Support the union workers of Powell’s Books! This benefit event will feature readings from the latest issue of The Ne’er-Do-Well. You’ll hear true tales from the circus, the Outback Steakhouse, and a Minnesota dairy farm from contributors Gigi Little, Sheila Ashdown, and Megan Zabel. Readings will be followed by labor-inspired music from Michael Ford and Over Creston, two contributors to ILWU Local 5′s first CD compilation, The Little Red Album, Vol. 1, which features new music by Powell’s employees, with lyrics taken from the IWW’s Little Red Songbook.

The Ne’er-Do-Well: Working-Class Stories and The Little Red Album, Vol. 1 will be available for purchase at the event, or you can find ‘em right here in our shop. Sales will benefit Local 5′s strike fund.

Friday, March 18, 2011
7:00pm
Waypost Cafe
3120 N Williams Ave, Portland, Oregon

Work can be drudgery, and most writers—most writers I know, anyway—view the minutes spent at work as metaphorical maggots, gobbling away at the soft flesh of their free time.

Why, then, would any of us want to write about it?

Here’s one good reason: it’s there, and since most of us have to spend 40+ hours a week doing it, we might as well get some good anecdotes out of the deal. Your job might seem as boring as a rock, but lift up that rock and the soil beneath is probably teeming with the stuff of stories: characters, tension, desire, obstacles, and more. Stuff that is, on the very face of it, most definitely worth writing about.

Here’s another good reason: we’re there, the human beings who work the cash registers or program the websites or whatever it is we do to earn our paychecks, and it’s only natural to want to see ourselves represented in stories. If work is rendered invisible in literature, so too are the workers. The fact that it exists as part of our lives and our identities means that it’s worthy of being represented on paper in all of its banality and glory and absurdity.

And as a bonus, profits from the sale of this issue will be donated to the ILWU Local 5, which is is the branch of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union that I belong to as an employee at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. Ten years ago, booksellers at Powell’s formed a union and fought hard for higher wages, affordable healthcare, and better working conditions. I’ve only worked for Powell’s for three years, but I’m sure grateful to be reaping the hard-won benefits.

–Sheila

Join us this Friday, August 27th, at the Rock Out to Walk Out, a night of stories and music and beer to benefit ILWU Local 5 – that’s the branch of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union whose members are workers at Powell’s Books and Aramark. With the next round of contract negotiations coming up in 2011, the goal of the benefit is to raise money for the Local’s strike fund, which ensures that workers aren’t left destitute should a strike occur.

This night also celebrates the release of two fantastic projects:

THE NE’ER-DO-WELL presents a special issue of working-class stories that cast a fresh light on the absurdity, banality, and redemption of contemporary wage-slavery, and includes brand-new stories and essays from favorite local authors, including Willy Vlautin (Lean on Pete), Kevin Sampsell (A Common Pornography), Suzanne Burns (Misfits and Other Heroes), Gigi Little (Portland Noir), Chris A. Bolton (Smash!), and others.

L5Artworks presents the first volume of THE LITTLE RED ALBUM, a CD compilation of classic union protest-songs that have been given a modern makeover (which, since this is Portland, means they’re all wearing moustaches).

The CD and lit mag will both be on sale at the event — and all proceeds will go straight to the strike fund!

Here’s the deets:

What: ILWU Local 5’s Rock Out to Walk Out

Where: The Cleaners at the Ace Hotel (SW 10th and Stark, downtown Portland, Oregon)

When: Friday, August 27, 2010, 5pm-2am

Entertainment: Happy hour from 5 to 7pm, with music from the Bop Out to Walk Out jazz quartet and readings from THE NE’ER-DO-WELL (Kevin Sampsell, Sheila Ashdown, and Suzanne Burns). From 7pm to 2am, live music from General Strike, Nate Ashley and the Landlines, ¡Ay, Claudia!, Michael Ford, The Middle Ages, Shaky Hands, and DJ Anjali & The Incredible Kid.

