The Assay Interview Project: Monica Drake
April 1, 2024

Monica Drake is award-winning author of two novels, Clown Girl and The Stud Book, and the collection of linked stories The Folly of Loving Life. She holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and designed and launched the BFA in Writing at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Her short stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, Longreads, the Sun, Oregon Humanities Magazine, Northwest Review, and other publications.
About Come Closer: Monica Drake's debut nonfiction title is two essays, forty-seven pages, DIY in production, and limited in editions. ​The title essay is a portrait of the author starting out that depicts 1980s Portland as well as it has been depicted. If you miss riding TriMet through the rainy night, Monica Drake will take you there. It’s for observation and reflection like what Drake displays in Come Closer that we have the essay. As the book’s dedication promises, this is a book for all of us.



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Scott F. Parker: Hi, Monica! It's great to be having this conversation with you. I've been reading your work for years, and when I read your new book, Come Closer, I knew right away that I wanted to talk with you about it. 

Monica Drake: Thank you so much, for following my work and being in touch. I appreciate your interest!

Can you talk about what it was like to grow up with two parents who were writers and how that has influenced your life as a writer? 

It’s hard to say how my parents’ writing lives did or didn’t influence the work I do. It’s the question of who a person might be if born to other parents, raised by another family. I really don’t know.

My mother is one of those writers who I believe always wanted to be a writer. She’s creative and smart, likes to recite poetry, and has a wide range of knowledge of the natural world. She says she started reading at two years old and soon enough read everything in the local library.

My father was born in Portland, in the county hospital for the indigent, in 1935, then lived in a tent on the street, with his family, until about 1939. They were homeless. His parents bought their first—and as it turns out, only—house, a tiny place with uneven floors. His father enclosed the front porch and knocked down a wall to expand the postage stamp of a living room. It’s easy to see, still, where the floorboards shift and slope at that juncture. There’s a single bathroom off a back bedroom, and that bedroom itself is about the size of a walk-in closet. These days, Portland streets are still holding the unhoused, and I think of my father’s early life as I see people living in RVs, tents, and tarps.

Our father’s father could fix a car. He owned a few tools. He set up a business digging basements, and later rehabbed a bulldozer. I have one of his business cards from about 1939. The word BULLDOZER is typed in as an afterthought, a later acquisition. ​
Pretty much everything my grandfather had to work with is listed on the card—a business partner, a telephone, a shovel, a hoe, a BULLDOZER . . . trucks, salvaged and rebuilt.
​
Unfortunately, our father’s father passed away too soon. Eventually our dad, a fatherless hotrodder, kicking around the city, making use of the tools his dad left him—working in a garage—impulsively pulled his truck up between buildings at Portland State University, a low-bar, commuter-based state school downtown, which has always been, honestly, pure gold. He went to see the registrar and said, “Gimme a class that everybody takes.” The registrar put him in a basic writing course, a perfect fit, like turning a key in a lock. He’d been a roughneck kid who also made lists, a boy with a rifle, a bike, a pocket knife . . . who kept a journal, who wrote things down though nobody asked him to, creating his own writing assignments. With college, writing became a new tool, the way a shovel and then a bulldozer had been his father’s.
 
An accessible higher education changes lives. PSU changed the direction of our father’s life, and by extension, our lives, his future children and grandchildren. I thank that PSU registrar, as well as both of my parents, for launching a version of this path that I’m now on. Portland State forged a working man’s way to come into a trade that also happens to be an art, a gateway, a path toward the spirit and the mind.
 
Between both of our parents, my brother, sister, and I grew up in a house of small press publishing, the scent of aged paper, late night stapling, the crumpled cigarettes of grad student parties, sometimes kegs of beer and a crowd in the yard, Super-8 cameras, wildness, and wilderness. It was the seventies into the eighties. Our hallways were narrow and dark, lined with books. As a little kid, I’d read the titles as I walked, running my hand along the spine of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Both sounded like children’s books to me! Ha! I’d think about the sound of the words. I was interested in Trout Fishing in America because I’d been trout fishing in America, even as a little kid, and what did I know about Brautigan? We were allowed to read at dinner: with five people in our family, maybe four or more of us would have books on the table between us.
 
