Film Screening: Wildwood, N.J.(1994)
Join us for a screening of the documentary Wildwood, N.J., 1994. (1 hr.). A look into the lives of the women and girls who inhabit the seaside town of Wildwood, New Jersey.
Nadia's Proust Group
Join us for a discussion of In Search of Lost Time, Vol. Four, Part 2
Fair Game Reading Series: Jonathan Aprea, Myles Early, Jaye Nasir, & Julia Wohlsetter
Jonathan Aprea is a writer living in New York City and a graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program. His work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Guernica, Joyland, and elsewhere. He publishes Poet Tree Magazine.
Myles Early is a writer from Los Angeles. Their work can be found in HAD, VOLTA, Split Lip & elsewhere.
Jaye Nasir is a Portland based writer whose work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Strange Horizons, Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry and elsewhere, and has been supported by the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Hedgebrook, the Atticus Hotel and the Tin House Workshop. She won the 2024 Sundress Publications Broadside Contest and she was a 2025-2026 McCormack Writing Center Fellow.
Julia Wohlstetter is a poet and educator whose work has appeared in Brazenhead Review, Metatron-Omega, Bodega Magazine, and Reality Beach. She received an MFA from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was awarded a Truman Capote Fellowship, a MacIntyre Fellowship, and a Stanley Fellowship for International Research. She is the co-creator of Poetry Practice Space at The Independent Publishing Resource Center and the author of the chapbook Please & Please / Forever Machine (2017). She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Lucas Gunn, Alien Power Tools, Transparent Aluminum
Join us for a night of sound with
Transparent Aluminum https://transparentaluminum.bandcamp.com
Lucas Gunn https://lucasgunn.bandcamp.com/track/shadowy-movements-from-a-frozen-human-being-blues
& Bellingham, Washington’s Alien Power Tools
Valerie Hsiung, Jennifer (JP) Perrine, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Jeffrey Pethybridge, Consuelo Wise, and Carolina Ebeid
Valerie Hsiung is a poet who writes between worlds, where language meets ritual and abolition meets afterlife. Drawing on diasporic, ecological, and metaphysical inquiry, her books dissolve the borders of poetry, prose, performance and philosophy into a single listening body. She is the author of eight full-length books, including The pedestrian (Nightboat Books), The Naif (Ugly Duckling Presse), The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath), To love an artist (Essay Press), and outside voices, please (CSU). Recipient of the Nightboat Prize, the Essay Book Prize, selected by Renee Gladman, and the CSU Poetry Prize, fellowships and residencies from the Camargo Foundation and Lighthouse Works as well as grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts and PEN America, she teaches writing at the limits of language at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. Her ceremonial work and pedagogy has been studied by researchers on the subject of emancipatory practices including Sophie Orlando. Born to Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives in the foothills of Colorado.
Jennifer (JP) Perrine is the author of five award-winning books of poetry: Beautiful Outlaw, Again, The Body Is No Machine, In the Human Zoo, and No Confession, No Mass. Their other recent work appears in the anthologies Best Small Fictions, Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times, and A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid Lit Collection. JP lives in Portland, where they cohost the Incite: Queer Writers Read series, guide nature and forest therapy retreats, and manage an equity and environmental justice program for the state of Oregon. www.jenniferperrine.org
Sueyeun Juliette Lee grew up three miles from the CIA and currently lives in Portland, OR. She is the author of Aerial Concave Without Cloud, That Gorgeous Feeling, Underground National, Solar Maximum, and No Comet, That Serpent In the Sky Means Noise. A former Pew Fellow in the Arts for Literature, she also makes video and installation art. Find her silentbroadcast.com.
Consuelo Wise (she/they) is a Guatemalan American poet and visiting scholar at Portland State University. Her first book, b o y, was published in 2024.
Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet. She is the author of Hide (Graywolf Press, 2026), You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior (Noemi Press, 2016) and the chapbook Dauerwunder: a brief record of facts (Albion Books, 2023). Her work has been supported by the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, CantoMundo, the NEA, and a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. Her work has been installed and screened at universities and galleries such as Stelo Arts in Portland, and Squeaky Wheel Film and Video Art Center. A longtime editor, she currently edits the multimedia site Visible Binary. Her current work explores the personal story of her family’s exilic and immigrant experience, the idea of home as an elsewhere, and the telepathic power of objects within the diasporas of Palestine and Cuba.
Jeffrey Pethybridge is a poet, editor, and curator; he is the author of Striven, The Bright Treatise (Noemi Press), which was selected as one of ten best debuts of 2013 by Poets & Writers Magazine. His second collection Force Drift, an essay in the epic has recently been released by Tupelo Press. His writing and visual poetry appear internationally in journals such as diSonare (MX); White Wall Review (CA); Writing Utopia (UK); Volt; Best American Experimental Writing, and others. He teaches in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University where he is Co-Artistic Director of the Summer Writing Program.
A discussion of "Nazi's at the Water Cooler" with Jacob Boas & Terrence Petty
Join us for a discussion & readings from Nazis at the Water Cooler.
Germany has long been praised for the way it has confronted the Nazi past. But the accolades are only partly deserved, as meticulously documented by Portland author Terrence Petty in his book Nazis at the Watercooler: War Criminals in Postwar German Government Agencies.
Petty exposes a truth that German and American officials kept buried well into the 21st century: after West Germany’s creation in 1949, thousands of ex‑Nazis were hired into government jobs — including men involved in mass murder, in drafting antisemitic laws, in persecuting Hitler’s opponents, and in other depravities.
Petty documents how former Nazis who had established an early foothold in postwar government agencies helped each other get government work by writing letters of recommendation called Persilscheine. These “Persil Certificates,” named after a popular detergent, made an ex-Nazi’s recorded past just as clean as fresh laundry, Petty writes. Ex-Nazis were given preference for government jobs even over victims of Nazi policies and anti-Hitler resisters. They swapped Nazi uniforms for suits, Hitler salutes for handshakes.
Very few of these civil servants were ever investigated for potential war crimes, Petty shows. They worked until retirement, collecting generous government pensions, and many received plaques thanking them for their public service.
Based on six years of research, including Petty’s examination of declassified CIA and German government files, Nazis at the Watercooler reveals the depth and breadth of this long‑hidden injustice — and the reckoning Germany delayed for decades.
Terrence C. Petty is a writer and retired journalist. He worked for the Associated Press for thirty-five years. Based in Bonn, Germany, from 1987 to 1997, he covered German and European affairs, the pro-democracy movement that toppled the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, neo-Nazi violence, and 1995 ceremonies at Dachau, Buchenwald, and other former concentration camps marking the 50th anniversary of their liberation. From 1999 to 2017 he managed the AP’s news operation in Oregon. He is also the author of Enemy of the People: The Munich Post and the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler. Petty, his wife Christina, their son Tristan, and two cats — Atticus and Helen — make their home in Northeast Portland, where they've lived for 26 years. A ninth-generation Vermonter, Petty has a bachelor of arts degree in history from the University of Vermont. He worked as a photographer, reporter and editor for newspapers in Vermont and upstate New York before joining The AP.
