4A • July 13, 2018 | Cannon Beach Gazette | cannonbeachgazette.com
Views from the Rock
STRANGE LITERARY
BEDFELLOWS
P
hilip Roth died in May at the
age of 85, only a few months
after the death of Ursula K.
Le Guin, the former Cannon
Beach resident and author of
world acclaim.
Until their deaths, Roth and Le Guin
had been the only living authors in the
Library of America, a series “preserv-
ing the words that have shaped the
American canon.”
Both Le Guin and Roth would like-
ly be uncomfortable with their sudden
literary synchronicity.
In so many ways they were polar
opposites: Le Guin a product of the
Pacific Northwest; Roth, of the East
Coast.
Le Guin was the daughter of aca-
demics, raised in Berkeley, California;
Roth, from a middle-class family in the
shadow of Newark, New Jersey.
Roth’s fiction took place on earth;
Le Guin’s in other worlds.
Le Guin spent a long domestic life
with her husband Charles and raised a
family. Roth’s serial relationships were
fitful and occasionally troubled — his
former wife, the actress Claire Bloom
wrote a savage accounting of their
years together. Roth had no children.
In many of Le Guin’s novels, she
imagines a world without gender.
Philip Roth’s voice is fixated on the
roots of his desire.
In later years, Le Guin confronted
the divide between herself and Roth
with a painful assessment: “He’s an
awfully male writer,” she told Literary
Hub, the Grove Atlantic literary news
source. “It’s sort of like he doesn’t
want me in his world.”
No labels
But it is their moment in time, in
America, their passion for writing and
uncanny ability to confound critics that
ultimately make Roth and Le Guin part
of a literary quilt.
Each found their voice and con-
nected with the public in decades-long
careers.
Their breakout novels — “Portnoy’s
Complaint” and Le Guin’s “Left Hand
of Darkness,” came out the same year,
1969.
Le Guin was an unfashionable
outsider from the East Coast literary
establishment; Both bristled at labels
“Don’t shove me into your pigeon-
hole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all
over,” she said in a 2014 interview.
Le Guin and Roth both viewed the
art of storytelling with reverence, as
prolific and highly regarded authors of
essays and criticism.
The two authors each retreated
from fashionable literary salons: Roth
lived and wrote in a wooded rural town
in Connecticut 100 miles from New
EVE MARX
Whether future beauty queen or future scholars — or
both -— Miss Oregon Princesses strut their stuff.
FILE PHOTO
Ursula K. Le Guin
CANNON SHOTS
R.J. MARX
York; Le Guin, in Portland and Cannon
Beach.
Each often used their remote lo-
cations as backdrops for their fiction:
Roth painting bucolic New England; Le
Guin, the grandeur of the Oregon Coast.
In a 1973 essay, Salman Rushdie
ascribes to each a shared literary device,
the power of allegory: Roth, in “The
Great American Novel”; Le Guin in
“The Left Hand of Darkness.”
Le Guin and Roth shared a kooky
love of language and lingo, some-
times made up. Their love of words
extended to tongues new and old: Le
Guin’s Hainish and the Hardic tongue
of Earthsea. “Have you no harekki on
Gont?” asks a character in “A Wizard of
Earthsea.”
Compare Roth’s Yiddish, “Kish
mir in tuchis” — which means what it
sounds like.
Voices for freedom
Le Guin and Roth came from a gen-
eration of progressive politics, secular
outlook and rigid work ethic.
Intensely political, they pressed
boundaries and hailed free expression.
Roth perceived the daily repression
of Eastern European regimes, where
writers feared for their safety and
viewed their example as a cautionary
tale, identifying abusive political power
“as immoral coercion.” He helped
bring writers like Milan Kundera and
Bruno Schulz from behind the Iron Cur-
tain to American readers.
Le Guin loathed intolerance,
totalitarianism and repression. “Only
fear rules men,” a Le Guin character
Writers add personal
experiences to their
characters’ voices
AP PHOTO
Author Philip Roth poses for a pho-
to in the offices of his publisher,
Houghton Mifflin, in 2008.
states in “The Left Hand of Darkness.”
