We are pleased to have OSU Press author Ana Maria Spagna blogging for us as part of the University Press Week blog tour.  A complete blog tour schedule is available here.

I admire university presses, revere them even, for more reasons than I can name. There’s the wealth of information their books had provided me during research. Need to know about American Indians? There’s Oklahoma. Civil rights? Mississippi. Western water wars? Utah. Then there are the reprints, those lost gems. My own home press, Oregon State, has resurrected some of my personal literary heroes H.L. Davis and Don Berry. Then there’s the long tradition of essential writers who got their starts with university presses, many of whom stayed: Edward Abbey, Norman McLean, Rebecca Solnit, Scott Russell Sanders, Lucia Perillo, Stanley Crawford.

But most of all, I adore university presses, cherish them, for what they are not.  A few years ago I thought I was on the brink of something big. An agent (an agent!) was shopping my first collection of essays around New York. Not surprisingly, at least in hindsight, the collection did not receive a warm reception (essays?), so the agent suggested that I rewrite the manuscript to make it more saleable. OK, I said. Sure. But what did she mean? Could she suggest a book that might serve as a model?  

The Da Vinci Code, she said. Read The Da Vinci Code.

I was stunned. The distance between my little book of nature essays and Dan Brown’s mega-seller could be measured in light years. Her suggestion was ridiculous, nearly outrageous. I was disheartened the same way I’d be disheartened a few years later when an editor at a large publishing house gushed in admiration of one of my books, and then took it to the marketing department where it was rejected out of hand because they didn’t think it could sell the requisite 25,000 hard cover copies. Twenty five thousand?  That seemed a very high bar. How many of my most beloved books would not exist if they’d been required to sell that many copies out of the gate?  Nearly all of them, I realized. 

That first collection finally found a home at a university press, and home was the right word.  The small staff proved helpful and encouraging, dedicated and demanding and very very smart. I was honored and humbled to work with them—I’m honored to be with them still—but I’m honored even more to be part of a sub-culture that cares about, well, culture. Not the mega-seller, but the best book possible, sometimes from the least expected author, the least expected place. In that way, university presses, like indie record labels, have become incubators of talent and a bulwark against highly profitable sameness. 

How many Da Vinci Codes do we really need?

Ana Maria Spagna, October 2012

Ana Maria Spagna is the author of Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness and Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw (both from OSUP). Her essays have appeared in Orion, Utne Reader, Open Spaces, Backpacker, and Best Essays NW. She lives in Stekehin, Washington.

We're pleased to share excerpts from Brian Doyle's The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart,  once again available in a new OSU Press edition. Brian describes The Wet Engine as a "headlong heartfelt chant and song and expedition to the seat of the soul, the pumping station of the body, the power house, headquarters, headwater, fuse-box, crossroads, the crucial battery, the mysterious extraordinary moist relentless fragile holy human heart; and notes on how it works and doesn’t work, and what it means, and how we use it so easily and casually as a metaphor for the extraordinary loves and pains that course through us like muscular rivers; and explorations of doctors and nurses and surgeries and the hearts of hummingbirds and whales and worms; and agony and atresia and courage and cardiology and blood and pulse and ebb and flow and prayer and people and the pain and poetry of the chambered muscle that drives us humming and weeping and hopeless and hopeful through the intricate countries of our days."

MY SON LIAM was born nine years ago. He looked like a cucumber on steroids. He was fat and bald and round. He looked healthy as a horse. He wasn’t. He was missing a chamber in his heart, which is a bit of a problem, as you need four chambers for smooth conduct through this vale of fears and tears, and he only had three chambers, so pretty soon he had an open heart surgery, during which doctors cut him open and iced down his heart and shut it down for an hour or so while they worked on repair.

That was when he was about six months old. I don’t remember much about that time. It all rushed past like a pain train.