Jacob Boas was born in Transit Camp Westerbork (1943), the concentration camp in northeastern Holland from which the bulk of Dutch Jewry was sent to the killing centers in the East. Liberated in 1945, Boas grew up in Amsterdam and Montreal before moving on to California, where he earned a Ph.D. in history. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Patricia. His books include Boulevard des Misères: The Story of Transit Camp Westerbork (1985); We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust (1995); Mr. Holocaust (I Presume) (2005); Writers' Block: The Paris Antifascist Congress of 1935 (2016); Until Further Notice ... Theresienstadt on My Mind (2024), and Burden of Proof: Fragments of a Surviving Remnant (2026).www.jacobboas.com
Detour Film Series: Dry Leaf(2025)
Join us for the Portland premier of Alexandre Koberidze’s DRY LEAF (2025)
DryLeaf: AlexandreKoberidze's low-res road movie is a quietly political ode to the ordinary. The Georgian director invites us to try a new way of seeing in a subdued low-tech portrait of a post-Soviet nation between two worlds, shot on a 2008 Sony Ericsson phone. (BFI)
BFI review:
Book Release: Penitents by Madeline Blondeau
Madeline Blondeau’s PENITENTS, a debut trans tribute to New French Extreme cinema and ’70s grindhouse horror set on the rain-slicked coast of the Pacific Northwest, in which a writer runs afoul of a local violent family while attempting to take some space from her partners, set against a backdrop of desperate hook-ups and polyamorous infidelity, this roaring revenge romp spans the course of one blood-soaked weekend around Astoria, Oregon.
Poetry Reading: David Weiss & Maryrose Larkin
Although Maryrose Larkin lives in Tucson, AZ, her heart lives in Portland, OR. She is the author of several books and chapbooks, including The Identification of Ghosts (Chax Press), The Name of this Intersection is Frost (Shearsman), A Monster’s Topic Sentence (Magificent Field) and the newly published Bluebird Grift (Sonorous Anchorite). Maryrose was a founding member of Spare Room, and currently serves as a director of Tucson’s POG reading series.
David Weiss is a poet, publisher, & arts organizer living in Tucson Arizona.
David founded Sonorous Anchorite (2021), a not-for-profit literary arts press dedicated to publishing “innovative writing that tends toward the poem”. As part of Sonorous Anchorite hebegan A Moveable Beast, a poetical cabaret cultivating curious intersections between the varied practices of poets, musicians, artists, etc. He also volunteers as a book designer for ChaxPress.
David served as the Assistant Director at Chax Press & as a board member of POG, a community poetry & arts organizationfrom 2019-2022. His recent poems have appeared in the journals BlazeVOX, Alienocene, e·ratio, & Word for/Word. His book-length poem In Memoriam: in enquiry was published by ChaxPress in early 2022.
Half Shadow EP release show
Join us for an evening of music to celebrate the new EP release by Half Shadow https://antiquatedfuture.bandcamp.com/album/wind-inside
with Floating Clouds https://budtapes.bandcamp.com/album/with-a-shared-memory
& Violet Creatura https://violetcreatura.bandcamp.com/album/resonances-loops-volume-i
Animals In War film screening benefit for Ukraine
A boy flees an occupied village with a cow as his only companion. A rabbit and its young owner wake to a morning that changes their world completely. A sound engineer recording birdsong in a quiet reserve hears the war arrive instead.
ANIMALS IN WAR carries russia's* invasion of Ukraine through the creatures it left behind and through the people who stayed human enough to save them. Seven of Ukraine's leading directors each contributed a novella. Together the stories become a meditation on survival, compassion, and the choices war forces on ordinary people.
Academy Award winner Sean Penn, a steadfast friend to Ukraine, opens the film, and Imagine Dragons contributed the soundtrack. After its world premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival, ANIMALS IN WAR screened across four continents and opened in theaters throughout Ukraine.
Join us for an evening that brings Ukraine's story directly to our community, with a discussion to follow the screening.
Ukrainian and English with English subtitles
*lowercase is intentional
Tickets:
WUNK presents MYSTERY DATE- a reading/variety show
Join us for an evening of readings & more from WUNK magazine
Chapbook release reading with Dan Raphael and guests Mike G & Claudia Saleeby Savage
How'd This tree get In is dan rpahael's 27th poetry collection, He is one of the host of Talking Earth on KBOO. Word Virus will be the 139th place in Portland where dan had performed his poetry.
Mike G--Poet of Stell--is one of the hosts of the Tony's open mike at the Wildwood Tavern on W. Burnside
Claudia Saleeby Savage is an Arab American performer, poet, essayist, and mama with MS whose work explores displacement and the landscape of the body.
