Free Public Reading August 4: Dennis McBride, Elizabeth Archers, Charles Deemer, and Nina Lary August 4, 2010

First Wednesdays, a series of readings, performances and wine-tasting are held at Blackbird Wine Shop, 4323 NE Fremont, 7-9pm. This show is 21 and over. Contact Julie Mae Madsen at [email protected] or http://www.facebook.com/pages/First-Wednesday-Readings for more information.

The readers for August 4 are Dennis McBride, Elizabeth Archers, Charles Deemer, and Nina Lary

Charles Deemer is the editor of Oregon Literary Review and the artistic director of Small Screen Video. He teaches screenwriting at Portland State University. He's been widely published and produced. His book Seven Plays was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. He's a two-time winner of an Oregon Arts Commission fellowship, for drama and fiction. At the moment he's teaching himself how to program animation with Carnegie Mellon's Alice software, with the goal of writing an animated chamber opera called "Life Is A Nice Place To Visit."

Whether writing about drag kings, French graffiti artists, local currency movements, or creative uses for beet greens, Nina Lary’s stories explore culture through food, travel and art. Her work has appeared in The Oregonian, The Bear Deluxe, Curve, Italian America, The Portland Sentinel, and Tourist Town Guides: Jackson Hole. Most of all, she loves sampling questionable street food on foreign corners. And after returning from a solo bus voyage through Peru, Andina restaurant asked her to pen a monthly column on Peruvian food and culture, which she has been doing ever since in exchange for a monthly wine allowance. These days she covers bars, restaurants and lifestyle as the Portland editor for citysearch.com, but once the bills are paid she spends her time writing about juicy topics like lust, death and boundaries as a member of “Savor: A Portland Women’s Writing Collective,” who released their first anthology this summer. She is currently working on “Unaccompanied Minor,” a collection of stories about growing up in three worlds with very different sized bank accounts.

Elizabeth Archers writes, reads, walks and lives in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in online poetry journals such as Quill and Parchment, and in various local small presses, including Broken Word: The Alberta Street Anthology, Volumes 1 and 2, which she co-edited; Walking Bridges Using Poetry as a Compass, Urban Adventure Press, and in Cradle Songs: An Anthology on Motherhood, from Quill and Parchment Press, forthcoming. In 2008, she published a photographic anthology, Blown Out: Portland’s Indie Poets. A book of her collected poems, Creosote, is being published by Nightbomb Press, due early fall 2010.

Dennis is a Portland-based freelance loiterer and writer who barely graduated from Lincoln High School after completing his G.E.D. with marginal honors. He received an honorable discharge from the United States Air Force after four years of service despite being involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital in Texas for one month due to a misunderstanding. He later attended Wichita State University for two consecutive months. He spent most of his working life as an un-indicted co-conspirator in the medical-industrial complex. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC Radio-Los Angeles, and various periodicals including the Canadian magazine, Open Minds and the California magazine, Journal. He is the author of two books of poetry and satire, Looking for Peoria and Killing the Mockingbird (both from Quiet Lion Press). He was the recipient of the 1996 Andreas Berger Award for poetry