David Oates writes about the arts, nature, and urban life from Portland, Oregon. He has published six books of nonfiction, including The Mountains of Paris: How Awe and Wonder Rewrote My Life (Oregon State University Press) which won the 2021 Eric Hoffer Book Award for Memoir and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. His essays have appeared in Georgia Review, Creative Nonfiction, and Orion, winning nonfiction awards and Pushcart Prize nominations. His poetry and prose are featured in the German literary journal Wortschau, which also published his collaboration with Johanna Hansen (in German and English) as the book Schreiben ist eine Art von Luftwiderstand (2019). The Heron Place won the 2015 Poetry Award and publication from Swan Scythe Press (San Francisco). His previous book of poetry Peace in Exile was published by Oyster River. He is general editor and founder of the small literary press Kelson Books and was Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Montana. His Ph.D. in literature is from Emory University. More information at davidoates.info.
Website: http://davidoates.info
by David Oates Before leaving Santa Fe I spent (yet another) morning at a coffeehouse. It’s an urban sort of behavior, and a Bachian one too – you might know about Zimmerman’s in Leipzig, the coffeehouse where Bach brought ensembles large and small to perform once a week. It seems to have been a chance…
by David Oates I was trying to get at something about living in the Pacific Northwest, something about the past and the future merging, blending. The way a forest can be that and can stand for that, both reality and symbol. A walk in deep woods, its distant past present as soil underfoot, as an…
by David Oates We sit in David Biespiel’s Republic Café: all of us together in the public space of democracy. It appeared in 2019, as American fascism made its perennial strut, less disguised than usual. At that point we’d endured two years of it. Lies spewed from the Leader’s mouth like flies from an open…
by David Oates Halfway through a pilgrimage, it’s a good thing to remember why you’re on it – where you hope it’s taking you. I’m following a plan to consider the strangely numerous churches of this little Portland neighborhood, just a half-mile square but crowded with varieties of religiosity. And what is it I want?…
by David Oates Full of good cheer – when does walking not perk me up? – on a too-cool March morning, past houses nicer than mine by several hundred grand with wide verandahs and Craftsman gables, and through a deep urban forest of elms, I make my way towards church. Church! Not exactly my normal…
by David Oates Looking at this photo brings a rush of feeling – complicated, lovely, heartbreaking: a simple still life captured from the churning reality of the sea and the shore, which of course means also the weather, the wind, the atmospheric chemistries and grinding tectonics and magmatic uplifts and erosions and all high things…
by David Oates In the short month since the first installment of this exploration, the news has returned to our theme. A few days ago (at this writing) a new squabble broke out over America’s supposed “Judeo-Christian heritage,” this time in Boston itself, seedbed of our original revolution. It seems the city government has rejected…
by David Oates Once again, wilted evergreen trees are appearing on city streets on trash day, with remorseful hints of tinsel and that gritty feeling of morning-after. And we are reminded that the mightiest of all our mongrel holidays has once again had its way with us. Though Christmas is of course the master-holiday of…
by David Oates A scar is a shiny place with a story. A skink is a story you could never imagine. It leaves a bright streak across your vision and an after-image you might notice even years later, neon greeny blue flashing amidst weed and dry stone and buckbrush and bending sumac trees. Our mountains…
by David Oates The soon-to-be famous ship is part-way around the world. It will eventually become only the second vessel in recorded history to achieve the complete circumnavigation – after Magellan. But the ship is poised over disaster. Somewhere in the seas off present-day Indonesia, the captain has ordered full sail and then retired to…
by David Oates For my whole life, the world has been ending. For various alleged reasons. . . but always there’s been an overhang of dread and fear, the end times already here, human cussedness and sinfulness and greed at work in every moment, everywhere, eating away at what’s left of goodness and preparing the…
by David Oates The day I began writing this essay, Portland Oregon braced for yet another round of uncharacteristic heat. Over several months of preparation, as I had been reading and pondering Kim Stanley Robinson’s big, detailed, hyper-realistic science-fiction book The Ministry for the Future, our normally cool northwest town had found itself repeatedly facing…
by David Oates In the plague year I walked every day, just about. It added up to a long journey of surprising homeliness. A solidarity of strangers. A neighborhood of distance and vista. A journey far and yet without the lie of the exotic. It began in March over a year ago now. Since I…
by David Oates Small poetry presses are the gold dust of the publishing world, glittering yet easy to miss. And of enduring cumulative value. Of course the Big Five publishers will pick up suitably salable, already-famous, sure-thing poets. Penguin Random House publishes Terrance Hayes, and that’s a damn good thing, a Black poet of subtlety…
by David Oates We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next. —Saul Bellow That quote hangs over my writing desk. Its purpose is to remind me of the urgency of writing. Not the correctness of writing, not its sentiment or fashionability or mild amusement: its urgency. Bellow wants what I…
by David Oates A missing tradition is haunting us, though we may not even realize it’s missing. It was called “conservatism,” and in the Anglo-American political tradition it has a record of partnering with liberals to create some of our greatest moments of democratic progress. Our new president did once publicly hope to govern under…
by David Oates An empty space sits where I once sat. I miss it. I miss the strangers I shared it with, and a few regulars with whom I achieved a nodding relationship. A couple of baristas I might greet and chat up. Very briefly. I miss the space itself – long and wide, its…
Text by David Oates Artwork by Alex Hirsch 1. “A more perfect union.” The Founders expressed a breezy confidence, didn’t they? As if such a thing were possible – the distant states cohered into a nation; the various occupants working it all out. Loyal. Collaborative. Taking part in the common welfare. While remaining, of course, individual and…
by David Oates We are entering the aftermath. Two of the most epic and wrenching struggles in American history are finally playing out to their conclusions. At last we see a conclusive democratic rejection of a presidency built on systematic lying and racism. At the same time we look just weeks or months ahead for…
by David Oates How hard it is to watch our national election ordeal as it draws us into yet another week of chicanery and bad faith. How hard to watch. How hard to turn away. I write this in an attempt to avoid both avoidance and obsession. (Can I do it? I’ve been trying all…