The unreliable narrator was one of our father’s favorite literary concerns, along with writing in general. In the years when one of my teenage girl cousins was in legal trouble, with a bad-boy boyfriend and a mess of drugs, our dad said, “Write it down! Write it all down.” Maybe he hoped she’d engage in self-improvement through literature. Life is full of mistakes, and it’s all potentially material. That’s a fantastic life lesson. It didn’t solve my cousin’s struggle, but I heard his advice and took it to heart.
 
Before writing, I studied psychology, animal behavior, and art history. I interned at the Oregon Zoo, studying Infant Asian Elephant Development and Play Behavior. I interned at the Smithsonian as an archivist covering the McCarthy Era of the SITES (traveling exhibits) program. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties, when I met the author Tom Spanbauer, that I really started writing. Tom made writing into a new animal, a wild place of the heart. He launched a workshop method he called Dangerous Writing out of his house. I took the risk. I was his first student, and his student forever. Writing, as Tom Spanbauer conveyed the craft, was dreamy, dangerous, and close to the spirit. I was in it then, for life.

Two of your previous books were published by indies, Hawthorne Books and Future Tense Books, and one was published by a big five, Hogarth Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Why did you decide to self-publish Come Closer? What has the process been like for you?
 
I spent years submitting versions of Clown Girl to major publishers. At times I had an agent who submitted the work. I’d hear back that editors loved the book, but there was a mysterious level of the publishing industry which I knew nothing about—the marketing board. Nobody talks about a marketing board in grad school, yet here they were, always expressing uncertainty, unsure how to market my work, and then publishing houses would politely decline, one and another. Later, a few editors wrote back to ask what had become of it . . . Then they’d disappear again. I started to feel like I was circling a fortress in the dark, searching by feel for a crack in a stone wall, determined to keep going . . . How to get in? I shared the work-in-progress with a few writers, and received supportive notes, like this one, from the late Tristan Egolf, (when the manuscript was under a different working title):
​Rhonda Hughes of Hawthorne Books ultimately took the gamble. An indie press can be daring and flexible. I love her and her entire creative sensibility. I love the cover, which Hawthorne produced working with Adam McIsaac of Pinch, a design company. I love Hughes’s relatively light touch on editing coupled with sage advice and gentle nudges to trim back. And I love that my work is now part of an amazing catalog. She’s a dream collaborator. The book sold out through multiple print runs. It’s my understanding that sales of Clown Girl helped Hawthorne move from a small to a more substantially recognized indie with wider distribution, before they published heavy-hitters, big time stuff, like Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir, The Chronology of Water as one amazing example. I love Hawthorne Books to the moon and back, for their daring and clarity of purpose. I’m honored that they took a chance on my work, and that it paid off for all involved, as far as that goes. 
After that, I worked with a fantastic agent and sold my second book in a six-figure deal with a subsidiary of one of the world’s largest publishing houses. I took two trips to L.A. and, working with Hawthorne back in Portland, managed to sell the film rights for Clown Girl to the actress Kristin Wiig. Kevin Sampsell, of Future Tense Books—a “micro press”—asked if I had a story collection. I offered him The Folly of Loving Life. I was honored to have a book under his imprint.
 
I’d built an undergraduate college writing program and was newly approved for a sabbatical, which meant a year off at half pay. Everything was amazing, coming together after decades of work.
 
Unfortunately, the success I enjoyed came at a time of my now ex-husband’s midlife rage. I believe it was cause and effect: I did well, and he was enraged. I had time and money, after a lifetime of both paid and unpaid labor, and he depleted both time and money, to assuage his rage. Divorce court was contentious. The entire mess undermined our finances as well as our lives. I wrote about some of the aspects here: “The Ongoing Joke about Women and Money Isn’t Funny Anymore.”
 
I have another piece out in the world written under a pseudonym that even I’ve lost track of, and I wrote about other elements anonymously, here: “Whatever Happened to ______ ?” This last piece went viral. It was posted and reposted internationally, by writers, actresses, and others. It became the second most read piece on Longreads for the year and was linked by the Guardian and others. The essay kicked off a conversation, inspiring others to speak up, that is still unfolding. Here’s one of the most recent examples, or points of reference that came my way:
Because my essay was anonymous, the success of it didn’t bump up a book deal. I inspired a conversation, though wasn’t included in panel discussions or related conversations. Up until now this piece has existed as an anonymous voice, one more way that violence silences. Only close friends recognized the words as mine, the details as my experience.
 
