Homecoming King

The rumors have cleared & it’s official: Bruce Boone’s coming home, reading with Maryrose “Name This Intersection” Larkin this Wednesday, May 12 in Portland for Spare Room. Like Bev Dahlen, who read here almost exactly a year ago, Bruce is Portland-born but hasn’t been back for a writerly victory lap since he blew town in his teens. Dust off the pennants & brace for an I that revs like this:

“So let’s put it another way. In the normal course of things it’s the cerebellum that musters emotion. To write in order to give the reader access to heights of transport is to reverse things and to harness the intellect to the service of emotions. To elicit emotions, you need a kind of false subject that will make the reader comfortable. Traditionally it was the work of shamanism and now it’s the task of psychoanalysis to unravel that false 'I.' The work of writing is the opposite—to reconstitute this phoney 'I.'”

—from Century of Clouds

“When you tell something to someone, doesn’t it change their life forever? For me such questions bring with them a great sense of melancholy, as if in interrogating language I come that much closer to some bedrock loneliness inseparable from history itself. But perhaps I should really say prehistory—since I don’t believe that these foreclosures are fated to remain forever. And what does narrative open up into, if not human love, called into existence for the first time.”

—from My Walk With Bob