News, Other Stuff

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*Photo by Stephanie Bassos, Chicago-based photographer.

Franki Elliot is a 20-something author from Chicago and blogs for us every Monday.  Curbside published her first book Piano Rats (October 2011). We are publishing her second book in late spring 2013.  This week Franki is typewriter-less.  For more Franki typewriter stories visit http://frankielliottypewriter.tumblr.com/

This is an eight part series by Portland author Aaron Gilbreath consisting of his interviews with members of Portland's homeless population.  Stay tuned for Part IV next week.  See Part II here.

Aaron Gilbreath is a burrito-obsessed essayist, journalist, and housesitter. He resides in Portland and his work can be found all over the place.  Click here to learn more about him. 

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Introduction

Like all interesting people and places, Portland, Oregon is a multifaceted character. There is Portland the socially progressive utopia of artists, food carts and environmentally conscious urbanism. And there is the Portland of pretension, heroin addiction, racial separation and rampant homelessness. The city occupies a county that has over 15,000 homeless people. That figure includes not only people who sleep on the street and in shelters, but those who sleep on friends’ couches and in cars and in transitional housing. In 2009, Oregon ranked first in the nation for homelessness per capita.

Those of us who have lived here long enough to have watched the city change from a sleepy little low-rent secret to a globally hyped mecca of gastronomy and marketable eccentricity know that no matter how empathetic your constitution, the sheer scale of homelessness here means that you can easily became immune to the presence of it. Two soiled feet sticking out from under a blanket, a body curled in a doorway atop cardboard slabs – to Portlanders, these sights can become as unexceptional as a sign at a coffee shop advertising gluten-free muffins. I don’t like growing accustomed to human suffering. Empathy should never grow callouses. Yet overly accustomed is what I’d become. Here I was, surrounded by the homeless, yet I knew close to nothing about them or their lives. So I spent the summer of 2011 speaking to them on the street.

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*Photo by Stephanie Bassos, Chicago-based photographer.

Franki Elliot is a 20-something author from Chicago and blogs for us every Monday.  Curbside published her first book Piano Rats (October 2011). We are publishing her second book in late spring 2013.  This week Franki is typewriter-less.  For more Franki typewriter stories visit http://frankielliottypewriter.tumblr.com/

We've received our very first Publishers Weekly review, and it's a great one!  Check out their review of our forthcoming book MAY WE SHED THESE HUMAN BODIES, the debut short story collection of Washington DC based author Amber Sparks.

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"Sparks’s debut story collection swirls with a Tim Burton-like whimsy. Ghosts nurse babies (“As They Always Are”), Death visits Earth as a New England prep (“Death and the People”), people evolve from trees (in the title story), and a girl, born in the land of the dead, is sent to Earth accompanied by a protective group of ghosts (“The Ghosts Eat More Air”). “You Will Be the Living Equation” describes a teenager’s attempts to cope with a friend’s suicide. This is much-traveled ground, but the story’s poignant insights are enlivened by the element of the supernatural and a second-person narration. The collection’s 30 stories, most no longer than three pages, are modern fables in which epiphanies replace moral lessons and tales unfold with Grimm-like wickedness. While the book’s shorter, more fantastic pieces are often little more than exercises in imagination, they provide an unnerving atmosphere in which the longer stories can languish and offer the primal enjoyment of not knowing what will happen next. As this energetic collection shows, Sparks isn’t afraid to take chances."

- Publishers Weekly