Free copies

One morning not long ago, I unlocked and opened my post-office box to find three thick, glossy copies of Oregon Home magazine stuffed inside, along with a copy of Oregon Home's Get Guide, and a kind note from the editor. The day before, I received two copies of Oregon Humanities, with a colorful cartoon on the front.

As I wrestled the magazines out of the small box, I gave thanks for one of the benefits of being a freelance writer — free copies of magazines.

Small-town news

Other people may be addicted to sugar or sex. Me, I’m addicted to small-town newspapers, the more picayune the better. Whenever I visit a tiny town, the first thing I do is find a newspaper stand, where I plunk down two or three quarters for a copy of the local gazette, to find out what’s going on, what the residents are talking about.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in the small town of Fairbanks, Alaska — where I cut my journalism teeth on the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, with its articles about moose sightings and curling bonspiels and its regular “Sourdough Jack Sez” column — that I have a soft spot for what other people might dismiss as insignificant rags.

Whatever the reason, I still enjoy reading everything from the Skamania County Pioneer to the Goldendale Sentinel, with their fuzzy photos showing someone handing someone else an oversized check and their features on everything from rooster-crowing contests and spelling bees to county fairs and students making the dean’s list.

Maybe it’s the relatively low percentage of crime stories combined with the unpretentious prose that makes the papers so appealing. Maybe it’s their neighborly, we’re-all-in-this-together tone combined with the outspoken letters to the editor and weekly recordings of births and deaths. Now what could be more significant than that?

Making fun of myself

Last night, I took part in a reading at Blackbird Wineshop (blackbirdwine.com) in Portland, Oregon. The audience clapped in all the right places, perhaps because I had more than one plant in the crowd, including two members of my writing group and their spouses, a former writing student and my painting teacher and her husband.

Only a humor writer, I suppose, would understand what fun it is to be laughed at, something a more well-adjusted person might try to avoid. I read two pieces: “Hooked on Antifreeze,” about my tendency to return, again and again, to my hometown of Fairbanks, Alaska; and “New York Agent,” about my inability to schmooze.

E. B. White fan

E.B. White's house. Photo by Nancy Woods

“It’s another E.B. White fan!” Mary Gallant called out to her husband.

The fan she was referring to was me. I’d shown up, unannounced, at White’s 19th-century Maine farmhouse with its barn and boathouse to see for myself where one of my favorite writers had penned everything from Charlotte’s Web and newsbreaks for The New Yorker to essays for Harper’s Magazine.

I’d arrived at White’s place in a rental car. White had died several years before; his home (where he lived for many years with his wife Katharine, who also had died), was now owned by Mary Gallant and her husband Robert.

It was all part of an East Coast trip I made that included stops at the homes of several other writers and artists, including the homes of Louisa May Alcott, Andrew Wyeth, N.C. Wyeth, L. M. Montgomery, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (well, in Thoreau’s case, I visited a replica of his cabin at Walden Pond).

But, for me, seeing White’s house and attached barn (where it was easy to imagine Charlotte the spider and Wilbur the pig hanging out) was the highlight of my trip.

After pulling my car into the driveway, I got out and walked up to the front door. Dark-green lilac bushes grew on either side. There was no doorbell, so I knocked and then stepped back.

“Hello!” someone shouted.

“Hello!” I shouted back, following the voice around to the side of the house just as Mary Gallant, an auburn-haired woman, stepped out.

When I told her I was an E.B. White fan, she smiled and said “Come on,” before leading me to the water side of the property and pointing out where I could stand to get a good shot of Allen Cove.

“You have to see the barn” she said next, explaining that that's where White kept his chicks. The interior of the building was high, wide and clean and conveyed a sense of safety. As Gallant showed me the corner where she potted her plants, her husband walked in.

“It’s another E.B. White fan!” she told him, before turning back to me and saying, “When people say, ‘I don’t know how you put up with it (visiting fans),’ I tell them, ‘Well, I don’t know if I could if I were living in Stephen King’s house, but I figure E.B. White was fairly benevolent.’”

I think E.B. White would be pleased to know that a woman with a sense of humor is living in his house.

The Gift

I just finished reading (well, okay, skimming) The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde.

Originally published in 1979, the scholarly book left me with these takeaway thoughts:

Most artists need to somehow "make some peace with the market."

"...the artist who wishes neither to lose his gift nor to starve his belly reserves a protected gift-sphere in which the work is created, but once the work is made he allows himself some contact with the market."

Being an artist "is most often a way of getting by, not a way of getting rich."

"No matter how the artist chooses, or is forced, to resolve the problem of livelihood, he is likely to be poor."

Do I feel better yet?

Readings, wine tasting

July 1. 7–9 p.m. Co-hosted by Oregon Literary Review. This month’s readers and performers are Barbara Blossom Ashmun, Samantha Waltz, Karen Flagstad and Nancy Woods. Free. Blackbird Wineshop, 3519 N.E. 44th Ave., Portland, OR (just north of Northeast Fremont Street). www.blackbirdwine.com. (503) 282-1887

Kickstart Your Writing: A Writing/Coaching Workshop

I'm offering the following class, beginning on Sept. 28, 2009:

Kickstart Your Writing: A Writing/Coaching Workshop

September 28 – December 7, 2009
10 weeks/No class November 23
Mondays, 7-9 p.m.
Northeast Portland, Oregon location
$200

Part writing workshop, part coaching session, Kickstart Your Writing was designed to help beginning to intermediate writers improve their writing skills while they take positive steps toward completing specific writing projects. During the 10-week session, students will receive:
· Individual help in setting their own meaningful, measurable, long- and short-term writing goals
· Positive, helpful feedback on their writing
· Frequent check-ins and ongoing editorial and emotional support

By the end of the workshop, students will have:
· Increased how much, how well and how often they write
· Achieved a feeling of accomplishment from having reached their writing goals

About the Instructor:

Nancy Woods (M.A., Journalism, University of Oregon) is a freelance reporter, editor, humor writer, essayist and writing coach whose articles and essays have been read on Oregon Public Radio and published in The Oregonian, The Portland Tribune, katu.com, Northwest Palate, Nostalgia, Oregon Home, Oregon Humanities, Oregon Quarterly, Portland Physician Scribe, Portrait of Portland, Raven Chronicles, GreenPrints, shortmemoir.com, UU World and Zephyr.

For more information or to be put on a mailing list: (503) 288-2469; wordpics@aracnet.com; www.nancywoods.org.