Lobby Power

I haven't blogged since the election, since I've taken a graduate-level creative non-fiction writing class, read many books: Nocturno de Chile (Bolano), A Woman in Berlin (Anonymous), My Traitor's Heart (Rian Malan), Fun Home (Alison Bechdel), 2666 ((Bolano) again)), High Sorcery (Andre Norton), Lands of Memory (Felisberto), The Age of Reason ((Sartre) again), among other less memorable things - most of a Bukowski novel, a graphic novel about an alcoholic, lots of short stories and even some occasional poems - though I'm sure there's a lot I don't recall. I won't pretend I can comment on all those momentums in this post.

I did notice (looking back to my most recent post) that when I was last blogging I was fairly recently back from a trip with my father down to Colombia, and also that the moments immediately preceding this post have been taken up by my haphazard and heartfelt/rended preparations for another trip down to my father's home country - to a region where neither of us has been - this time, for the first time, on my own. I've accepted a trial post with a school called selvalegre (http://www.selvalegre.edu.co/eng/Index.html), in the Amazonas department, in the southern most tip of the country, on the border with Peru and Brazil. The school is part of a non-profit organization called Fundacion Entropika (http://www.entropika.org/index.html). I'm really exited about this opportunity!

I'm shopping for a quality bargain digital camera with which to document my move from the eco-hipster urban Portland to the rural ecosystem of the Amazon. Traveling always gets me moving in a writing kind of way, so I'm sure I'll have new posts soon, hopefully accompanied by new photos.