I passed The Blue Orchard along to my own grandma, also a nurse and child of the Great Depression, and she enjoyed it as well. I thought it was particularly funny that after about 45 minutes of talking about Jackson Taylor’s grandma, I had to say to myself and grandma, ‘Enough! We’re talking about this woman like we know her; like we’re pals. She’s someone we’ve never even met.’ My grandma laughed, agreed, and said that it hadn’t been since Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle and Half Broke Horses that she felt like she knew someone so well through the pages of a single book.

A great read for individuals, but an especially good choice for book groups. There is a lot to talk about in this one!”—Ross, Rediscovered Books, Boise. Buy The Blue Orchard from Rediscovered Books.

Christopher Howell is a stalwart figure in Northwest poetry and publishing. A professor at Eastern Washington University, where he was a senior editor at EWU Press, he runs Lynx House Press, a small independent publisher. His tenth collection of poetry,

There are many currents in this book, ranging from childhood recollections to Grimm Brothers-esque tales. And though Gaze certainly contains comic elements and rich philosophic ruminations, I found the work overall to be stained by a very deep and beautifully compelling sense of sadness. For instance, this lovely elegy:

Elinor

for Elinor Howell (1919-2005)

The tall trees tip their hats

as she is passing.

The berry fields sway from shadows

where they have waited ripe and shining

more than eighty years.

They bend, but what is wind

worth now

that she is passing?

On high the hawk tiles and falls veering

and blue bound as the day itself.

Others enter and depart

along the narrow dusty sunlit road

leading away from time.

Someone beautiful is passing.

How do you find your way back from that well of emotion with these brimming poems? The grief that comes across in several of these poems is so visceral it seems like you must be re-experiencing it as part of your creative process. There is a lot of sadness in the book, but I don’t think of it as purely personal. There is a phrase in Latin, Lacrimae Rerum, “the tears of things.”  I think of the sadness in my work in those terms, that it is an acknowledgment of some fundamental mortal sadness essential to life and that it is only a micron from joy. Grief, it seems to me, has more specific sources and is more personal. But it is also a blessing, since it allows the one who grieves to affirm, again, that powerful affection for what has been lost. And right next to grief, I think, only a whisper away, is celebration. I hope the poems offer all of that, that they transcend sentiment, biography, technique, expectation, whatever scrim one might lay over them.

As to the journey you mention, into and out of sadness and grief, it is the same journey I want all my poems to take: from the conscious to the unconscious, the known to the unknown, and back again. It is difficult only because it is always difficult, not really because the elegiac mode makes it so.

Some of the poems in Gaze appear to flow from a kind of haunted, fairy tale vein. This beginning of the poem “Rachel,” for example:

It was a small hotel with a stone facade;

or a hotel with a facade of small stones.

It was late, and difficult to tell.

We beat and beat upon the gate, though the sound

we made was soft as breath

before it stops.

If the fairy tale as part of your work seems reasonable, what influences you that direction? Andre Breton said, in the first Manifesto: The fabric of adorable improbabilities must be made a trifle more subtle the older we grow, and we are still at the stage of waiting for this kind of spider . . . But faculties do not change radically. Fear, the attraction of the unusual, chance, the taste for things extravagant are all devices that we can always call upon without fear of deception. There are fairy tales to be written for adults, fairy tales still almost blue.

I like that: “the fabric of adorable improbabilities.” I like laying myself open to whatever might suggest itself as a path that may turn out to be a poem. It is a kind of receptivity we associate with childhood, when the magical seemed to lurk behind so many events and moments. So I am neither surprised nor distressed that some of my poems partake of the “fabulous.” I like it, in fact. “Fairy tales still almost blue:” I am happy to welcome them.

I can’t say what influences me to write such pieces, other than a love of Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and the poems of Robert Desnos. Perhaps it is simply the inexplicable, periodic onset of whimsy: another form of blessing.