Then when he was about eighteen months old he had another open heart surgery, during which they did all that again, and what I most remember from that time is his grinning face receding down the hallway as he was carried toward the bone shears by a sweet quiet doctor. I’ll always remember that. His face was so round. His face bounced up and down a little on the doctor’s thin shoulder. He smiled at me at the very end of the corridor, just before he and the doctor turned the corner, and I thought maybe that was going to be the last time I ever saw that big fat face smiling at me, and that was when I saw pain and death leering at me closer than I ever saw them before. That was a cold moment. I’ll always remember that.
*
…Not a day goes by, not one, that I do not think of my son tiny and round and naked and torn open and heart-chilled and swimming somewhere between death and life; and every day I think of the young grinning intense mysterious genius heart doctor who saved his life; and for years now I have wanted to try to write that most unwriteable man down, to tell a handful of the thousands of stories that whirl around him like brilliant birds, to report a tiny percentage of the people he has saved and salved, and so thank him in some way I don’t fully understand, and also thank the Music that made him and me and my son and all of us; and somehow it seems to me that the writing down of a handful of those stories will matter in the world, be a sort of crucial chant or connective tissue between writer and readers, all of us huddled singing under the falling bombs and stars; and more and more over the years I have become absorbed and amazed at the heart itself, the wet engine of us all, and how it works and doesn’t work, and what it means, and how we use it so easily and casually as a metaphor for the extraordinary loves and agonies that course through us like muscular raging rivers; so finally I sit my raggedy self down and write this lean book, as a sort of prayer of thanks that my son is alive and stubborn as a stone, that there are such complicated and astonishing people as Doctor Dave, that there are such mysterious and incalculably holy things as hammering hearts, and that they power such mysterious and holy and wild things as us.
*
Let us contemplate, you and I, the bloody electric muscle. Let us consider it from every angle. Let us remove it from its bony cage, its gristly case, and hold it to the merciless light, and turn it glinting this way and that, and look at it as if we have never seen it before, because we never have seen it before, not like this. Let us think carefully about the throb of its relentless tissue. Let us ponder it as the wet engine from which comes all the music we know. Let us contemplate the thousand ways it fails and the few ways it does not fail. Let us gawk at the brooding genius of its architecture. Let us consider it as the most crucial and amazing house, with its four rooms and meticulous plumbing and protein walls and chambered music. Let us dream of blood and pulse and ebb and flow. Let us consider tide and beat. Let us unweave the web of artery and vein, the fluttering jetties of the valves, the coursing of ions from cell to cell, the sodium that is your soul, the potassium that is your personality, the calcium that is your character.
*
The heart is the first organ to form. It is smaller than a comma when it begins and ends up bigger than a fist. Every cell in it is capable of pulsing. No one knows how that could be. The pulse begins when a baby is about twenty days old. No one knows quite why it happens then. The pulse then continue for about two billion pulses. No one knows why there are that many. Or that few. Why not one billion each? Why not twenty billion? Mayflies to mastodons, beetles to bison, prophets to poets, infants to those who commit infanticide, all are issued the same number of pulses to do with what they will. Tell me, asks the great quiet American poet Mary Oliver, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
 *
Dave says Liam is well enough to go home and he writes Liam a pass out of the hospital. My wife dresses her bruised boy and puts him gently in his stroller with his bear and wheels boy and bear through the corridors and hallways and elevators. As she nears the front doors of the hospital Liam gets all restless and fussy and fidgety and causes a ruckus. Mary, as perceptive a woman as there ever was, realizes what he wants and lifts him out of the stroller and he swaggers through the swinging front doors of the hospital himself.

Once through the doors he tires and Mary hoists him back into the stroller and we take him home.

Eight years later I remember the way I felt deep in my hoary heart that day when he pushed through those big doors, curious, delighted, hard-headed, sore-hearted, hungry for light. I like to tell him that story and he likes to hear it, about the time he was one tough hombre even though he was only one and one half year old, and he met pain head-on and kicked its butt and told that pain he would remember its butt-ugly face and if ever pain troubled his town again, why, there would be some hell raised and some thrashin’ and bashin’, you hear that, you ugly pain?, and sometimes if he is feeling especially goofy and showoffy and nutty he will imitate his own swagger that day, and every time this happens, which it happens about once a year or so, I get a feeling in my chest that I don’t know how to explain to you. There aren’t enough words for it, and the words I’d try to use are weak anyways.
*
So much held in heart in a life. So much held in heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end – not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

And what might we be, as a species, in the years to come? O what, O God tell me, o people tell me, o friends and lovers tell me, o enemies tell me, o come clear to me in the entrails of birds and the fleeting tails of stars, what we might be if we rise and evolve, if we reach and leap, if we deepen and sing, if we come further down from the brooding trees and out onto the smiling plain, if we unclench the fist and drop the dagger, if we emerge blinking from the fort and the stockade and the prison, if we smash the bricks from around our hearts, if we cease to stagger and swagger, if we peel the steel from our eyes, if we yearn and learn, if we do what we say we will do, if we act as if our words really matter, if our words become muscled mercy, if we grow a fifth chamber in our hearts and a seventh and a ninth, and become as if new creatures arisen from our shucked skins, creatures become what we are so patently and brilliantly and utterly and wholly and holy capable of…
 
What then?

***

Brian Doyle is the author of twelve books, including Mink River,  Bin Laden's Bald Spot & Other Stories, The Grail, Grace Notes, Thirsty for the Joy: Australian and American Voices, and Epiphanies and Elegies. He edits Portland Magazine at the University of Portland. Doyle’s essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Orion, The American Scholar, and in newspapers and magazines around the world. His essays have also been reprinted in the annual Best American Essays, Best American Science & Nature Writing, and Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies.

