Dmae Roberts talks with award-winning author Kim Stafford about his new memoir 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared In poetic and poignant detail, Stafford takes us on a journey of sibling love and departure. We'll hear about his experiences with his brother and the different paths their lives took and hear readings from his new book.
More about 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: Bret and Kim Stafford, the oldest boys of the Poet Laureate and pacifist William Stafford, were close. As children, they never fought and were inseparable, yet each had their own unique place within the family. Bret was the good son, the obedient public servant; Kim the itinerant wanderer. Though their home was full of love, there was a code of silence about hard things: “Why tell what hurts?”
As childhood pleasures ebbed, this reticence took its toll on Bret. Against a backdrop of the 1950s and 60s, Bret—a puritan in the summer of love, a conscientious objector in the Vietnam era—became a casualty of his own interior war and took his life, leaving the family—and Kim—to endure the loss. Taking its title from a pamphlet Bret ordered as a kid, 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do is a memoir that works its own magic in portraying two brothers bound by love and friendship through boyhood and adolescence, forging their way into adulthood, together and then, ultimately, apart. Through Kim’s devotions, he shares Bret’s life and what it teaches us about the secret nature of depression, the tender ancestry of violence, the quest for harmonious relations, and finally, the trick of joy.
Kim Stafford Readings:
November 8, 7pm at Annie Blooms, 7834 SW Capitol Hwy / Portland OR 97219. For more info call 503-246-0053 or visit www.annieblooms.com
November 14, 7pm at Broadway Books, 1714 NE Broadway, Portland OR 97232. For more info call 503-284-1726 www.broadwaybooks.net/event
November 18, 1-4pm Book signing, Audubon Society “Wild Arts Festival,” Montgomery Park, 2701 NW Vaughn, Portland OR 97210. For more info visit: wildartsfestival.org/about-portland-audubon
December 4, 7pm at Elliott Bay Book Co., 1521 Tenth Avenue, Seattle WA 98122. More info call 206-624-6600. www.elliottbaybook.com/node/events/current
January 16, 2013, 7-8pm Book Launch and reading, Lewis & Clark College. Portland, OR (contact Matsya Siosal 503-768-6222)
February 21, 7pm Grass Roots Book Store / Corvallis Public LibraryCorvallis, Or (& a free writing workshop, 2-4pm)
March 4-6, time TBA Associated Writing Programs, Boston (Panel: “Writing Beyond the End”) https://www.awpwriter.org/awp_conference/schedule
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kim Stafford has taught since 1979 at Lewis and Clark College, where he is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute and co-director of the Documentary Studies program. He also serves as the literary executor for the estate of William Stafford. He has worked as an oral historian, letterpress printer, editor, photographer, teacher, and visiting writer in communities and colleges across the country, and in Italy, Scotland, and Bhutan. Stafford has published a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft; Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford; and Having Everything Right: Essays of Place. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Oregon Governor’s Arts Award, and a Western States Book Award. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and children. More info on the book: www.tupress.org or Kim Stafford's site: www.kim-stafford.com/
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