpus is both archive and threshold, a site where “what’s felt becomes the body, what’s draped becomes form.” Here, passion for indigo, a medical-science informed perspective, fascination with the materiality of cloth and skin, and a journeying towards reclamation interlace with feminist inquiries and cultural examination to conceptualize the poems’ multivalent inhabitances.

Expansive in its rhetorical modes and landscapes, Blue Selvage is unified by a remarkable singularity of voice and vision through which Parikh skillfully invokes form as metaphor, performance, dramatization, and content. Throughout the book, recurrent vocabularies and silences—integument, selvage, gaze—operate as warp and weft, binding personal experience to collective striving, devotion, and survival. Meanwhile, on the page, multilingual textures and typographic openness resist closure, offering apertures for looking within and without. What emerges is a capacious field of attention, where intimacy and history press against one another, and where writing itself becomes an act of unstitching and re-making—an ethical, sensuous practice of staying with what the body remembers and what culture would prefer to erase.

Preeti Parikh is a poet and essayist with a past educational background in medicine and a recent MFA from The Rainier Writing Workshop. A Kundiman Fellow and National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant award and an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence award. Parikh’s poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Margins, Zócalo Public Square, and elsewhere. Her writing is anthologized in Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World, the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, and The Last Milkweed, the last of which was also published by Tupelo. Parikh has been a Millay Arts resident and an AWP Writer to Writer Program mentee and has received staff scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Born and raised in India, she lives with her family in Ohio.

Join us for the Mountain Writers Series with Suzanne Matson & Joe Wilkins

Suzanne Matson’s third book of poems, As Creatures, was selected as the Editor’s Choice for the Vern Rutsala Book Prize from Cloudbank Books (2026). Her other poetry volumes are Durable Goods (1993) and Sea Level (1990), both published by Alice James Books. Also new this year is her book of nonfiction Winnowing (Duke University Press). Her fourth novel, Ultraviolet was published by Catapult (2018). Previous novels include The Tree-Sitter (W. W. Norton, 2006), short-listed for the PEN New England/L. L. Winship Award; A Trick of Nature (W. W. Norton, 2000); and The Hunger Moon (W. W. Norton, 1997), a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. A 2012 fellow in fiction writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, Matson has also received creative writing fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the American-Scandinavian Foundation and was named the Finlandia Foundation Lecturer of the Year for 2023. Originally from Portland, Oregon, Matson teaches at Boston College and lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Joe Wilkins is the author of two novels, The Entire Sky and Fall Back Down When I Die; a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers; and five collections of poetry, including Pastoral, 1994 and When We Were Birds. A finalist for the First Novel Prize from the Center For Fiction, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and the Orion Book Award, Wilkins has won the Oregon Book Award, the Montana Book Award, the GLCA New Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, and four High Plains Book Awards. His latest book is Every Sky at Home: Essays on Landscape and Family. Born and raised north of the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana, he lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of western Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield College.

Join us for an evening with Colin Drohan, celebrating his debut poetry collection It's Late, joined by local novelist Kathleen Boland.

It's Late approaches the world with openness and affection, prioritizing wonder about plants, animals, and other people, as well as individual and communal pasts, presents, and futures as a guiding force. The voices behind these poems dwell in a state of perpetual curiosity. Colin Drohan's writing is full of awe but he also asks difficult questions about the world we inhabit and its present ecological crises, often discovering humor as a mechanism for real hope. It's Late imagines readers as close friends and confidants, written with a conversational quality that welcomes the absurdity of our daily lives.

"I thought again about how / it's all disappearing," the speaker says in the poem "Notes Toward an Apocalypse" in Colin Drohan's debut It's Late. "If there's a way / to write about anything else, I'm all ears." The collection, which Ocean Vuong calls "a rare debut that's both bold and tender, deeply considered yet wrought with quicksilver urgency," approaches the world with amusement and affection ("the loneliest whale in the world / is a blue it feels too easy") while also expressing an unshakeable anxiety about the future and anticipatory grief for all that we have to lose: "If the arborist comes / and finds a tree that's ruined / tell her I want her to lie to me. / I want to believe / the trees will live on."

Underneath the casual tone is a deep ache, that comes from knowing that, as Cynthia Cruz puts it in her blurb, "the end of the world is experienced as though it is not occurring." Even when the world seems to be falling apart around us, we go on, calling our friends, making soup, playing penny slots, walking the dog. "It's a wonder and a comfort," It's Late reminds us, "The sky is still there."

"In 'The Apocalypse is (Still) Disappointing,' the Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič argues that the end of the world is no longer on the horizon—it has already begun. Zupančič's title would make a fitting subtitle for Drohan's It's Late, an understated study of the human subject absorbed in the everyday while the apocalypse unfolds around it. The collection's central revelation—that the end of the world is experienced as though it is not occurring—is brilliantly rendered throughout this breathtaking debut. As Drohan writes in 'You Expected From the World': 'We didn't understand / The beginning was the end / The song on the radio says / We'll all be gone by fall.' It's Late is the book about the end—which is to say, our contemporary moment—we have been waiting for."—Cynthia Cruz

Colin Drohan's poetry collection It's Late won the Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award from Interim and will be published by the University of Nevada Press on December 1, 2026. He is from Chicago, and he earned an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he received the Karen Skolfield and Dennis Goeckel Award in Poetry. He was the Director of Writing Programs at Catapult, and he has taught writing and worked in student support at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Landmark College, and the University of Texas at Austin. He is studying to become an archivist, and he lives in Brooklyn.

Kathleen Boland is the author of the novel Scavengers. Her fiction has appeared in Tin House, Conjunctions, and Gulf Coast, among other places, and she has received support from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family.

Mountain Writers Series is reviving its reading series with monthly events at Mother Foucault's Bookshop in S.E. Portland
Join us for poetry and prose readings featuring award-winning poets & writers.

Henry Hughes is the author of five collections of poetry, including Sergeant Dark (Lost Horse, 2026), Men Holding Eggs (2004 Oregon Book Award), Moist Meridian (2011 Finalist for the Oregon Book Award), Shutter Lines (2012, with photos by Paul Gentry) and Bunch of Animals (2016). His fishing memoir, Back Seat with Fish: A Man’s Adventures in Angling and Romance, was published in 2016 by Skyhorse. He is the editor of the Everyman’s Library anthologies, The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing, Fishing Stories, and River Poems, and his poems and essays related to fishing appear in Gray’s Sporting Journal, Anglers Journal, The American Fly Fisher, and The Flyfish Journal. Hughes is the director of Write Place: Literature, Arts & the Environment, and a professor of literature and writing at Western Oregon University.

Carlos Reyes has published a prose memoir and twenty books of poetry, most recently Into the Journey’s Eye, Selected Poems 2012-2024 (Lynx House, 2026), What Shelters Us, What Doesn’t (2026), and The Four Hinges of the World (2023). In 1971, Carlos started Trask House Books, a small press that published poetry books, chapbooks, and broadsides by dozens of poets, among them Robert Duncan, Marvin Bell, Jane Hirshfield, Tess Gallagher, Paulann Petersen, Peter Sears, Christopher Howell, Vern Rutsala, Alice Derry, Yannis Ritsos, Ger Killeen, Martin Espada, Gloria Bird, Patricia Geodicke, Clem Starck, Sandra Williams, Phil Garrison, and more. Reyes considers himself a poet of place, taking inspiration from any landscape where he finds himself. His writing is informed by the places he has lived — Missouri, the Pacific Northwest, Maine, Arizona — and by the places and people he has visited in Europe, South America, and Asia. Reyes lives in Portland.