“Nothing else works. Nothing else lasts
long enough.”
Le Guin’s greatest moments in
public life came from the podium. At
the 2014 National Book Awards, she
delivered a speech that resonated to
not only the world of publishing, but
politics, society and letters.
She urged an ascendancy of writers
who can “remember “freedom — po-
ets, visionaries — realists of a larger
reality.”
Both Le Guin and Roth were hon-
ored by the National Book Foundation
with its Medal for Distinguished Contri-
bution to American Letters, an honor
bestowed on Saul Bellow, Joan Didion,
Toni Morrison, Ray Bradbury, John
Updike and Stephen King.
Neither received the Nobel Prize for
Literature.
Is there a nexus between them? Does
there need to be one?
Roth supplies a better understand-
ing of appreciating great authors in his
essay, “Writing American Fiction”:
“There seems to me little, in the end, to
prove an assertion about the psychology
of a nation’s writers, outside, that is, of
their books themselves.”
eventually found the language and her
By Rebecca Herren
Seaside Signal
Publisher
Kari Borgen
Editor
R.J. Marx
Circulation
Manager
Jeremy Feldman
Production
Manager
John D. Bruijn
REBECCA HERREN
Authors Anna Quinn, standing, and
Jennifer Haupt, seated, talk about
what influences inspired the char-
acters in their newest novels at the
Lunch in the Loft author series at
Beach Books.
until something disrupts her belief that
Nora finds out the story she’d been tell-
ing herself might not be the true one.
Suffering her own childhood trau-
ma, Quinn learned to tell herself stories;
writing herself out of old stories and into
new ones. Quinn also found an escape in
music and learned to play the accordion.
“Music changes you viscerally,” she
said, and looks for ways to recreate
rhythm and passion in her writings. But
it wasn’t until she discovered fiction that
her whole world opened up. Like the
characters in these stories, Quinn, too,
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Brenna Visser
Contributing
writers
Rebecca Herren
Katherine Lacaze
Eve Marx
Nancy McCarthy
couple of Saturday’s ago, June 30, which would
have been, were she alive, my mother’s 96th
birthday, we happened to be in downtown Seaside
just as the Miss Oregon parade was starting. Normally,
I’m not much of a parade person, but this was different.
That night 24 young ladies from all over the state would
be competing for the title of Miss Oregon, the winner
going on to compete for the crown of Miss America 2019
in Atlantic City on Sunday, Sept. 9. Along with a couple
of hundred tourists
and bystanders
and people rooting
VIEW FROM
for their own
THE PORCH
favorites, I shouted
EVE MARX
encouragement
to the amazing
young women
competing for the Miss Oregon title from the sidewalks on
Broadway, yelling extra loud and waving at Haylie Moon,
Miss Clatsop County, who hails from Cannon Beach and
Hannah Garhofer, Miss Lane County, a Seaside native.
The Miss America contest and pageant is a sentimental
trip down memory lane for me. I grew up in Atlantic City,
and when I was a kid, as a family, we went to conven-
tion hall to watch it live onstage. The night before the
big show, which is nationally televised, contestants from
all 50 states participated in a parade on the Atlantic City
boardwalk. They wore evening gowns and tiaras and rode
perched behind the back seat of Cadillac convertibles. (In
Seaside, they ride in Corvettes). I always enjoy the parade
more than the actual show because you can get really close
to the contestants.
On June 30, at the Seaside Convention Center, Taylor
Ballard, 25, holder of the Miss Northwest Wonderland
crown and from Portland, won the title of Miss Oregon.
She holds a bachelor of science degree in communication
and her platform issue is Confidence Under Construction.
Her talent is dance. Kennedy Hjelte, of Tualatin, who
competed as Three Rivers Outstanding Teen, won the title
of Miss Oregon’s Outstanding Teen. She will also progress
to Atlantic City.