Tom’s Book Club
Footloose and broke, the unnamed narrator of Gone Tomorrow hops on a plane without asking questions when his director friend offers him a role in an art film set in Colombia. But from the moment he arrives at the airport in Bogotá, only to witness a policeman beat a beggar half to death, it becomes clear that this will not be the story of gritty bohemians triumphing against the odds. The director, Paul Grosvenor, seems more interested in manipulating his cast than in shooting film. The cult star, Irma Irma, is a vamp too bored and boring to draw blood. And the beautiful, nymph-like Michael Simard doesn’t seem to be putting out. Meanwhile, the film’s shady financier is sleeping with his mother, while a serial killer skulks about the area killing tourists. Everything comes to a head when the carnaval celebration begins in nearby Cali. But once the fiesta is over, all that’s left are ghostly memories and the narrator’s insistence on telling the tale. “Unlike the majority of pointedly AIDS-era novels,” writes Dennis Cooper, “Gone Tomorrow is neither an amoral nostalgia fest nor a thinly veiled wake-up call hyping the religion of sobriety. It’s a philosophical work devised by a writer who’s both too intelligent to buy into the notion that a successful future requires the compromise of collective decision and too moral to accept bitterness as the consequence of an adventurous life.”
NOISE SHOW: Sean Keenan (SF), Organic Produce, Drunk Transaction, Body Shame
Sean Keenan is an experimental composer who will be performing on amplified gong and electronics. Local artists include Organic Produce (Emmet Martin (Water Shrews/Bud Tapes)), the debut performance of Portland's best-kept-secret project, Drunk Transaction (Shane Mcdonell (Carousel) / Joel Shanahan (Golden Donna)), and, last but not least, sleek, sophisticated noise artist Body Shame who's varsity expressions never fail.
Nadia's Proust Group
Join us for a discussion of In Search of Lost Time, vol. iv, pt. i.
Book Release Reading: The Phantasmogenetic Centre by B. Kearney
Join us for a celebration of the release of The Phantasmogenetic Centre (Hobo Borealis), a ghost-ridden pornographic antibildungsroman that was carefully assembled no more than two lines at a time from hundreds of public domain books digitized by Project Gutenberg.
An outlying milestone in weird fiction, socio-sexual satire and artisanal plagiarism, The Phantasmogenetic Centre is a timely, cruel repurposing of the untimely words of dead and largely forgotten authors.
KLUBKine with Jacquesrates
KLUBKine roks the avant merde. Before making Hippy Porn, Jacquesrates filmed two black&white experiments (for director B. Dammkoehler) called SANS SERIF & LA DIVINA. Both works (the latter produced by Todd Haynes) screen in simulvision on 16mm.
Tom’s Book Club
Join us to discuss Macunaima: The Hero with No Character by Mario de Andrade.
Translated from Portuguese by Katrina Dodson
With a contribution by Katrina Dodson and John Keene
Here at last is an exciting new edition of the Brazilian modernist epic Macunaíma: The Hero with No Character, by Mário de Andrade. This landmark 1928 novel follows the adventures of the shapeshifting Macunaíma and his brothers as they leave their Amazon home for a whirlwind tour of Brazil, cramming four centuries and a continental expanse into a single mythic plane. Having lost a magic amulet, the hero and his brothers journey to São Paulo to retrieve the talisman that has fallen into the hands of an Italo-Peruvian captain of industry (who is also a cannibal giant). Written over six delirious days—the fruit of years of study—Macunaíma magically synthesizes dialect, folklore, anthropology, mythology, flora, fauna, and pop culture to examine Brazilian identity. This brilliant translation by Katrina Dodson has been many years in the making and includes an extensive section of notes, providing essential context for this magnificent work.
Screening: BOOKWARS (2000)
The New York bookseller documentary BookWars is an independent film by Jason Rosette (produced by Camerado Media) about the life and times of New York City street booksellers.
