Kirjahaku

A Catholic-themed migratory freak show, the Traveling Death and Resurrection Show is made up of a group of misfit performers, including Frances Catherine, a twenty-eight-year-old stigmatic, who finds herself the unwitting center of a religious controversy as she struggles to reconcile her strict Catholic upbringing with her questioning faith. A first novel. Original. 35,000 first printing.

"The Gen-X Dr. Spock" and the founder of Hip Mama: The Parenting 'Zine gives readers advice from the trenches on pregnancy, childbirth, cool names, clueless doctors, potty training, domestic mayhem, right-wing losers, the evil patriarchy, nervous breakdowns, and way more. Line drawings.

26 Short Memoirs by Portland Writers We are doctors, waitresses, housewives, and punks; grandmothers, rockstars, and runaways. We're third generation Northwesterners or we've only just arrived. We complain about the rain, but we don't seem to mind it that much. We drink a lot of coffee and beer. We've been telling stories, in one way or another, for as long as we can remember. Collectively, we are brilliant. We write, rewrite, edit, and occasionally just start over. Sometimes we ignore the facts to tell the truth. Or we change names to protect the guilty. We bank on chance and skate on by. We are a community of writers who gather at The Attic on Hawthorne Boulevard in Portland, Oregon. And we have a story to tell. Thanks for listening.

An expansive, darkly funny, and deeply personal reflection on the reality of living with--and dying from--metastatic breast cancer.Deena stepped out of the shower and opened her towel in the steam. "Does my breast look weird?" These words irrevocably change the lives of writer Ariel Gore and her wife. As they descend into a world of doctors and tests, medications and insurance, sickness and treatments and hope and pain and more, they discover just how little they truly knew--despite the awareness campaigns and hyper-visible pink ribbons--about the reality of breast cancer. Over the four years following Deena's terminal diagnosis, Gore does what she always does, no matter how difficult or personal the subject: she writes about it. With keen insights, empathy, and humor, Ariel Gore braids together the story of Deena's experience, her own role as a caretaker, narratives from others living with breast cancer, literary reflections on illness, and reportage on the history of breast cancer and the $200 billion industry that capitalizes on and profits from breast cancer screenings and treatments. Rehearsals for Dying investigates and challenges everything we think we know about breast cancer. It goes beyond awareness to knowledge, presenting a rich, nuanced, heartbreaking, and hopeful portrait of what it is to be diagnosed with, treat, and live with breast cancer in the twenty-first century.

Buying into the dream that education is the road out of poverty, a teen mom takes a chance on bettering herself, gets on welfare rolls, and talks her way into college. But once she's there, phallocratic narratives permeate every subject, and creative writing professors depend heavily on Freytag's pyramid to analyze life. So Ariel turns to a rich subcultural canon of resistance and failure, populated by writers like Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Anzald a, Tillie Olsen, and Kathy Acker. Wryly riffing on feminist literary tropes, We Were Witches documents the survival of a demonized single mother. She's beset by custody disputes, homophobia, and America's ever-present obsession with shaming strange women into passive citizenship. But even as the narrator struggles to graduate--often the triumphant climax of a dramatic plot--a question uncomfortably lingers. If you're dealing with precarious parenthood, queer identity, and debt, what is the true narrative shape of your experience?Ariel Gore is a journalist, author, and teacher. She is the founding editor/publisher of Hip Mama, an Alternative Press Award winning publication covering the culture and politics of motherhood. Her memoir Atlas of the Human Heart was a 2004 finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Her anthology Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City won a Lambda Literary Award in 2010.

Like Jack Kerouac's intrepid little sister, Ariel Gore spins the spirited story of a vulnerable drifter who takes refuge in the recesses of the human heart. With just a few pennies and her I Ching, a change of clothes and a one-way ticket to Hong Kong, a perceptive, searching Gore makes her way through the labyrinthine customs of Cold-War China, wanders bustling, electric Katmandu, and hunkers down in an icy London squat with a prostitute and a boyfriend on the dole. Yet it is in the calm, verdant landscape of rural Italy where, pregnant and penniless, nineteen-year-old Gore's adventure truly begins. An illuminating glimpse into the boldly political Gore,creator of HipMama.com and Hip Mama magazine,this unflinching memoir offers a poignant exploration of the meaning of home, and surveys the frontiers of both land and heart.