And your poems are so alive visually, “my mother walks through wind /to the clothesline,” I wonder if your work isn’t influenced by art other than literature, paintings and/or movies, for instance? If so, what are some of those influences? My poems are not often self-consciously ekphrastic, but there are many painters whose work is precious to me, that of the Swedish painter Hanna Pauli, for instance. I am captivated by light, placement, color, and the sense of movement. It is not impossible that such admirations affect the way in which I shade and position the elements inside the poems. A clearer influence, I think, is drama: speech is action. Where you have action you have actors, where you have actors you have context, even, as we know, if it’s a naked stage.

I studied the early 20th century dramatists extensively in graduate school, wrote my master’s thesis on Strindberg. I’ve never actually tried writing a play; I think because my approach to the poems satisfies that need.

I know from the personal history that shows up in some of your poetry you were in Navy during the Vietnam war. How did you find your way from the Navy to professorship, poetry, and being a publisher? That seems like a rarely taken career path. I was, of course, in the Navy under duress. I transferred from one university from another after my junior year and was declared still a junior because I hadn’t taken a one-hour health education course. So my draft board announced that I had obviously been bad, had not been making “normal progress,” and revoked my student deferment. Two months later I received my draft notice. I was on my way home from the grocery store, with two bags of groceries, draft notice in my pocket, when I saw in front of a low brick building a sign, “U.S. Naval and Marine Corps Reserve Training Center.”  So I went in there, with my groceries. The Chief behind the reception desk laughed at me; they had a waiting list six miles long, he said. But he took my name. A week later the shore patrol showed up at my apartment and said, “Come now, son, this is your chance.”

So I became a member of the Navel Reserve. Which allowed me to finish my degree.

It was noted that I had been editor of a collage newspaper and had a degree in English, so at the beginning of my two years of active duty, I was sent to the Defense Information School for journalists, at Fort Ben Harrison, in Indianapolis. After that I went to the fleet, aircraft carriers the whole way.

Even on board ship I was writing poems; I really never stopped. And I was writing other things, too, of course, news releases, articles for the ship’s magazine and newspaper, copy for the news show I did each night on the ship’s closed circuit station. And I got to know the boys in the print shop. They showed me quite a bit about printing, and I begin to think about maybe publishing a magazine, kind of an underground thing.

That’s where the publishing part kind of took root; and, well, it just never went away. Since that time I have edited at least six journals and been director and principal editor of four presses. It has always seemed perfectly consistent with my devotion to writing and to teaching—though I confess that, at times, confluence of the devotional requirements of all three have worn me to a nub.

A little sleuthing showed me that Lynx House Press was founded in 1972 and you have been associated with it since its inception. You’re referred to as the director of the press on its website, and have been for a considerable time. In this publishing landscape what do you see as the role of the small press? And will you chime in on the foggy notion of the book’s decline as a cultural medium? The role of the small press. Well, I’m not sure it has changed much since the beginning of the 20th century. It’s role is to make public what commercial publishers will not. Forty years ago you could have said that, where literature was concerned, university presses really inhabited the same ground. Now, because library buying programs have been so seriously curtailed nationwide, they have moved closer to the commercial model and are competing (not very well) in the trade book market in every literary category except that of the novel.

But some things have changed.  The availability, now, of print-on-demand production, which allows even poorly financed small publishers to keep some control of their overhead; the easy and inexpensive access to first rate typesetting and design offered by new computer technologies; the expanded advertising and marketing opportunities offered by social media and the Internet generally. All these have made small presses more active and effective in the marketplace and more attractive to first-rate writers, particularly poets—who don’t expect their work to bring in any money anyway and who really just want their work attractively published and made broadly available.

So, the role is the same, more or less, but in terms of cultural impact it has expanded. And I don’t think electronic publishing is going to drive books into extinction. A virtual text is still virtual, no matter how you cut it. People still believe in the efficacy of the material world. Drop into Powell’s Books in Portland any day or night and you’ll find thousands of people eagerly and happily buying books, whether they own them in electronic form or not.

