by Paul Pintarich - Contributing Editor

If, as the poet said, April is the “cruelest month,” with spring’s hope harsh and often unfulfilled, then September must be the kindest with the more easily accepted realities of late summer and early fall; that after some lingering rare and wondrous days of sunshine and deep-blue skies, rains must come and we dig in for months of gray-cold rain.

If you have lived around here as I have, for all of my life, and are a writer, the rains of late September are welcome to a mind’s privacy. We come indoors; fly fishing has passed with the leaves drifting golden on the trout streams. And rather than purely aesthetic, outdoor walks become bundled
necessities against weather and poor health, while books are once again sought out as cozy companions during evenings after early twilight.

As a native Oregonian, an endangered species, and a Virgo born on the 13th day of this month, I consider September as the year’s beginning. Not only because of the coming of the rain, but of the beginning of school; a time marked forever into memory with the familiarity of pencil boxes,
blackboard chalk and peanut butter sandwiches.   And after a long hiatus, I think of writing once again. And of writers, so many that I knew once but with whom I have lost touch after several years, isolating myself while questioning whether writing, books and all that  is important anymore?

Then, on a golden day of deep-blue sky, I run into Brian Booth and I am kicked back into gear. Not having seen him in some time, I observe him more wispy haired and thinner than I recall, older of course, like the rest of us, but with the same unpretentious charm and energy that characterizes him
as gadfly and one of Oregon’s foremost advocates of the literary arts.

A Portland attorney, Brian has nevertheless kept his mind and avocation an open book. He was founder of the Oregon Institute for Literary Arts and Oregon Book Awards, was instrumental in forming Friends of Clyde Rice, which has established a writers’ retreat on Rice’s farm along the
Clackamas River, and is himself an editor, most recently of “Wildmen, Wobblies & Whistle Punks; Stewart Holbrook’s Lowbrow Northwest,” by Stewart Holbrook, edited and introduced by Brian, himself. (OSU Press, 1992).

Seeing Brian reminded me we were only a block from the Central Library, where in the Collins Gallery there was an exhibit of his books-- “Oregon Writers and Their Books: Highlights From the Brian Booth Collection” -- a most important personal collection representing Oregon books and authors
from the state’s beginning, in 1859, to today--an exhibit that, unfortunately, concluded on August 30.  Though since returned to Brian’s careful keeping, the works on view serve as an invaluable primer of our native literature, reminding us, despite the continued ignorance of Eastern critics, why  the
Pacific Northwest has long been one of the most significant literary regions in the land.

In Brian’s care are found works classic and contemporary. Here is the first novel published in Oregon, Abigail J. Duniway’s “Captain Gray’s Company,” as well as many other 19th and 20th century works by well-known and obscure writers and poets who often surprise us with their literary diversity.  Significant among these are H.L. Davis’ classic,“Honey in the Horn,” winner of the 1936 Pulitzer Prize, and must reading for any Oregonian worth the moss between their toes. Also found is our
beloved late poet-laureate, William Stafford, as well as the lesser-known but internationally recognized poet Mary Barnard; Gary Snyder, along with Portland’s Hazel Hall, who wrote masterful poetry during a short life of sad modesty.

Not so modest representatives are the infamous Ken Kesey, Ursula Le Guin, the late and adventuresome Don Berry, a more mysterious Suzanne Blanc, and the late Chekovian minimalist Raymond Carver, who wrote briefly but so well.  Moving backward in time we find the eccentric and dubious Joaquin Miller, Zane Grey and Ernest Haycox; Laurence Pratt, the infamous John Reed, the only American resting within the Kremlin’s
walls, Frances Fuller Victor, and the legendary C.E.S. Wood, Oregon renaissance man who, as a cavalryman, recorded the sad surrender of Chief Joseph, surviving well into the next century to be attorney, poet, painter, lover and much more.

And there are so many others, new, contemporary writers who have established themselves nationally and are bringing the region the recognition it deserves.  To live and write here successfully is to transcend the East’s provincial stereotype: that our writers have somehow merely “lucked out” in having their shouts heard from the far boondocks.  If there is acknowledgement, it is often ignorant or ill-placed. An eastern publisher’s assistant once said to me, after I had mentioned Ken Kesey in our conversation, “Oh, is Kesey out there now?”

Another visitor from the East, a literary agent, once said to me, “The Oregonian. . .that’s a weekly, isn’t it?“

So you see, our work is still cut out for us.  Though things are always changing.  Population has much to do with it, of course--and inevitably. After all, those people wearing their silly hats in all those Starbucks coffee shops must have something to talk about other than their cell phones and SUVs.   Nature is the key, the beauty that clamors “Northwest lifestyle,” but encourages suburban sprawl and rapacity.  Nature has been both inspiration and hinderance to our region’s writers. While early writers like H.L.
Davis and Holbrook so skillfully profiled our demographics in fiction and non-fiction, both overwhelmed by the Northwest’s natural beauty, others have captured our psyche by overcoming the outdoor landscape and moving it into the mind.

Stafford did this in his poetry, as did his close friend Richard Hugo. And so do newer writers like Molly Gloss, Craig Lesley, and of course Kesey, oh so well, all along.   Reversing directions west-to-east, David Shetzline conveyed this in “DeFord,” a novel depicting the travails of a retired
Oregon logger trapped on New York’s Bowery.  That Northwest writers are reaching out into the world--and there are so many good ones, men and
women--is significant and hopeful, at least to me. I recall that my good friend Clyde Rice, who died several years ago, was 81 when he published his first book, the heroic autobiography, “A Heaven in the Eye.”

Clyde went on to publish a couple more, the novel “Night Freight” and “Nordi’s Gift,” an autobiographical sequel, and though stricken by strokes that would have felled lesser men, was laboriously writing, speechless and  with only one usable finger, near the time of his death--in his early 90s.
Clyde’s books are about a life that filled nearly all of the last century in Oregon. A life of love and passion and work and folly that defines a man of the Northwest; the kind of man we used to have a lot of around here.

I’d like to write like that, and make my own story ring true.