Triinu Hoffman has to face cruelties like this every day. Shy, intellectual, and living in a rural town, she just doesn’t fit in. She does her best to hide behind her dyed hair and black wardrobe, but it’s still hard to ignore the bullying of Pip Weston and Principal Pinn. It’s even harder to ignore the allure of other girls.
After the devastating loss of her father on a canoe trip meant to bring them closer together, fifteen-year-old Emma Wilson finds herself alone on the river. As she treks out from their remote campsite, she faces wild rapids and a numbing sense of guilt. Back home, Emma confronts the complexity of grief and realizes that leaving the river behind was only the first step forward.
It’s been a year since the Big One―the Cascadia subduction zone earthquake―devastated Portland. While Meryem Zarfati’s injuries have healed and her neighborhood is rebuilding, her mother is still missing. Refusing to give up hope, Meryem continues to search for her mother, even as she learns to live without her in a changed Portland. Along the way, she struggles with her Jewish-Vietnamese heritage and what it means to honor her ancestry. After she receives a magical prayer shawl handed down from her maternal grandmother, a mysterious stranger appears and Meryem is called to save a young girl living in slavery―in sixteenth-century Istanbul. The third companion in the Oregon Book Award–winning Blue Thread series explores how we recover―and rebuild―after the worst has happened.
A widower searching for solace in competitive eating. A mother and daughter preparing their living room for the rapture. A young couple looking for reasons to reconnect on a trip to the mountains. A grieving sister and her alcoholic brother sharing a home for the first time since childhood. Siblings and Other Disappointments follows an array of characters searching for comfort—in parents and children, in brothers and sisters, in strangers and friends. Scattered throughout the Pacific Northwest, its twelve stories are stories of place, as stark and infinitely complex as the landscape itself. Author Kait Heacock’s debut collection is an examination of relationships and isolation within working-class families and a tribute to the little victories and traumas of everyday life.
When the flower children were flocking to Woodstock, Allison Green was in preschool. As a teenager, yearning for the counterculture movement she felt she just missed, she discovered the writing of Richard Brautigan, finding refuge in his visions of America and refusal to conform. Years later, however, she questions her attachment. Why would a lesbian and feminist writer identify with an author whose most famous work doesn’t even name its female characters? Searching for the answer, Green embarks on a journey retracing Brautigan’s steps in Trout Fishing in America. Along the way, she examines how we relate to the influences in our lives-the ancestors who created us, the past that shaped us, the writers who changed the way we saw the world–and how these elements intertwine to make us who we are.
It’s 1960. In a small logging town called Calamus that’s about as far in the middle of nowhere as you can get, Wade Curren, star of the high school baseball and football teams, is content living out his role of local hero, holding court in the corner booth of the town diner where his girlfriend Lorna waits tables.
Meri Miller lives in Soldotna, Alaska. Never heard of it? That’s because in Slowdotna the most riveting activities for a teenager are salmon fishing and grabbing a Big Gulp at the local 7-Eleven. More than anything, Meri wants to hop in her VW Bug and head somewhere exciting, like New York or L.A. or any city where going to the theater doesn’t only mean the movies. Everything is so scripted here–don’t have too much fun, date this guy because he’s older and popular, stay put because that’s what everyone else does.
Sixteen-year-old Mattie Rollins has her life all figured out. She’ll ace her high school classes, earn a college scholarship, and create a new life for herself and her family. But Mattie’s brilliant plans begin to crumble when her family is forced to move into their beat-up station wagon, Ruby. Then, her mother mysteriously disappears.
Dangerous secrets, past tragedies, and a violent obsession emerge when Emerson and her estranged family agree to care for a ten-year-old Native-Alaskan girl and a complete stranger, Addie, in the wake of Addie’s single mother attempting suicide. Emerson has buried her emotions since her husband’s suicide a decade past. Meanwhile, her younger sister, Tillie, pursues a new romance with a woman and avoids her questions about the accident which left her in a wheelchair.
An eccentric writer and self-proclaimed “socio-anthropo-lingui-loreologist” ventures into the fictional town of Odsburg, Washington, to research the location’s unusual history and residents. Convinced the name of the town is no coincidence, Wallace Jenkins-Ross goes about uncovering its mysteries through shady (and sometimes illegal) means. He discovers one man contending with a family of mountain lions living in his basement, another who can’t stop hallucinating after getting laser eye surgery, and a corporate employee whose skin is gradually receding. Despite his immersion into local traditions of flannel and bar food, the residents prove hesitant to speak on record—particularly within earshot of OdsWellMore Pharmaceutical, whose ominous presence extends not only to call centers and pet parades but to maintaining (and testing) the physical and mental well-being of the community.
Claire Stanfield became a lawyer to make her father proud, but after a troubling case leaves her shaken, she escapes to Alaska and immerses herself in the world of dog sledding. Dillon Cord became a police officer to serve his community, but he moves to Nome in the wake of a life-altering incident. For both, the Iditarod—the toughest sled dog race in the world—offers a chance for forgiveness, redemption, and healing.
Never leave someone behind: it’s a promise easier made than kept, especially when seventeen-year-old Pip takes the headstrong twelve-year-old Iris under her protection in the wake of an earth-shattering plague. After an unspeakable tragedy, the duo must negotiate the complexities of their own identities amid the nearly unrecognizable remains of Spokane, Washington.
Fifteen-year-old Laurel Summers couldn’t tell you the last words she spoke to her mother and siblings if her life depended on it. But she will never forget the image of her mother’s mangled green car on the freeway, shattering the boring world Laurel had been so desperate to escape. Now she can’t stop seeing the ghosts of her family members, which haunt her with memories of how life used to be back when her biggest problem was the kiss she shared with her best friend Hanna.
Isaac knew Heritage Camp would be different this year: he was different. While he had accepted who he was, he wasn’t sure how his peers would feel. What he didn’t expect was having to investigate the sudden death of his camp counselor.
Ed Garrison has it all—a successful basketball career, a great relationship with his kid brother, the best dog a guy could ask for, and a supportive family. With summer vacation being the only thing standing between him and a full-ride scholarship to Berkeley, Ed feels invincible.
This flash fiction anthology examines the experiences of being a transplant in a foreign land and looks critically at what it means to forsake tongues, traditions, and comforts in the hope of starting a new life in another world. These stories push readers to expand their understanding of the world beyond their own front doors.