Made on an ultra-low budget in a jazzy, impressionistic style reminiscent of the films of Robert Frank and poetry of the Beat Generation, BookWarsis notable as the only first-person documentary made during then-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's controversial "Quality of Life" campaign, which sought to limit and control individuals engaged in informal economic activities on the streets of New York City.
BookWars was released in June 2000, winning the Best Documentary Award at the 2000 New York Underground Film Festival and premiering theatrically at New York's Cinema Village. An advance screening review by New York Film Critics Circle critic Matt Seitz called the film 'Superb' and 'Mesmerizing' , with numerous other positive reviews following.
Despite its very modest budget, BookWars enjoyed numerous domestic and international TV sales, and is now part of the Circulating Film and Video collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Dao Strom, Camp Cataract, Joshua James Amberson with Otembaar
Join local PDX writer-musicians for a night of performance pushing slightly outside the bounds of their usual genres. Fiction writer Sara Jaffe, author of the recent Hurricane Envy story collection, will play a solo guitar set. Poet/hybrid artist Dao Strom will revisit songs from her 2022 ambient-folk album, Redux, reissued on vinyl this year, alongside material from her recent Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs project. Joshua James Amberson, author of the essay collection Staring Contest and bassist of Golden Tiles, will be accompanied by Otembaar. An eclectic mix of genres and atmospheres is sure to ensue, united by a commitment to creative impulses that traverse boundaries.
Detour Film Series
Detour Film Series presents: There’s Always Tomorrow (Douglas Sirk, 1956).
Book Release: Extremophiles by Rats Alice Trujillo
Book release reading for Extremophiles by Rats Alice Trujillo. A porn/horror novel about grief in the shadow of collapse. Transgender sex and ultra violence at the end of human existence. Featured reading by K.Y. Steinberg.
One Night of Multimodal Entertainment
Warren Pash (music)
Ethan Plunkett (poetry)
Sid Perrett (music)
SarahAnn Harvey (poetry)
Kelly Mullinix (film)
Warren Pash’s latest record, Sideshow Barkers, defies categorization, pivoting from percussive folk-soul to unconventional pop with elements of Americana, psychedelia, and groove rock.The album finds humour in heartbreak and poetry in the weeds
Ethan Plunkett is a poet who plans on moving. Their work has appeared in Buckman Journal, Dump, and Lurch.
Sid Perrett is a Portland-based musician and sound artist. He has performed with many local underground rock ensembles including As Above, Motorway South and Hey There, and also enjoys getting weird as a solo performer.
SarahAnn Harvey is a writer, artist and editor. She holds a BA in English and Writing from Portland State University. Her primary work is centered around publishing Pile’s bi-annual literary journal for women + non-binary creatives and CHUNK, an Oregon centric lit + arts paper. You can read her works in Papeachu Press, included in a book of poetry called There We Grew, Lucky Jefferson’s 365 Collection and in Borderline Press’ Common Ground Issue 03. She lives in Portand, Oregon and can often be found curled up in one of her favorite local bookshops.
Kelly James Mullinix is an accomplished filmmaker, visual artist, painter, photographer, writer, and musician. A bizarro, seedy, surrealist, occult mindscape is the labyrinth he has been sentenced to wander, in ecstasy, for all of eternity. Every now and then, a tulpa escapes.
Ashley Yang-Thompson & Kiik A.K.
Join us for a night of readings with Ashley Yang-Thompson & Kiik A.K.
The product of a Chinese immigrant and a white polygamist from Fort Scott, Kansas, Ashley Yang-Thompson has been a performance artist since the day she was ruthlessly shoved out of the safety of her mother’s womb. Her art has been exhibited at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, the Museum of Moving Image, and the Essex Peabody Museum, as well as numerous national and international spaces. She is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Equity Fellowship and Mass MoCA’s Assets for Artists Grant. She is the author of How to be the worst laziest fattest most incontinent piece-of-shit in the world EVER and Still Worm, both published by Bateau Press.