In that spirit, what’s the last (non-Lynx House) book you’ve read that excited you? I have come across at least a dozen very good books of poems in the past year, books that gave me great pleasure and helped to renew my faith in our literary culture (it does need occasional renewing), and there were two I found especially exciting and nurturing. The first is Laura Kasischke’s Space, In Chains. A stunning collection, the only book I know that employs a kind of fragmentist technique to actually amp up emotional content—the usual result of such employment, I notice, is a kind of frigidity. The poems contain some of the most original and electrifying imagery I’ve ever encountered. No one seems to much like the term “Deep Image,” but that’s what’s going on, what gives the poems their incredible resonance.

The other book I do truly love is Melissa Kwasny’s The Nine Senses. It’s comprised of prose poems, but the language in them is as tough and taught and clarified as any lyric you’ll ever read. They have in them, too, moments of breathtaking candor in which the poet steps right into the room and says, in many ways, “if only there were a story as great as our aching need to tell one.”

I recommend both these books with all my heart.

John Marshall, along with Christine Deavel, co-owns and operates Open Books: A Poem Emporium, the seventeen-year-old poetry-only bookstore in Seattle. He publishes poetry under the name J.W. Marshall because the late, lamented Seattle Post Intelligencer had, as its book editor, a John Marshall whom this John Marshall was not. He won the 2007 Field Poetry Prize, and his first book, Meaning a Cloud, was published in 2008 by Oberlin College Press.

Marshall tells us that the day he received Gaze in the store, a customer bought a copy of it. “He bought it with no encouragement on my part . . . I was on the phone when he came in and he went straight to shopping. The customer was a plain-spoken, salt-of-the-earth type late-20-something who, when I asked why he was buying this book I so admired, said he had been assigned a book of Chris’s in college which wowed him. Said he wasn’t even an English major. Then he told me he’s in catering now and when he caters weddings he thinks of a Chris Howell line that goes ‘the music / of their clothes dismantling restraint.’ It’s good to be reminded that poetry, and lovely that it was Chris’s, can be a partner in getting through the world.”

Miranda Roethler reported and wrote a comprehensive, insightful article about ebooks and the future of bookselling for one of her classes at Oregon Episcopal School, where she’s a junior. We’re publishing a condensed version of it here. Roethler is a native Portlander. She says she spends her free time swimming, hanging out with friends, watching old movies, and, of course, devouring all of the (print) books she can get her hands on.

On a busy, narrow, one-way street in quaint, homey Multnomah Village, Annie Bloom’s Books sits crammed between a curiosity shop and an Irish Café. Passersby stop to browse through the bin of bargain books sitting on the pavement outside the brick and tile exterior. A window display advertises the debut of The Chronicles of Harris Burdick.

In a light and airy room, three women of varying ages keep up a constant chatter with themselves and the customers as they work. “That book is so popular with that age group,” one notes as she rings up a Warriors book for a woman and her son. Another listens politely as an eight-year-old girl asks about a specific book on dogs; she knows the title (sort of), and thinks the author’s name starts with a T. Or maybe a G. The cashier begins searching.

Looking around, it’s not obvious that the store is struggling to stay in business.

If you’re reading this, you probably know the story well. During the past few decades, small, independent bookstores have received several crushing blows that have forced many out of business. First, giant chains such as Barnes & Noble and Borders, and then “big box” stores like Costco and Wal-Mart began appearing in greater numbers. Then Web-based booksellers such as Amazon became popular. All of these  book-buying options offered progressively cheaper prices that were impossible for small independent stores to compete with. As if these companies weren’t competition enough, then came the economic crash of 2008 and the ebook.

“Over the past few decades, in the blink of the eye of history, our culture has begun to go through what promises to be a total metamorphosis,” begins the infamous Gutenberg Elegies, a book by Sven Birkerts that rocked the literary world more than fifteen years ago with its dire predictions of the death of the book and which, ironically enough, I was able to preview on Amazon’s website.