Admission: Sliding scale, $5-to-$5 billion

Now come with me to St. Rita’s annual youth group retreat, held at a camp in middle-of-nowhere Ohio. I’m here because the only way my parents would let me attend public school — as opposed to Catholic school — was if I agreed to regularly attend Youth Group. So I did. I actually kind of liked Youth Group. It wasn’t overly religious most of the time, and it leveled the social playing field; it was so unabashedly dorky that the usual rules of coolness simply did not apply. So me and my funny, goofball friends could express our innate coolness without worrying that some jock was going to pop out from around a corner and pants one of us.

Anyway, the high point of the annual retreat came on the last day, when we’d each receive a manila envelope stuffed full of letters that the retreat coordinators had solicited from our friends, family, and teachers. You know, “You’re so great, I love you, Jesus loves you, etc.” It sounds dorky now, but those letters were absolute tearjerkers. To this day, I have them saved somewhere.

Back then, I didn’t get along too well with my dad, and those letters were probably the only time he directed three- to five-hundred words in a row at me. Though, to be fair, if he’d tried to say that much in real life, I probably would have been like, whatev! after about three seconds.

Anyway, in 1995, his letter included this strange statement:

“Your iconoclastic disposition is quite delightful!”

At sixteen years old, I wanted to be described as many things, including “smart,” “funny,” and “cute.” Surprisingly, “iconoclastic” — which basically means nonconformist and rebellious — didn’t make the list. Especially since my parents’ perception of me as rebellious (when I was in fact a very law-abiding teenager) resulted in their controlling my social life with an iron fist. That kind of contradiction — “You’re so adorably rebellious! We can’t trust you to be out past nine o’clock!” — grated me to no end.

But somehow, that sentence lodged itself into my psyche. And as I grew up and started getting along with my dad, it began to strike me as more and more hilarious. I mean, think about it: My dad is the type of person who’ll tell a teenage girl that her iconoclastic disposition is quite delightful. How can you not love it? It’s so absurd, so half complimentary and half insulting. And the way he says “quite delightful” makes me think he should be wearing a monocle and drinking a cup of Earl Grey.

And best of all, that phrase has come to describe pretty much what I want to be as a person, and what I want to produce as a writer and publisher. I think you have to be an iconoclast to be a writer and lover of short fiction, because you (or I, at least) have to say a hearty “fuck yoooou!” to the world’s persistent claims that short fiction is dead and that nobody cares about lit mags.

Also, and always, I have to keep my eye on the real prize: the sheer delight of a great story, whether I’m reading or writing it. Now, I don’t mean a story has to be happy – I believe that even sad stories come from a place of delight: the transcendent joy of getting lost in the writing; the human need to create and share stories, like little paper airplanes that we send aloft to each other. No matter the tragedy or comedy of the subject matter, it takes some measure of delight to get it on the page. After all, though there are myriad reasons for loving short fiction, I’m pretty sure nobody says, “I’m in it for the buzzkill.”

–Sheila

Issue #2 features hot pants, butterscotch turds, truck stops, rainbows, roller blades, an unquenchable fire, a nagging sense of failure, guilt by association, secret love, and a smidge of redemption. (Visit our shop to purchase.)

(click image to enlarge)

EL NINO WALKED INTO A POSTER
This two-color, limited-edition poster features the full text of Ryan Davidson’s “El Niño Walks Into a Bar” and a custom illustration by artist Keith Rosson. Signed, numbered, the whole shebang. Perfect for covering up a medium-sized hole in any wall in your home or business. (11”x17”) (Visit our shop to purchase.)

Here’s what Ryan Davidson, author of “El Niño Walks Into a Bar,” has to say about it:

I am amazed that this poster is a thing that exists. I often complain that visual artists and musicians are lucky because their work has an immediacy. A song or a painting can just grab you as you are passing by, but we writers kind of get effed because our work is always hidden away inside a book, and somebody has to sit down, open it, get comfortable, and then actively engage the words on the page before he can get anything out of it.

With this poster it’s like I get to cheat the rules. My writing is all up in people’s faces!