Portland’5: Brunish Theatre

Poets Victoria Chang (Tree of Knowledge) and Beth Piatote (distant waters) sit down for a conversation on their recent publications andtheir evocative use of nature throughout their poems. Moderated by writer and editor Alyssa Ogi, this discussion promises a rumination on our shared home, oppressive efforts of erasure, and the art and language that we use to understand our world and ourselves.

About Tree of Knowledge:

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

A poet watches the limbs of a eucalyptus tree get sawed off: the image persists, refracting and recurring across poems of art, language, selfhood, memory, and loss.

Joan Mitchell said, When I talk about love, I mean loving a tree. When I talk about love, I mean loving where a tree used to be.

Men assess the eucalyptus tree growing on the poet’s street; a crane arrives. The sound of a chainsaw rings in the air and branches begin to fall. This tree-cutting haunts the poet and becomes the locus from which the rest of the collection spirals. It refracts across works by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Mitchell, and Hilma af Klint, whose painting series lends the collection its title and who becomes a model for engaging with the world. At the core of the collection, the long poem “Eureka” examines the violent 1885 expulsion of Chinese Americans from the eponymous California town. Roving, evocative, and intricate, Tree of Knowledge is rooted in Victoria Chang’s crystalline voice and generous, probing gaze, and by certain images —trees, a hanging figure, a branch, fingertips, a briefcase—that resurface like apparitions.

About distant water:

As a scholar of Native American literature and law, Beth Piatote focuses on the endangerment of Indigenous languages. As an activist, she moves against the current of English-language colonization, working to rescue and revitalize the language of her people. Language, she posits, is an expression of land, a means through which we can travel great distances.

distant water brings the reader into the language of our shared home, North America, revealing a sonic world and grammar governed by rivers, kinship, and ancestral knowledge. “In our homes and homelands,” she writes, “we share the language with the plants and animals and waters and rocks and sky.” Inventive and playful, these poems explore the sounds, structure, and wisdom of the Nez Perce language, illuminating its vitality and capacity to organize relationships to time and place. Braiding aural, linguistic, and spiritual ecologies, distant water conveys an understanding that to be in language is to be in place. To be at home.

Dr. Mary Fariba Afsari (Labor: One Woman’s Work) and fiction writer Danny Ramadan(Crooked Teeth) pivot from their usual work to author their own stories in their recently published memoirs. Both authors share powerfully nuanced accounts of resilience and autonomy, whether working to expand women’s access to healthcare in Afsari’s memoir, or navigating the brutal reality of being queer under oppressive regimes in Ramadan’s work. Moderated by journalist Claudia Meza.

About Labor: One Woman’s Work:

A powerful memoir of medicine, identity, and family secrets from an esteemed ob-gyn as she unravels her grandmother’s mysterious death while reimagining women’s health care from a mobile clinic—for readers of The Beauty in Breaking and The In-Between.

In Labor: One Woman’s Work, Dr. Mary Afsari takes us on a deeply personal and transformative journey through her life as an ob-gyn. Set against the vivid backdrops of Portland, Oregon, and Shiraz, Iran, this powerful memoir intertwines the complexities of her professional life with the hidden truths of her family’s past, exploring the intersection of medicine, identity, and the enduring search for agency.

The story begins in the bustling corridors of an Oregon hospital, where Mary dedicates herself wholeheartedly to her patients—often at great personal cost. At the same time, Mary uncovers a long-buried family secret: the tragic story of her grandmother Mehry’s death in 1950s Iran. This revelation propels her on a quest to untangle the threads of her family’s history while confronting the forces that have shaped her identity and her professional mission.

As Mary struggles with the oppressive realities of the medical-industrial complex and the growing attacks on women’s reproductive rights, she chooses a path of bold defiance. Inspired by her grandmother’s legacy and her own commitment to compassionate care, she decides to take her work out of the hospital and on the road: she converts an RV into a mobile women’s health clinic. This innovative act allows her to deliver personalized, critical reproductive health care services across the Pacific Northwest, creating community and enduring friendships along the way.

“When women don’t have a choice, bad things happen,” Mary writes. Labor is an intimate, immersive personal story, a rallying cry in a post-Roe world, and an inspiring example of what women can do when they do have a choice. Rich with the voices of her patients and the vibrant cultural threads of her Iranian heritage, Mary’s story challenges us to rethink the boundaries of health care and reclaim the autonomy of women’s bodies and lives. With warmth, insight, and humor, Labor ultimately offers a vision of transformation, resilience, and the power of reclaiming one’s path and saving other people’s lives in the process.

About Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir:

“An engrossing account of one queer man’s journey through a life filled with danger, yes, but also great joy. A beautiful read that adds nuance to the stories of so many refugees.” —Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased.

“Writing this memoir is a betrayal.” So begins this electrifying personal account from Danny Ramadan, a celebrated novelist who has long enjoyed the shield his fiction provides. Now, to tell the story of his life, he must revisit dark corners of his past he’d rather forget and unearth memories of a city he can no longer return to.

Starting with his family’s humble beginnings in Damascus, he takes readers on an epic, border-crossing journey: to the city’s underground network of queer safe homes; to a clandestine party at a secluded villa in Cairo; through Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East, a reckless hoax that threatens the safety of Syria’s LGBTQ+ community, and a traumatic six-week imprisonment; to beaches and sunsets with friends in Beirut; to an arrival in Vancouver that’s not as smooth as it promised to be; and ultimately to a life of hard-won comfort and love.

What emerges is a powerful refutation of the oversimplified refugee narrative—a book that holds space for joy alongside sorrow, for nuance and complicated ambivalences. Written with fearless intimacy, Crooked Teeth is a singular achievement in which a master storyteller learns that his greatest story is his own.