Upcoming appearances

Thursday, September 6, 6 pm. Orion Magazine celebrates a new issue with guests including Cheryl Strayed and Brian Doyle, Ecotrust Natural Capitol Center, Portland.

Saturday, September 22. Time tba.Rowboat Gallery, Pacific City, Oregon.

Sunday, October 14. Wordstock Festival. Noon: Reading. 3 pm: Panel, The Art of Ending.

Author photo by Jerry Hart

We're pleased to welcome author Bonnie Henderson to the OSU Press blog. In her book Strand: An Odyssey of Pacific Ocean Debris, she traces wrack collected on a mile of Oregon beach, some of which had travelled from as far as Hokkaido, Japan. Today she reflects on the tsunami wreckage that has begun to wash up on Oregon's coastline and on what the future might hold for Oregon. The photographs were taken after large quantities of flora and fauna, including potentially invasive species, were scraped from the sides of the dock. 

by Bonnie Henderson

A large concrete dock, wrenched from the port at Misawa, Japan, by a massive tsunami 15 months earlier lands on the beach north of Newport, Oregon. A columnist from the local paper gives me a call. He’s struck by what he sees as a lack of reverence by tourists and locals for this object, which to him represents the thousands of lives lost in that cataclysm. He’s interested in a quote from the author of Strand: An Odyssey of Pacific Ocean Debris.

“I think about what will be washing up in Japan when the earthquake and tsunami happens here,” I tell him. “What is the stuff that will be showing up there? Our docks, soccer balls and, unless a few schools are moved, our kids’ backpacks?”

I believe he thinks I missed the point. I tend to think he did.

The debris from the March 11, 2011, tsunami has sparked great interest on this side of the Pacific in the stream of garbage that circulates in the North Pacific and that sometimes gets stuck in what’s known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  Many more people are now attuned to the North Pacific Gyre, a collection of currents that move like a river in the ocean in a great clockwise pattern around the northern Pacific Ocean. The gyre has always carried durable debris, notably the glass floats that Japanese fishermen used to use in great quantities and would lose or would intentionally discard, to make room in the holds for fish, before most of them switched to plastic floats. Since the advent of container shipping and the explosion of plastic manufacturing, the quantity of plastic garbage in the gyre has exploded. Fish eat it. Birds, skimming the ocean’s surface, eat it, or they dive and eat the plastic-stuffed fish below. Most such debris floats just under the surface of the water, and thus floats at the speed of the current. Some—the dock from Misawa, notably—rides higher in the water and thus gets an assist from prevailing winds, which blow it faster than the speed of the water. The Pacific Ocean is vast. Debris that lands in the water immediately starts to spread out, and scientists now estimate that the debris from the 2011 tsunami in Japan now covers an area equivalent to three times the area of the continental United States.

That’s part of the science story. What about the reverence? There’s a science story there too.

Certain geologists and seismologists in Japan had been predicting a mega-quake of this kind for that part of Japan for several years, though their warnings had not been taken seriously by the Japanese government. Japan is no stranger to earthquakes, but the last major one in this particular location was in AD 869. We have a similar situation in the Pacific Northwest. There is no longer any doubt that similar seismic events—just as big, just as devastating, triggered by the same kind of collision of tectonic plates—have occurred here in the past and will occur here in the foreseeable future. Right here, from southern Vancouver Island, B.C., down to Eureka, California, or—in the cast of a partial rupture—from about Coos Bay down to Eureka. The last one was much more recent than AD 869; it was just 312 years ago, in January 1700. Humans living on this coast at that time—those who survived the event—memorialized it in their stories. And the earth recorded it in layers of estuary mud and sediment and ocean sand.

With its history of frequent earthquakes, Japan has developed an infrastructure that is better prepared for such events than that of any country in the world. Still, as many as 20,000 lives were lost in the March 2011 event—with thousands still counted as missing, there is no definitive tally. The vast majority of those deaths were caused not by the earthquake but by the tsunami that followed close behind.

It seems to me that the best way to honor those lost souls on this side of the Pacific is to take seriously the mirror-image threat that we face and to do our best to save lives here. We can prepare for it by moving schools and hospitals out of the inundation zone and by rebuilding bridges to withstand a magnitude 9 earthquake. Those bridges will be a lifeline for people fleeing the coming tsunami after the earthquake rumbles its warning. To ignore the science and fail to prepare here is to devalue the lives of our fellow humans claimed by another tsunami in another country on the other side of the Pacific.