Unsurprisingly, the 24 young women in Seaside
competing for the title of Miss Oregon did a portion of
the competition wearing a swimsuit. Perhaps by next year,
that element of the contest will be eliminated, as several
months ago, the Miss America corporation announced they
were dropping the swimsuit competition from the pro-
gram after making the decision to rebrand the competition
around scholarship.
The swimsuit competition has always sat poorly with
me.
What bothered me, even as a child, were the remarks
people made, even my own mother, about the competi-
tor’s bodies. (For some reason, during the evening gown
competition, the remarks were all about the dress and
whether or not it worked.) “She’s got no breasts,” my
mother might say. Or, “Lucky she’s wearing heels — will
you get a load of those stumpy legs.” Every remark passed
about the contestant was a body judgment. My moth-
er, God bless her, saw nothing wrong with that. What a
dreadful message, I think to send the tiny girls and young
teens, currently pageant princesses, growing up in pageant
culture.
Taylor Ballard told the Oregon contest judges her plat-
form of confidence and positive body image is particularly
relevant. I think she’s on point. I applaud her success in
Seaside, seizing the Miss Oregon crown. And I am person-
ally delighted she won’t have to compete in a swimsuit in
Atlantic City on Sept. 9.
A
Authors Haupt, Quinn at Beach Books
Novelists Jennifer Haupt and Anna
Quinn love combining book tours, and
their joint readings featured at Beach
Books on June 22 was one of many they
have collaborated with over the years.
Quinn, who is the author of “The
Night Child,” and Haupt who penned
“In The Shadow of 10,000 Hills,” first
met at a Pacific Northwest Booksellers
event. They hit it off and have been tour
buddies ever since. “It was simpatico,”
Haupt said.
Their book tours have taken them
from coast to coast, together and individ-
ually. Whenever possible they combine
tours, readings and workshops. When
schedules align, their husbands accom-
pany them for a weekend vacation.
Anna Quinn owns the Writers’ Work-
shoppe and Imprint Bookstore in Port
Townsend, Washington. She is a pub-
lished poet and essayist and has led writ-
ing workshops for more than 26 years.
“The Night Child” is a story of resil-
ience. The novel explores the impact of
traumatic childhood experiences and the
line between the past and the present. Its
main voice is Nora, a high school En-
glish teacher, who, as a child, told her-
self stories as a way to survive. It wasn’t
The future of
Miss America
CANNON BEACH GAZETTE
The Cannon Beach Gazette is
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voice.
“In The Shadow of 10,000 Hills” is
set against the backdrop of a country
grieving 12 years post Rwandan geno-
cide. It follows the intertwining stories
of women who discover the connections
between forgiveness and grief.
She specialized in writing about
women who dealt with their own depres-
sion and grief by starting nonprofits for
children and women around the world.
She didn’t know how to start a nonprofit
or how this would help heal one’s grief,
but she kept asking. The answers she re-
ceived were always the same: by helping
people discover their voice and helping
them deal with their grief was healing
for the women who started the nonprof-
its. “I was just fascinated with that,”
Haupt said.
She traveled to Rwanda in 2006,
more than a decade after the Rwandan
genocide. Her journey into the rural
provinces to interview genocide survi-
vors, aid workers and people who were
starting nonprofits gave her a sense of
connection, sharing similar trauma.
“There was a bridge of compassion I
felt between me and the people whose
stories and experiences that, of course, I
couldn’t compare my experiences with,
but I found this whole country was still
grieving 12 years after the genocide and
it was very much under the surface. I
came back from Rwanda wanting to tell
these stories but wanting to tell these
stories in fiction.”
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PUBLIC MEETINGS
MONDAY, July 16
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TUESDAY, July 17
Cannon Beach Public Works Committee, 9 a.m., City Hall, 163 E.
Gower St.
THURSDAY, July 19
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E. Gower St.
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TUESDAY, Aug. 7
Cannon Beach City Council, 7 p.m., City Hall, 163 E. Gower St.
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