Kiik A.K. does not perform often. But when he does it is an awful performance. We would like him to get out more or even leave his bedroom. But his bedroom is where pornography is. Especially a naked cowboy riding a green tractor. Pricing is customized to your needs. Under normal circumstances something happens that obligates him to give your money back. Contact Kiik for weddings, baptisms, funerals, circumcisions. But please never in that order. His limits may surprise you. As you watch a man die his foreskin turns to rust. The dust convulsing off a moth’s bulb paints the spirit in a thin gold film.
James Ilgenfritz, Daniel Reyes Llinas, Matt Hannfin, Dustin Krcatovich, Mike Gamble
Join us for a night of music with Brooklyn-based bassist & composer James Ilgenfritz, guitarist & composer Daniel Reyes Llinas, percussionist Matt Hannafin, multi-instrumentalist Mike Gamble, and Dustin Krcatovich (Golden Feelings).
hypernormal: Works by Caroline Anderson
The concept of hypernormalization offers a framework for understanding how contemporary life continues to feel stable despite the presence of multiple, overlapping crises. Denial, distraction, and systemic complexity flatten our perception of urgency, allowing familiar routines to persist even as environmental, social, and political pressures intensify. What falters is not awareness, but our capacity to fully register the scale of what surrounds us.
Anderson’s paintings operate within this tension. Their tactile, layered surfaces are marked by technical and pictorial discrepancies, embodying the effort to sustain coherence amid instability, particularly but not exclusively related to the climate crisis. The traditional easel format is borrowed from the visual language of domestic space, reinforcing the normalization of crisis: an acknowledgment that disruption has become an ambient condition rather than an exception.
Through her work, Anderson offers recognition rather than resolution. The paintings engage an existential unease that is widely felt but rarely named, inviting viewers to reflect on shared anxieties and the challenge of living attentively in a time of ongoing crisis.
Artist Bio
Caroline Anderson is a New England based painter whose work is exhibited and collected nationally and internationally. She has an MFA in painting and printmaking from Ohio University and has held faculty positions at Trinity College, Washington, DC; Cleveland State University; and Illinois Institute of Art Chicago. Notable exhibitions include the Cleveland and Columbus Museums of Art, Fargo’s Plains Art Museum, Cincinnati’s Arnoff Center for the Arts, the Newport Art Museum, and Chicago’s Judy Saslow, ARC, and WomanMade galleries. Recent Providence, Rhode Island exhibitions include solo presentations at The Gallery at Central and Angell Street Galleries. International collaborations include TransCultural Exchange’s Tile Project, consisting of 22 permanent public worldwide venues, including UNESCO Paris.
Anderson is a founding member of "Climate Artists,” a climate crisis-focused collective of five artists from across the United States. In 2026 Climate Artists were in Katchemak Bay, Alaska for a two-week residency that features workshops and exhibitions at Kenai Peninsula College and a raku firing with a collaborative ceramics installation at Pratt Museum. Grants for this residency include National Endowment for the Arts and Alaska State Council on the Arts.
"Index Letters" Chapbook release
Index Letters:
Chapbook Release Reading
A BOOK OF "FOUND POETRY" PERFORMED BY NADIA NIVA & JUDY THORN
Millions & Millions presents: "BUMP"
Opening June 11th, BUMP is a trio of original short plays about deception, control, and the miracle of life. Written and directed by Portland author Riley Michael Parker, and staged by the newly-formed company MILLIONS & MILLIONS at Word Virus in downtown PDX, this limited-run production will stick with you long after the show is over. Find tickets at partycomic dot com.
Four shows: June 11, June 12, June 17, and June 26
PNCA MFA Residency Reading
Join us for night three of three nights of reading by PNCA MFA faculty and visiting artists.
Night three with: Diamond Sharp and Lana Lin
PNCA MFA Residency reading
Join us for night two of three nights of reading by PNCA MFA faculty and visiting artists.
Night two: Sara Jaffe, Diana Oropeza, Jay Ponteri, & Sara Vetiver