Tillie Olson wrote about this gendered dynamic in Silences . . . and about ways in which women are silenced, through motherhood, gender bias, and family demands. She wrote, “In their adult years, women struggled with sporadic effort and unfinished work . . . they made mediocre caretakers of their talent. Writing is not first . . . there is maintenance-of-life necessity, work on a paid job as well as the whirled expending motherhood years. We must not speak of women writers without speaking also of the invisible, the as-innately-capable: the born to the wrong circumstances—diminished, excluded, foundered, silenced.”
 
Not enough has changed, at times.
 
But I’m here, in this writing business for the long haul, and I’m still working. I don’t take even a day of writing, reading, or living for granted. Fists, verbal assaults, coercive control, financial abuse—it’s been hellish, no other way to put it, but I’m grateful to be free and moving on.
 
The essays in Come Closer come out of a time before all of that, looking at who I’ve been, and where I’ve been. With these essays there’s an aspect of reclaiming my own anti-consumerist, low-buck, big love roaming existence.
 
The essays are new, in that they haven’t been previously published. At the same time, they’re revised and built from material I’ve been drafting over years. I took variations of both of these essays into workshop, back in the pre-pandemic world, when a group of us were still meeting as a workshop, then I put the work aside. I tend to be a slow writer because I’m also a mother and a daughter. My father, in particular, needed some caretaking through the past decade, and I taught college for the past twenty-five years, too.
 
Honestly, I have about one thousand pages of essays-in-progress, drafted. Some are more complete than others. I’ve moved pieces around to create three different themed essay collections, though I’m not sure if they work yet. I look at the essays individually then together, considering the material. What I’m interested in is perhaps abstract but has to do with presenting the pieces of a girl’s life, a woman’s life, which comes out of the world of art, philosophy, ideas, and community. Portland is a city of strippers, among other claims to fame—more strippers per capita than any other city in the US . . . and that isn’t my chosen terrain. I want to show myself on the page as I’ve been, at times ragged and other times caretaking, but always operating in the world of ideas, not solely or even mostly that of the body, often the handy terrain of marketing and feminized gender.
 
I’m interested in how we make meaning and make sense of our lives. We make meaning out of words, or use words to convey meaning, and philosophers have often asked questions about meaning and understanding. But I’m also interested in how to convey the meaning of relationships, particularly those that exist outside of clearly defined lines. The people in these essays—real people—are those who rode the bus alongside me, in a shared space, and taught me so much about living. They’re friends and neighbors. Sometimes, they’re the voices of people I only know through the books they’ve left behind, as they’ve left this world. It all counts, it all matters, it’s all part of being alive, listening and reading and writing, of speaking back through the ages, being aware and feeling our own humanity in the mix.
 
I’m also always here to shout out to what people call “the Old Portland,” meaning the eighties and nineties. Old Portland in the lexicon of my demographic would most likely be delineated by cheap apartments and the scent of rancid malt, when Henry Weinhard’s brewery was still spitting out it’s pale beer foam waste into downtown at night, around Powell's Books, and the Franz bread bakery filled the air with the scent of a major commercial ovens, turning out warm loaves on conveyor belts. It was a time before and lunging into the era when Kurt met Courtney, the grunge scene. Portland was a dark, blue-collar dive, struggling with deeply ingrained racism, poverty, heroin, inequity, bad cops, but also thriving with ideas, art, politics, cultural challenges, questions, push-back, voices, and lives.
 
I wrote essays through the pandemic. The book is a labor of love. These essays reach toward something close to my heart, in love, art, ideas and memory. It’s about how we influence each other, how we make creative work, outside of structural educational or professional systems. How to express the inherent value in that? This book is a quiet conversation in one corner of a major party, murmuring what matters to me. I’ve put it out into the world, trusting that it will find its way to people who take an interest. It’s a pebble tossed into a river of conversation, perhaps contributing in a minor way to the tiniest shift in any existing current. How did we come to this place where bestsellers are so often mining the terrain of dead girls, consumerism, name brands, men with money? How do we express more ambiguous aspects of a generalized love, longing, and human value? How to write about the past without it being considered nostalgia, conveying instead significant meaning?
 
