23 Roads to Mythville
An apocalyptic journey across America and meditation on the imposition of order in space, both cyber and dirt real. By experiential author Douglas McDaniel, who explores the mysteries of American networked life. Read more






Ipswich at War
A few days after Sept. 11, 2001, poet and essayist Douglas McDaniel moved to Ipswich, on the North Shore of Massachusetts. A collection of poems from that period of fear and anxiety, as well as the polemic essay, "Media Arts and War."
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Glasnost Lost
As an act of defiance after the botched election of 2000, experiential author launched himself into a journey into the underworld of American life, or, what he calls: The Science of Descent. Read more







Godz, Cars & Cannon
Experiential author Douglas McDaniel launches drives into the networked thickets of American life, looking for signs of myth and romance in the age of automotive machines.
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Many Moons the Mythville: The Collected Road Poems
Poetry written during a 10-year span of criss-crossing America in a roving-eye view of the turn-of-the-century landscape of Mythville, or, as the author puts it: "It's all a bunch of Mythville." With work from four separate books by Arizona-based author and poet Douglas McDaniel, the bard-inspired voices of Milton, Blake and Yeats, as well as the saturnine streak of early beat poesy, ring through this collection of poems and essays. From the southwestern deserts to the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, "Many Moons to Mythville" is a foot-to-the-floor blast through the mythical roads of American life.
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Human Search Engine

The journey continues as the quest for myth in an age of information overload leads to online life as an editor for Access Internet Magazine. A story about all human search engines as they chase the ghost in the machine.
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William Blake in Cyberspace

Experiential author Douglas McDaniel takes on the visionary art and poetry of William Blake, comparing an otherworldly worldview to that revolutionary, romantic era to our own wild, wired, mythic world.
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The Kachina's Son

Poems about the Four Corners area written while author Douglas McDaniel was living in Telluride, Colorado.
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The Road to Mythville
A collection of poems on the new millennium in America, drawing from decade of bouncing across the country as a journalist and Kerouac-style poet, from the Southwestern deserts to the shores of New England and back again.
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Robert’s Book Shop is a really good place to get lost. Not lost so much, but consumed. Not so much devoured but a place to devour.
It has more books than most small town libraries, let alone Lincoln City’s. It isn’t orderly like a library is orderly or like a computer hard drive is orderly. It has been well organized after 15 years of working at it by Linda McAlister, but the book store at 3412 S.E. Highway 101 is more like a mystery writer’s brain, which is to say, always susceptible of discovery at each turn of the page, each turn around the corner.
In that way the book shop, as a kind of cavernous den of many rows of caves, is very much shaped like one of those classic nooks on the East Coast, in those old cities covered with vines, such as Boston or parts of New York. A place where you don’t find the book; the book finds you.
The place is owned by Robert Portwood, a.k.a, ‘The Book Baron” of Lincoln City, who also owns Bob’s Beach Books and the Book End, as well as more books than he can count in storage and at home.
“One-hundred thousand? A lot of it in storage,” he guesses. “How many? I have not a clue.”
After 19 years in the bookselling business, he’s a big collector of antiquarian books and odd collections of things. For example, he pulls out a book on Dewey Decimal classification from the 19th century.
“Look, right here, it’s signed by Mellville Dewey,” he said.
He’s somewhat at a loss to explain why he has so many books or so many walls covered with the artwork for book covers, many of them steamy romance novels, other than to say, “I just enjoy stuff.”
“So many books are just a pleasure to have,” he said. “So many times it’s not just to read, but for the pleasure of owning them.”
He collects books on Oregon and the history of the counties of the northwestern portion of the state, also books about ghosts, and technical books about machines of all kinds. He’s also a rabid collector of images, usually artwork for book covers. Or, at least, he was until he ran out of space. And the space he now has for those images in the book shop are categorized. For example, there’s a blondes- only corner.
“I ran out of places to hang them, and I ran out of storage, too.”
He explains his business philosophy as one reason why he has so many used or antiquarian books.
“If you try to pay a fair price, people will bring you the books,” he said, then paused, finding humor in the statement: “But it’s easier to buy books than to sell them.”
People might assume that a best-seller returned to the book store after being read is exactly what Portwood is looking for. It may be, but there’s also a strong current of novelty at work with what he’s looking for.
“You have to have books beyond the common stuff,” he said. “I enjoy looking for unusual books. They don’t have to be expensive (collectors’ items), just stuff that isn’t around.”
What has Portwood been reading lately?
“A lot of romances and Mickey Spillane” he said. He just finished reading another book, which he’s recommending to a lot of people now.
“It’s called ‘Lovely Bones,’” he said. “For a book about a dead girl, it’s relatively pleasant reading.”