Docks, yes. Plastic water and soda bottles, certainly, and plastic toys and containers and items of all kinds. Boats. Wood from houses. All this and much more will find its way into the North Pacific Gyre after the tsunami here—whether it strikes this year or in 50 or 100 years. Some of that debris from our houses and businesses and parks and schools may eventually get blown onto the beach on northern Honshu, or maybe Hokkaido, and beachcombers there will no doubt have the same range of reactions our fellow citizens have had to the dock from Misawa, from annoyance to curiosity to reverence. But none of them will doubt that the kind of event that sent this debris from the West Coast of the United States to the coast of Japan can happen there.

They know it can. They have felt it, have seen it. And they know it will happen again.

Bonnie Henderson is currently at work on a book about how we know what we know about earthquakes and tsunamis in the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

We are delighted to welcome guest blogger David G. James, co-author with David Nunnallee of Life Histories of Cascadia Butterflies. We guarantee his reflections will inspire everyone to head to the fields, nets in hand.

Can butterflies have secrets? Well, they surely do. We see them visit our flowers sipping nectar for a few minutes or we see them flying towards our windshield as we hope for a last-minute reprieve from death, but that’s just about as much as the average adult person knows about the life of a butterfly.

However, if our children attend elementary school, we may have heard of Painted Ladies and learned that these are a species of butterfly that the kids were rearing. It is not a coincidence that the Painted Lady butterfly rearing kit is currently the most popular purchase in the ‘toys and games’ section of Amazon.com. It is very likely that your children know a great deal more about butterflies and their "secrets" than you do.

I recently "taught" butterfly classes to groups of kindergartners and second graders and was amazed at their enthusiasm and knowledge of butterflies! The second graders confidently told me that the largest butterfly in the world is the Queen Alexandra Birdwing and they knew all about caterpillar parts, how they feed, how they grow, how they defend themselves, etc etc. The kindergartners knew all about predators, chrysalids, and proboscis and sang a song about thorax, abdomen, and heads.

The biggest secrets of butterflies are those that concern their immature lives. The flying adult represents only one quarter of the life cycle of a butterfly. Seventy five per cent of a butterfly’s life is spent as egg, caterpillar, and chrysalis (or pupa). It is these stages that the children witness firsthand in their Painted Lady rearing experience. Witnessing the transformation of your own "pet" from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly, all within 20 days or so, is captivating for the average (or not so average) child. How much better is this than just reading about it in a book?!

The life histories of butterflies are fascinating. Every species is different and shows often unique strategies and adaptations to optimize development and survival. For a long time these life histories remained a secret; indeed, many are still shrouded in mystery or are totally unknown especially among tropical fauna. Unraveling butterfly life history secrets has been a passion of mine since I was a young boy in England and actually led me to a career in agricultural entomology. That thrill and passion for investigating the life histories of butterflies remains with me and recently culminated in OSU Press publishing a book I co-authored on the subject with David Nunnallee.

Life Histories of Cascadia Butterflies, which hit the shelves in November 2011, is a comprehensive treatment of the life histories of Pacific Northwest butterflies. Dave and I are proud to have created a unique book that focuses on illuminating the biology and ecology of the other 75 percent of a butterfly’s life. The laboratory and field work involved in such a book was enormous and we took the best part of a combined 20 years to complete it. The life history of every species (except one!) that occur in southern British Columbia, Washington, northern Oregon, and Idaho is covered in the book with high quality images of every stage (including all instars). We provide information on host plants, behavior, physiology, seasonality, development, defense, natural enemies and conservation. We reared every species, many of them multiple times, and obtained a large amount of new information. We uncovered many secrets of caterpillar lives. For instance we found that many caterpillars have a ventral "neck" gland that emits chemicals to repel predators and warns neighboring caterpillars of imminent threats from predators. However, with nearly all species we raised more questions than answers and since we were on a mission to complete the book, we did not have time to answer all the questions. Thus, for most species we include recommendations for further research. In many cases this research could be done by enthusiastic amateurs.

So the "secret" lives of Pacific Northwest butterflies are slightly less secret now but there are still opportunities for important discoveries to be made. We need to know as much as possible about every species. This information could be critical in ensuring we are well equipped to ward off threats to their future survival. There are already far fewer butterflies flying today than there were 50 years ago, mainly as a result of habitat loss. It's not too late to reverse this trend, but we need to learn more about the secret lives of butterflies.

David G. James is a professor at Washington State University in Prosser, Washington.

'Neck' gland of a caterpillar of a Callippe Fritillary butterfly. Recent research suggests this gland expels chemicals that repel predators like ants.

To learn more about the book:

Listen to the interview on OPB's Earthfix.

Read the news release at Washington State University.

Read the review at North Coast Diaries blog.