Wordstock, Baby!

[April 27th, 2005] Thousands of Portland readers spilled through the hallways of the Oregon Convention Center last weekend to attend Wordstock, a public book party organized by writer Larry Colton. "The only way Larry Colton could have gotten more press is if he would have married Neil Goldschmidt," joked Tom D'Antoni, a producer for OPB's Oregon Art Beat, at the kickoff reading. WW, a media sponsor for the event, adds to the glut with this offering of our favorite moments.

9:15 pm Tuesday, April 19, Keller Auditorium

"I like rewriting," novelist John Irving said to an appreciative crowd of some 1,600 who turned out to hear him read from his upcoming novel, Until I Find You. "I can't do it enough." (Mary Putnam)

11:18 am Saturday, April 23, Borders Stage

Her Auntie Aya came up with her own solution to international peacekeeping, writer Diana Abu-Jaber tells a crowd of 300 people: "Just get the three superpowers together and feed them baklava." That easy-as-pastry solution hints at the flavor of Abu-Jaber's new food-accented family memoir, The Language of Baklava. (Ellen Fagg)

1:06 pm Saturday, TriMet Living Room

Six minutes into Melissa Hart's humor-writing workshop, the instructor mentions that much of her humor comes from the fact that she is a Buddhist, then spends the next 45 minutes assaulting the silent crowd with the sound of one ham laughing. Hart, the author of The Assault of Laughter, espouses the kind of advice you could find in any sophomore comp class, including such golden nuggets of knowledge as: "Tragedy + time = comedy." Who knew? (Mark Baumgarten)

2:36 pm Saturday at Burgerville, 1135 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.

Even the graffiti in the women's bathroom at the closest fast-food joint promotes literature: www.bookcrossing.com, somebody has scrawled in black felt pen, accompanied by a smiley face. (EF)

2:45 pm Saturday, in the line outside the TriMet Living Room

"Books may well be the only true magic," a quote from Alice Hoffman, is printed on a bag slung over the shoulder of a bearded man standing in a line that snakes out into the hallway. "Are they waiting to have their books signed by a famous author?" I ask a Wordstock volunteer. "No," she responded drily. "This is the workshop to find an agent." (Byron Beck)

3:45 pm Saturday, convention center hallway

"I need you to introduce the poetry stage," Laura Howe, the 18-year-old volunteer directing traffic, tells festival director Colton. "Oh, no," he replies, just as urgently. "I don't do poetry." (EF)

4:25 pm Saturday, Borders Stage

"She's got a worry Rolodex inside her skull that's so thick she can barely spin it," reads Pam Houston, a description of a character in her novel Sight Hound. (EF)

8:04 pm Saturday, Keller Auditorium

He's still "The Man," KINK's Sheila Hamilton says to introduce Norman Mailer. And it's her outfit, black strappy sandals and a miniskirt, that prompts Mailer's first sexist comment of the night. After the writer makes his way to the podium, supporting himself on two canes, Mailer says he'd restrain himself from offering Hamilton "an exceptional compliment, although she deserves it." Mailer presents a short lecture on the craft of writing-complete with typical flourishes of machismo, sexism and elitism. Male novelists have to grapple with creating a character more intelligent than themselves, Mailer opines, while women writers are relegated to concerns about sensitivity or passion. He rails against conservative Republicans and do-nothing Democrats, and each reference to marijuana or Lyndon Johnson draws delighted hoots from the aging hippies in the audience, while their younger neighbors seem to cringe in embarrassment-or maybe boredom. (Angela Valdez)

12:43 pm Sunday, April 24, Powell's Stage

"Thanks for coming to a reading at the monster-truck rally," says Sarah Vowell, referring to the racket of a literary trade show occurring on five stages in one echoing convention hall. Vowell, a member of the modern humor essayist club made popular by NPR's This American Life, reads from her latest book, Assassination Vacation. Vowell's fans relish the author's deadpan delivery as much as her words, but here the writer is forced to bark over the background noise. "I've never yelled the word 'genitalia' in public before," she says. "I'm just glad my mom wasn't here to hear it." (MB)

1:20 pm Sunday, Azumano Travel Oregon Stage

For 20 minutes, four writers from Portland's Dangerous Writing workshop have been telling a confused crowd of 70 people about "burning" words and "collapsing distances." And then one anxious onlooker raises his hand and asks the question all of us want to know: "Can you please tell me exactly what 'dangerous writing' is?" The answer, sadly, is in no danger of being deciphered. (MB)

2:05 pm Sunday, Dianetics booth, convention hall

I am holding two silver cylinders in my hand taking the Scientologists' "stress test," while a wide-eyed 23-year-old named Mick tells me that all the stress and unhappiness in my life comes from my "reactive mind," which apparently thinks too much about the pesky past. If I read L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics (hardcover on sale for $16.95), he tells me, I can get rid of those thoughts. "But I like my memories," I tell him. This prompts Autumn, his colleague, to quickly shuffle over to me, Mick and the machine. "You won't lose your memories," she assures me, "you'll just get rid of the emotional connection to them." (MB)

4 pm Sunday, Portland Ballroom

Clad in black, writer Alice Sebold offers a somber reading featuring a senile mother who has soiled herself. Rather than clean the poor woman up, the narrator smothers her to death. "Is that scene inspired by One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest?" an audience member asks.

Sebold replies with a monosyllable: "No."

Another question for the author of The Lovely Bones, a novel, and Lucky, a memoir:

"You have written in the past about the overlap between memoir and fiction-is there any such overlap in the scene you just read, or is it all fiction?"

"It's fiction," she says, and that is that.