David Oates presents STEALhead and What We Love Will Save Us

Start: 11/11/2009 7:30 pm

End: 11/11/2009 9:00 pm

Portlander David Oates presents his newest book and a fascinating work in progress:

In What We Love Will Save Us, brief and beautifully intense personal essays explore hope, pleasure, and creativity --offering a crucial balance to David Oates' dramatically personal account of what it has been like to be a "citizen of the regime" during eight years of unprecedented propaganda, torture, waste, and war. What is the right response, when the government that belongs to us goes seriously off course? How does a person's private and creative life relate to the life we share in common? The author finds wildness and grace breaking out in unexpected places - from city streets to mountain peaks, from ecstatic pleasures to unanswerable questions. Readable, memorable, smart but straight from the heart - these essays give voice to our shared experience of a dark and frustrating time in the nation's life.

In 1848 a half-Chinook, half-Scot adventurer named "Tole" MacDonald smuggled himself into still-closed Japan – years ahead of Commodore Perry's famous gunship "opening." From Fort Vancouver he had travelled halfway around the world searching for what he imagined was the racial/ancestral home of his own, vanishing, Chinook people. Welcomed, but imprisoned in Nagasaki, MacDonald taught fourteen of the Emperor's best scholars, so that Perry later found himself greeted by English-speaking Japanese – MacDonald's students.

MacDonald lived out his years on the northern reaches of the Columbia. He was the grandson of the Chinook Chief Concomly – son of the Fort Vancouver Hudson Bay Company's "Chief Trader." (The chief's head had been stolen "for science" after his death, hence the title of this book.) MacDonald's place seemed to be everywhere and nowhere.

StealHead weaves together the letters MacDonald wrote home to other outcast "half-breeds," uncovering his real motives and purposes. This work in progress is funded in part by a grant from RAC, the Regional Arts Council.