The fact is, technology is developing in today’s society at an unprecedented rate. In 2000, the most recent threat to small independent bookstores—and to the printed book itself—was born. On March 14 of that year, Simon & Schuster released Stephen King’s novella Riding the Bullet online. Within twenty-four hours, around half a million people had downloaded the book, and the electronic book, or e-book, revolution had officially begun.

In 2002, close to one million e-books were sold. Although slow to begin, recently the popularity of e-books has risen with the release of e-readers. In 2009, e-book sales grew by one hundred and seventeen percent. Amazon currently sells more electronic books than print books—about one hundred and five e-books for every one hundred print books, according to recent article in The New York Times.

So where does that place the printed book and booksellers? In September of 2011, Borders closed its last store. But they certainly aren’t the only ones. Around the nation, small, independent bookstores are struggling to stay alive. A classic example of an independent book business gone belly-up is Looking Glass Books. This Southeast Portland store closed in March 2011, to the considerable dismay of the community. As the business faced closure, owner Karin Anna described a pivotal experience with the e-book in an article in The Oregonian. A customer came into the store, found a book that was priced at $40 and asked Anna if she could match the online price, which was a full $16 cheaper. “I couldn’t and wouldn’t,” Anna told a reporter. “It was an incredibly painful experience.”

Will Peters

Will Peters, manager of Annie Bloom’s books, agrees it’s been a struggle to stay in business. I met with him in the heart of Annie Bloom’s office, a low-ceilinged basement with yellow lighting and a labyrinth of desks, chairs, overflowing bookshelves and blinking computers. An English major in college, Peters says he went into the book business because he “wasn’t fit for a real job.” Tall and white-haired, with a piercing, intelligent gaze intensified by black, thin-framed glasses, Peters possesses a deep, infectious, often-heard laugh. However, while talking about the e-book he assumes a slightly stiff and carefully indifferent air; he is not sure where to stand on this difficult subject. On one hand, one could argue that e-books are encouraging reading in today’s technology-oriented world. On the other hand, they are threatening to drive his store out of business.

Peters talks about the “waves of competition,” starting with chain stores and then big box stores, and then online corporations, the biggest challenge right now. E-books have definitely affected his business, but he notes that it’s hard to say how much, especially with the economic recession. He believes that his store is doing quite well, all things considered, but he’s heard from some of his friends in the profession that the last few years have been very rough.

Valerie (“Val”) Ryan, owner of Cannon Beach Book Company, a small bookshop in Cannon Beach, puts it more bluntly: her biggest challenge during the past ten years has been to stay in business. Recently Ryan has had to reduce inventory and payrolls. Amazon, she says, is a huge threat to her business. One of her recent Facebook posts reads, “If you really want to occupy Wall Street, stop shopping at Amazon!”

Ryan (second from right) celebrates Cannon Beach Book Company's 30th anniversary.

E-books pose an additional threat for Ryan. Many tourists have been bringing e-books with them on vacation, since they are more portable than regular books. In a small beach town like Cannon Beach, where most business comes from tourists, this shift to electronic books is quite a blow.

Peters agrees that the biggest problem with e-books is the monopoly that certain corporations, namely Amazon, have over the business. When a person buys an e-reader through Amazon, he or she can only purchase e-books through Amazon. Although Annie Bloom’s does offer e-books through its website, they are not very popular because of this monopoly. Peters thinks that companies like Amazon should have followed what he calls the “movie model,” where a book could be available only in print for several months, like a movie in theaters, and then be released as an e-book, like DVDs.

Sally McPherson, co-owner of Broadway Books in Northeast Portland since 2007, also has a thing or two to say about big online corporations—namely Amazon. “I always tell people, Amazon is not a bookstore. It’s a Walmart. You don’t call Safeway a bookstore just because they have a few paperbacks at the checkout stand. Amazon sells lawnmowers and shoes and everything in between. It just started out selling books,” she says. She compares the situation to buying a car for cheap but then only being able to buy from one gas station. If they decide to dramatically raise the prices, or pump bad-quality gas, you’re stuck. “I’m not anti-e-book,” Sally clarifies. “I’m anti-control.”

