Shoplift Me: The Oregon Book Awards and the Process of Ambition

Shoplift Me:
The Oregon Book Awards and the Process of Ambition
by Nora McCrea

On a rain-slicked November evening this fall, I ventured out to the Oregon Book Awards down at the Wonder Ballroom, which was MC'ed by short story writer Pam Houston this year.  I once shoplifted Pam Houston’s first collection Cowboys Are My Weakness when I was sixteen, a fact which thankfully made her laugh when I shared that during the cocktail hour. Joseph Gallivan of the Portland Tribune pointed out to me afterwards that she should have asked for her six bucks in royalties. Houston, who told us she’d been recognized by the MFA-grad concierge when she checked into her hotel, thanked Oregon in her opening remarks for being the only place where a writer is made to feel like a rock star.

Diana Abu-Jaber’s look at food and cultural memory in her family, The Language of Baklava, was my personal pick of nominations for the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction, but the award went to Kathleen Dean Moore for The Pine Island Paradox. Portland author Marc Acito thanked Tom Spanbauer’s Dangerous Writing workshop in his acceptance speech for the Ken Kesey Award for the Novel for How I Paid for College.  Those Dangerous Writers.  They certainly have turned out some successes, including Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Joanna Rose’s oeuvre, although Acito did confess to me that he had to go home and work off their suggestions away from the group.  In truth, the room was littered with local lights like Jewish Book Award winner Marjorie Sandor, Tracy Dougherty and staffers from Tin House.

After the heat and press of the crowd had faded, however, I was left thinking about the process of ambition, how those people got to be up on that podium.  Does the literary climate in Oregon make writers feel like rock stars?  There are at least two literary communities in Portland, one of which receives mail at the Literary Arts offices and another which centers somewhere around the intersection of SW Broadway and the Powell’s building, including the block with the Independent Publishers Resource Center and Reading Frenzy.  The latter has produced folks like poet Leanne Grabel, experimental fictionist Frayn Masters and short story writer/publisher Kevin Sampsell, whose latest collection Beautiful Blemishes would have been my nomination for the H.L. Davis short fiction award for its frank, poetic exploration of desire and ennui among a wasteland of dead-end jobs and quickie marts.   I’d say it’s an open question which community produces more vibrant, visceral storytelling, the kind that grabs you by the crotch and says: shoplift me.