And what about the logistics of self-publishing? How did you navigate editing, design, printing, distribution—the things a publisher would normally do?

A few years ago, I was at a small press book fair in Seattle and saw a lovely book of photographs. The quality of the printing was good, suited to the quality of the photos, and the binding and other aspects were great, too. Looking at the book kicked off a conversation with visual artists and authors about printing, resources, economics. It made me want to create a book of my own. 

I chose a printing company with an economic model based on individual books, rather than one that becomes more economical by volume. In other words, I could order a slim set instead of feeling compelled to order thousands at a time in order to bring the price down, then storing and managing inventory. I’ve ordered 140 total, with no plans to print more. I’d like it to stay limited, as an edition. Most are gone, a number are left, for those who might want to order a copy.

I’m fortunate to know wonderful, creative, and generous people. My friend Jen Wick did the layout. She’s a graphic designer who works under the business name Fort Wick, currently working for the Port of Portland, I believe. Brent Hirack, photographer, and I had fun taking the photos. It was all collaborative. I’m so grateful to know them, these talented, beautiful people. 
 
This is your fourth book and your first book of nonfiction. What made you want to write essays?
 
I see it as a path from what was a more roundabout way of expressing something—visual arts, theater arts, considering poetry, taking on fiction, then essays—always moving toward increasingly direct communicative work. Essays welcome a clarity of expression, a directness . . . though it’s possible that I’ve still fallen short of saying what I hope to say. George Bernard Shaw apparently said, “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” Language is clear and it is murky. There’s a space between people, and clarity of expression can bridge the gulf between interior lives, but so can art, so can a hike, a wave, a sunset. I’m always aiming for clarity, though also building a world, in love with all aspects of language, metaphor, and meaning.
 
Are your nonfictional influences different from your fictional influences?
 
It’s one conversation, ideas finding shape in varied forms with different modes, different implicit contracts with the reader. Some of my favorite authors cross from fiction to essays, illuminating their ideas. I’ve tried to give a shout out [1] to so many writers who inspire me in the second essay in particular, though there are always more, the list doesn’t end, honestly, only keeps growing in all admiration.
 
I think of you as belonging to something I call the Portland School, an informal group of writers, many of whose names appear in the book, who share a blunt realistic style and a willingness to face life’s suffering with a defiant smile. It’s a little romantic, but more than that it’s gritty. Things are hard and will always be hard, but no one is thinking of giving up or giving in. Many of the writers I have in mind live or lived in Portland, but there’s something about the aesthetic I have in mind that fits Portland itself, at least Portland of the eighties and nineties. Do you think of your writing as being, in part, a product of Portland, not just topically but artistically?
 
What I hope comes through in the essays is, in part, how much place shapes us even as we bring shape to the place. The influence can’t be helped. It moves in all directions, and the conversation evolves. Portland is a noir town, a city built on timber fraud and land scandals, the largest city in the only state in the nation with systemic racism built into the state constitution. At the same time, in other ways, it’s still a city of people trying to be their better selves, to varying degrees of success. It’s a city of idealists, in the lineage of John Reed, Ursula Le Guin, and others who asked what it means to know that life’s enjoyments are too often built on the suffering of others. They both raised that question directly. How do we live, knowing others are suffering? It’s at the heart of Le Guin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” as one example, and it was laced through Reed’s assertions. It’s a very Portland question, though maybe also just a very human question.
 
Within that “Portland School,” as you’ve called it, there are a certain number of us who have come up through Tom Spanbauer’s “Dangerous Writers” workshops, so we’re actually unified through a kind of workshop experience, while remaining individual in our ideas and writing. I was Tom’s first workshop student—the first one to take workshops in his home and stick with it, keep going. Chuck Palahniuk joined shortly after I did, and of course he broke out big time with Fight Club and so many books since then. Eventually, a number of us stayed together in our own workshop group, including Suzy Vitello and others. Cheryl Strayed initially drafted her memoir, Wild, in that group. Lidia Yuknavitch brought so much to our workshop, as a writer, a teacher, and a brilliant mind, and of course she has written many books. Chelsea Cain, too, and others. We met weekly for decades, in an incredible gathering of big personalities, dedication to the craft, and shared support. In terms of our workshop, we inspired and coached and argued with each other, over decades. But the city has shaped us all, too, with its hard edges and ruthless, aggressive whimsy.
 
