Recently Joanne Seiff, author of Fiber Gathering, wrote on our blog about the joys of fiber festivals.

March 9, 2009:
Fiber Gathering

"What's your book about?"

"Fiber festivals." (I have 30 seconds to make my pitch sound interesting to this individual during our random encounter.) "There are festivals all over the country," I explain, "for knitters, spinners, weavers, shepherds, alpaca farmers, dog handlers..." The person's eyes may glaze over...

"Some of the festivals have up to 50,000 people a day attending," I say quickly. I hope the person doesn't walk away in midsentence. That can be embarrassing.

Yup, Fiber Gathering (that book I wrote, and which incidentally has nothing to do with oat bran) is only cool to the approximately one in three women in North America — that's approximately 53 million people — who know how to knit or crochet. So, OK, I might not be writing for that guy whose eyes just glazed over. I'm writing this for his mother, sisters, wife, daughters, co-workers... and for his male relatives and friends, too. At least one of them probably knits.

Read the rest of Seiff's post on our blog. Plus, check out our daily Book News and Read It Before They Screen It features, Matt Love's On Oregon, Kirsten Berg's Rare Book posts, and more!

Early morning, upon leaving the store, Bear split off on his own.

Everywhere he tripped over memories. First, Fup during that long heat wave, perched every evening in the tree overlooking 8th Avenue, by the building since torn down and replaced. Bear followed a quick loop south past the old Church of Elvis — also gone. Had anything survived? He'd forgotten about William Wegman's water bowl, the canine Benson bubbler, where Fup liked to linger, sometimes just pretending to drink, making dogs on their leashes wait.

Outside the Orange Room, Bear says to himself, to Fup, "Sometimes, I imagine you're on the streetcar when it's coming toward the stop. The doors open and you walk out. All nonchalant."

It's been a while since I've done that, Bear realizes.

His first week in Portland, Fup walked him here, to the corner of Couch and Northwest 11th. Before Powell's added the big entrance on this side. Huddling against the building's brick shell, in the roar of giant trucks hauling hundreds of barrels of beer. They held their breath from the stink of exhaust. They spied for rats.

Now condos rise on all three corners adjacent. It's not better, nor worse, but so different that he has to make himself remember how it was before. Through a crosswalk, under a fence, and then up a familiar metal staircase, three flights take him to the landing where Fup once broke out in song; she tried to convince him it was some kind of old-school bat lure.

If he squints through the iron gate, those might be cats 40 feet below, not people.