Which brings up a crucial point: bookstores aren’t the only stores being threatened by the Internet revolution and online shopping. The reality is that most things are cheaper when ordered through huge corporations online. “It’s not just books. It’s everything,” Ryan says. Movies. Music. Clothing. Almost all stores are receiving some kind of online competition, and as a result, many small, community-based shops are closing.

Peters says Annie Bloom’s attracts customers by trying to highlight the unique experience of the small independent bookshop, an experience that would be impossible to find online. His bookstore is different from online corporations like Amazon and chains like Barnes & Noble, he says, because Annie Bloom’s is very much a part of the community. The store does school fundraisers and holds book readings and community meetings. “I don’t think they have that on Amazon!” he laughs.

Peters also notes the difference in what they carry in the store. “We sell different books here than you would find online,” he tells me, adding that online, people find books through “impulsive clicks,” instead of browsing through a store. Peters often has conversations with frequent customers to find out what they like. “We’ll hear about new books from the publisher and think, ‘oh, Mrs. Jones would really like that!’ ” he says.

Ryan also prides herself on her “deep book list.” “Books you find in a grocery store, you will not find in my store,” she says.

Ryan and Peters both stress their stores’ excellent customer service. But customer service sometimes isn’t enough. As I chat with McPherson at Broadway Books, she gets a call. “Oh, hi Jeanie,” she says in a friendly tone. “That book that was featured on NPR the other day? Oh, do you mean The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper? I’m sorry, it’s all sold out, but we can ship it in a few days . . . Okay, great! It’s $35.” There’s a long pause as, presumably, the woman at the other end reacts to the price, and Sally’s voice changes. “Okay . . . well. Give us a call if you change your mind. We also have this new pop-up book on M.C. Escher. There are only three in stock . . .” But she eventually hangs up without having made a sale.

Broadway Books co-owners Roberta Dyer and Sally McPherson

Despite this incident, McPherson notes that lately there has been an increased interest in shopping local. “People have realized that they need to spend their money where their heart lies,” she tells me. “Their heart doesn’t lie in some warehouse of Amazon’s in California.”

Inside Cannon Beach Book Company, something becomes apparent that neither Ryan, Peters, nor McPherson mentioned, perhaps because it’s so blatantly obvious and also a bit clichéd: what these stores have and what big corporations like Amazon lack is heart. Ryan, Peters, and McPherson aren’t in this business for the money; they’re in it because they love books and reading, and they want to share their love with everyone in their community. The overall profit for the book industry nationally is negative two percent, Sally tells me. “We’re not getting rich here.”

In November, novelist Ann Patchett opened a bookstore in her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. Why? Because,with the closure of Borders, there were almost no bookstores to speak of in the city anymore. “I have no interest in retail; I have no interest in opening a bookstore,” Patchett told reporters. “But I also have no interest in living in a city without a bookstore.”

Are bookstores really disappearing so quickly that people have to start opening them because they feel it’s their civic duty? Peters doesn’t think so. In fact, he’s quite optimistic about the future of the bookstore and the printed word. He cannot say enough about the advantages of the printed book, and he firmly believes that because of these advantages, bookstores will always have a place in the future. McPherson disagrees; she says it’s quite possible that in the future there will be no bookstores. Although perhaps a treasonous thought for most people in the book business, one has to wonder, what would it be like if there were no bookstores? How would you browse? Ask for recommendations? Meet authors? Go to book signings? How would you get the search engine to turn up results for “book about skyscrapers on NPR the other day,” or “kid’s book with ‘the dog’ in the title, by someone named T or G”?

Though McPherson is pessimistic about the future of the bookstore, she is cautiously optimistic about the future of the printed word. The book has survived for this long, she says. It is treasured and cherished by many. Those people won’t let it die now, or anytime soon.