Tom let us know, the first time I met him in his first workshop, in a small, grade school library, that he had AIDS and he’d come to Portland to write stories until he died. He imagined he’d go soon. He made writing important, on a very personal level. I’m glad to say that over thirty years later, he’s still with us.
 
Dangerous Writing is about taking risks. Those risks show up on the page in ways that are varied, but they’re always there, either in terms of sentences, or content. They might show up in the transgressive material of Chuck Palahniuk, or in my own whispered stories, or in the confessional work of other writers, but the risk is there, and the sentences are strong and there’s a rubric, a set of ideas, a set of terminology. Tom used a combination of listening, pausing, and line editing, alongside recommending stories to read, to show us how to write—really write, beyond basics, to the essence of being human, words on the page. 
 
Portland as a city also showed me how to write. This place fostered the urge to turn life into words on the page, to take notes and hold on to something—tension, missteps, the whole visible mix of politics and pushback, human constructs alongside breathtaking earthly beauty, so much longing, and most of all . . . textures. There’s a novel in every assorted group to gather on public transportation, our buses so often half empty but full of ideas, and in old apartments, weathered wood and metal. When I look at the photos of Minor White, who photographed Portland back in 1939, including a building I worked in for a while, I see textures of the world that was and the dreams that are still here, and I feel time stretch back to the days when my father was born here, and I know we’re all connected, tangled, traveling through time and space.
 
When the sketch comedy show Portlandia came in, they offered an outsider’s view. They were perhaps writing from the vantage point of the proverbial drunk uncle, always mocking “new” ideas, like feminist bookstores and eating locally, aiming for a more humane existence, which aren’t really new ideas at all. It’s a kind of conservatism in hipster clothes, keeping the status quo.
 
The people I know best run toward anti-consumerist, low-consumption, DIY, with high expectations for things like how food is made, how good the home brew, how regionally we can forage, how close to the heart and far from commercial we can live. Those values also shape a vision, pulling together beautiful images and gritty moments not tied to assumptions about value always being reflected in cash value, but in something more closely linked to an essential humanity, maybe even the human spirit. At least, that’s how I see things. Maybe I’m only speaking for myself. You can make a lot out of a little, if you see the value and the beauty in the moment, and support each other in our shared need for nourishment, creativity and small, certain sources of joy.
 
“Portland was mine,” you write in the title essay. “I was there to witness, to listen and learn.” What's it like to revisit that era? And what about it did you hope to capture?
 
It’s pretty common, among some of us in Portland, to remember a wildly different time, when rent was cheap but our expectations were also a little rough around the edges. What I hoped to capture was the sense that it’s okay to build a life out of very little, and it can be a creative and rich life. I meet a lot of people who are writing, when they can, though who imagine they could really get going if they had the money, the time away from work, or if they only knew the right people. The way I came to writing, I’ve always had at least one job and sometimes as many as three. I met the “right” people on the bus and in old apartments. I took my most meaningful writing class from a man who was handing out his phone number on pieces of paper at the gay pride parade. After the first round of workshop with him, I bartered for ongoing tuition by finding used furniture he needed, folding chairs and a slab of marble.
 
I also wanted to convey something about moral ambiguity and human connections. The first essay is largely focused on a cartoonist, John Callahan. He was a cool guy and kind of a creep—but I say that fondly, as a friend. His whole deal was about pushing boundaries, stirring people up, but also about trying to score chicks. He was in awe of women, and I’d say afraid of women, and maybe that brought out a misogynistic streak? I can only guess. I wasn’t a fan of some of his anger, or his ideas about denigrating women in general ways, but I took an interest in his work, his character, his humanity. I saw him. I knew him and listened. What to do with a friend like that?
 
These two essays were, or are, the first and last in a set of what I think of as how-to-be-human pieces, though I’m not sure it’s anybody’s way of being human other than those of us who lived it. It’s not inspirational, unless the inspiration is in finding a creative path and thriving in unconventional ways.
 
The second essay in the book, “Between the Living and Dead,” is set in a closer-to-contemporary Portland. We get glimpses of the gentrification that has marked the twenty-first century so far and glimpses of the events of 2020. But even so we’re once again looking mostly back at how the past shapes the present. “We're layered on top of each other, walking over the footsteps of our predecessors.” You are really working in this book to understand your place in the tradition of Portland writers. Why is that so important to you, and why is that so important to you right now?
 