As a self-described author, photographer and lyricist, Ashland-based Eric Alan has used language and imagery for his latest book, “Wild Grace: Nature as a Spiritual Path.”
The author, who will be at Driftwood Library in Lincoln City at 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 29, said the book was influenced by various elements of his life: hiking in the woods near his home in Ashland, recovering from a bout with cancer when he was 32 years old (he’s 46 now), and more than anything else, what his eye as a photographer told him about nature.
“Through photography I understood that nature was really my spiritual path and cathedral,” he said.
Another major influence for the book was the Buddhist monk and best-selling author Tich Nhat Hanh, whose literary studies of “mindfulness” and “being present in the world and living in a compassionate way” are also woven into Alan’s own thinking.
Alan, who is the music director for the public radio station based in Ashland, said he’s become fascinated by the way interest in the book has spread.
“It has found a pathway through the world,” he said.
For example, readership in the Midwest led to his invitation to write a column for a magazine called “Whisper in the Woods,” which is based in Michigan. It has also led to his giving workshops on the subject of nature as a spiritual path at the Jefferson Center for Religion and Philosophy.
“I did not imagine it in terms of couples, what (the book) would mean for them,” he said. “Lots of people say they use it as a tool for their relationships.”

On the official Web site for Ursula K. Le Guin, there’s a photo of the author on a mountaintop in Oregon, staring down into what appears to be a bush of some kind. Based on recent statements she has made about her creative process, one could easily imagine her mind trying to set the flowers on fire, and from that burning bush, a story gets born.
Recently, Le Guin said her stories often come from her interest in “peculiar arrangements” of race, gender and sexuality, and using the fantasy / science fiction genre not so much as an opportunity to escape into outer space, but as “the form as a wonderful box of fixed metaphors you can play with endlesslessly, like a musician with a sonata.”
So the author then has been a successful practictioner, a Taoist sorceress powered by the Theory of Relativity. In “The Left Hand of Darkness” she invents an androgynous world where a king can get pregnant. She spins the narrative wheel, and comes up with a society that has never known war. In her first book of the “Earthsea” cycle, “A Wizard of Earthsea,” first published in 1968, Le Guin predates Harry Potter by inventing a school for wizards. Ged, the greatest sorcerer of the land, is looking for the school, and in the center of this city of the mind, he asks a woman with a basket of mussels about the whereabouts of the school. She replies: “You cannot always find the Warder where he is, but you find him where he is not.”
Perhaps tuition to Le Guin’s school for literary wizards can be found in that paradox. As she has said recently, “change” is the “key word.” “You’re opening the door to imagination, and the possibility of things being other than they are.” After all, what would the “Venus de Milo” be without the missing arms? Less memorable, surely less evocative and enduring. Playing with the pieces of gender and sexuality, or simply looking at the mutability of all things, saying if “above” is so, below must also be “thus,” you end up with a practical tool that has certainly made an impression on such Le Guin adepts as Margaret Atwood (“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Oryx and Crake”), whose imaginative forms are laced with such “peculiar arrangements.”
“It’s a tremendous playground,” Le Guin said. “It doesn’t do any harm to have people’s ideas shook up. I do my thinking narratively.”
Now 76, the Portland-based author is living within a cultural landscape of pop fantasy she helped to create. Yes, if there were four Beatles, there were three fantasy writers who discovered the map for R.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Le Guin. It’s only a matter of time before the river dredge of Hollywood storylines matches the right Le Guin tale with the right movie director to put it all up on the big screen.
Just as Disneyland began with the drawing of a mouse, Le Guin’s worlds are more discovered than invented.
As she said: “I stare and see something, maybe a person in a landscape, and have to find out what it is.”

Glasnost Lost by Douglas McDaniel (Book) in Books > Fiction & Literature

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Ipswich at War
By Douglas McDaniel

A few days after Sept. 11, 2001, poet and essayist Douglas McDaniel moved to Ipswich, on the North Shore of Massachusetts. A collection of poems from that period of fear and anxiety, as well as the polemic essay, "Media Arts and War."

Click Here

The Road to Mythville
By Douglas McDaniel

A collection of poems on the new millenium in America, drawing from decade of bouncing across the country as a journalist and Kerouac-style poet, from the Southwestern deserts to the shores of New England and back again.

Click Here