It's been over a decade since Ariel Gore, in a caffeine-induced brainstorm, invented Hip Mama as her senior project in college. The zine that's been called "fun and irreverent" by USA Today, "delightful" by Glamour, and "cutting-edge" by the Chicago Tribune has grown up alongside Gore's daughter, covering subjects from weaning to home schooling with a political edge and a puckish sense of humour. The Essential Hip Mama captures the heart of a decade's worth of earthy, honest, soulful parenting,and topics from circumcision to dating, abortion to the belief that "mothers don't fart." Gore has gathered in one volume the whispers and conversations heard in homes, on playgrounds, and in coffeehouses around the country. Reassuring and hopeful, The Essential Hip Mama is a brilliant testament that one becomes an "expert" simply through the act of mothering, echoing Gore's own words, "Whenever I've needed parenting advice, I've put out a call for submissions."

As our newsfeeds become more and more glutted by stories of harassment and assault, it's no surprise women are turning to every power in their arsenal to fight back--even the magical ones. As Lindy West put it in her New York Times op-ed, "Yes, this is a witch hunt. I'm a witch, and I'm hunting you."Hexing the Patriarchy: Magical Resistance from A to Z is a book for women for women who want to join the resistance. Upbeat and inviting, without making light of anyone's oppression or spirituality, it offers fed-up women a primer of enchantment in the form of 26 spells for undermining modern-day oppression, all gathered from authentic witches from various magical traditions. Readers will learn how to . . . make salt scrubs to "wash away patriarchal bullshit" place spells on misogynist leadershipmix potions to boost their strength against harassment . . . and more. Individually and cumulatively, the spells are designed to topple the patriarchy with a dangerous, they-never-saw-it-coming power.

"Pure entertainment by a collection of impressively skilled storytellers, Santa Fe Noir is especially and unreservedly recommended." --Midwest Book ReviewAkashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city.Brand-new stories by: Ana Castillo, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Byron F. Aspaas, Barbara Robidoux, Elizabeth Lee, Ana June, Israel Francisco Haros Lopez, Ariel Gore, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, Candace Walsh, Hida Viloria, Cornelia Read, Miriam Sagan, James Reich, Kevin Atkinson, Katie Johnson, and Tomas Moniz.From the introduction by Ariel Gore: "The stories in this collection reflect a fundamental truth about this city: history depends on who's telling it. Too often the story of Santa Fe has been told only by the conquerors and the tourism PR firms. In Santa Fe Noir, you will hear the voices of the others: locals and Native people, unemployed veterans and queer transplants, the homeless and the paroled-to-here. When I asked the contributors you'll read in these pages if they had a Santa Fe story to tell, they invariably shrugged and said something to the effect of, 'Oh, I've got a story all right. But it might not fit the image of Santa Fe you're looking for.'I said, 'Try me.' They came back with the stories that never make the glossy tour brochures: the working class and the underground, the decolonized and the ever-haunted; the Santa Fe only we know . . . Conquered and reconquered, colonized and commodified, Santa Fe understands--from historical genocide to the murders of family members--the intimacy of violence."

Happiness is big business. Books, consultants, psychologists, organizations, and even governments tout happiness secrets that are backed by scientific findings. The problem is that all of this science is done by and for cis white men. And some of the most vocal of these happiness experts were announcing that women could become happier by espousing "traditional" values and eschewing feminism. Skeptical of this hypothesis, Ariel Gore took a deep dive into the optimism industrial complex, reading the history, combing the research, attending the conferences, interviewing the thought leaders, and exploring her own and her friends' personal experiences and desires. Fuck Happiness is a nuanced, thoughtful examination of what happiness means and to whom, how it's played a role in defining modern gender roles and power structures, and how we can all have a more empowered relationship with the pursuit of joy in our lives.