My aims with this essay are somewhat, or perhaps wildly, different from your encapsulation here.
 
What I’m offering, I hope, is a tribute, and a gratitude shout-out to writers I’ve known one way or another[1] , either in life, as friends and colleagues or on the page, as voices that come to me as I move over Portland’s terrain, blending the material world and the world of ideas. There are ways to know writers through their words that can be passed down through time.
 
It’s called “Between the Living and the Dead,” largely because I’m intentionally blurring lines between these states of being, as well as means of knowing, in our shared humanity.
 
I believe writing is a conversation that happens through time and space. Personally, I believe anyone can enter into that conversation. Being heard is a different matter, but we can read and write and look out at the world and talk to friends and strangers. We can make art, regardless of our economic or other circumstance. How can we convey the beauty, value and inspiration of a hard knocks, punk rock, rainy dark day in a creative city?
 
The past is actively with us, in influence and struggles, for better or worse. Portland shows the footprint of its particular history. This city is relatively new, compared to other cities around the world. We’re still struggling with the essential racism of our foundations, in a very material way, including a history of segregated neighborhoods, followed by red-lining then gentrification. The economic and social struggle is with us. Some of the families of lumber barons are still here, their last names carrying on. I’m now in my fifties. The writers I’m celebrating in these essays are people, friends and authors or both, who have influenced my worldview, my creative work. I’m singing their praises and remembering their voices. Too many have passed away. Some of those I mention in the essays I only knew through their writing, but it’s a shoutout to writing as an art and a way of connecting through time. Writers like John Reed, a political idealist, have felt present to me even though they’re gone. For a long time Portland had a John Reed Bookstore. I lived near it. His name was on the awning. The old steps of his family estate were buried under fern and brush, though the house was long gone. I could, at a time, sit on those steps. His books are still with us. Writing has always felt like one big, nonstop party, in the mind and spirit, and I wanted to highlight some of the authors, living and dead, past and present, who have fueled that party for me and invited me into the world of ideas.
 
On Portland, I’m curious: Given your observations of how the city has changed over the years, what's it like to be a writer in today’s Portland, which isn’t the blue-collar town of the eighties and nineties or the mecca of cute brunch spots of the aughts? Do you still see evidence of the “emotional currency” that you write about in The Folly of Loving Life (a collection of stories set in Portland), or have rents made currency the only relevant currency? I haven’t lived in Portland since 2009, and I’m somewhat suspicious of my impressions now. But growing up there was always a sense of communal optimism that feels hard to come by now. Is that accurate? Is it fair? Where does that leave you as a writer?

The creative advertising agency Weiden + Kennedy has gifted Portland the slogan “Portland is what we make it.” It is what it is, no doubt. But what is Portland, now? It’s possible we’re all checking for the city’s pulse. In that void, art will find a way to build community and jumpstart the heart of this city one more time. I’m absolutely certain. The arts will have a place in enlivening Portland, bringing people back. The question is, how, and when, and for whom. I’m here to swing for the bleachers and support voices of all kinds, contributing to the conversation, too, in finding our shared future, together. 
 
Can you please confirm for me that we’ll be seeing more nonfiction from you in the future?
 
Yes! I’ve just finished an essay for an anthology that I’m proud to be part of. Unless something changes, that should be out in the coming year or so.
 
Wonderful! I’ll be looking forward to it. For now, thank you for taking the time to discuss your work with me. It’s been a pleasure.

End Notes

[1] ​Louise Bryant, Chelsea Cain, John Callahan, Walt Curtis, Rene Denfeld, Albert Drake, Barbara Drake, Abigail Scott Duniway, Katherine Dunn, Ralph Friedman, Hazel Hall, Mitchell Jackson, Ken Kesey, Ursula Le Guin, Chuck Palahniuk, Hattie Redmond, John Reed, Tom Spanbauer, Cheryl Strayed, C. E. S. Wood, Elizabeth Woody, Lidia Yuknavitch
Scott F. Parker is the author of A Way Home: Oregon Essays and the editor of Conversations with Joan Didion, among other books.

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