Oral storytelling is among the oldest arts, so it’s appropriate that the release in Yamhill County of this year’s Paper Gardens anthology of locally written prose and poetry gives authors the opportunity to read their work aloud to an audience.

The 32nd annual publication was released earlier this month at the Chehalem Cultural Center in Newberg before a crowd of more than 200 friends, family, and other supporters of literary arts. It is published by the Arts Alliance of Yamhill County, carrying on a tradition that was started more than three decades ago by Rachael Burchard, who died in 2004. Her poem Nemesis includes the line that gave the event its name:

So, scorn my fanciful rambling
I’ll map trails to Celestia
Mock my dreams
I’ll mold bricks of vision.
Pity my loneliness
Quick tears will fill singing brooks.
Burn my Paper Garden
Cool camelias will rise from the flames
And lyrics bloom like suns
To light us to the gates.

More than 400 people of all ages submitted work this year in the categories of traditional poetry, free verse, poetry of place, and prose — both fiction and nonfiction. Seventy-three pieces by 47 writers were selected for publication. Given numbers like that and the size of the crowd, Paper Gardens is arguably Yamhill County’s largest literary event.

“We work especially hard from January until this day to make this happen” said Deb Broocks, one of the festival’s organizers, at the top of the May 6 event. “But this is our reward, a roomful of writers and people who support them. It is such a great joy for us.”

“In this age, we’re immersed in social media, AI-generated information and unlimited Internet news feeds,” she continued. “It’s not often that we hear a personal human voice, one voice, standing on a stage and sharing an authentic part of themselves with an audience. That’s what we’re here tonight for, and I just don’t think it happens all that often.”

Indeed, one of the poems in the 139-page collection touches on the saturation of cultural life with technology. Free, a 10-line free verse poem by Leona Stetser, a student at Memorial Elementary School in McMinnville, brings robotics into the picture:

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I pity the robot
That mindless machine.
All the gears and cranks
And batteries and things.
If I were a robot
I’d want to be free!
Free to do whatever I please.
Yes,
I pity the robot
That mindless machine.

Another poem that pulls the reader out of life’s endless parade of distraction and seeks something more numinous begins by quoting the late Oregon author Ursula K. Le Guin, from a memorable speech she gave in 2014: “I think hard times are coming.… We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries — the realists of a larger reality.”

In the adult category, Jenny Pessereau’s poem is titled The Larger Reality:

To change the narrative,
you must remember dreaming —
the nonsense of cars racing backwards,
of cakes, big as tires,
of meetings with loved ones you didn’t know you knew —
and not cling to the details,
even if the car speeds toward water,
the cakes are devoured,
and you beam light straight from your heart.
For there is no linear arc.
No A story or B story.
No main character,
nor nemesis, even.
There is only you,
floating in the soup of the universe,
trying to wake yourself up.

As I note each year, Paper Gardens offers a unique and very personal glimpse into what’s on area writers’ minds, particularly youth. This year was no different. Several poems addressed well-known national tragedies, some of which occurred before the writers were born or, we can assume, were not old enough to have something like the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing fall into their field of vision. Student John Paul Burke of Willamette Elementary looks at that event from a canine perspective in his story, The Boston Bombing: A Dog’s Story. Mercifully, both the dog and its person survive.

That is not the case of the child narrator who describes the 9/11 attacks from the perspective of a child in one of the towers. Addison Taylor, an Amity Middle School student, begins When the Dust Settles by setting the stage with school being canceled, enabling the narrator to tag along with her father for work, and ends in a realm beyond death, a place that was “not Earth.”

You may be braced for another 9/11 story when you start reading, in the adult category, Ann Russell’s What 911 Means to Me, until you realize that it’s not a date; it’s the address — 911 Iliff Street — of the two-bedroom, one-bath house where she grew up in Pacific Palisades. “My childhood house, yard, and blocks and blocks of houses surrounding 911 Iliff are now ashes,” she writes. “I didn’t realize how vivid the memories were until all the structures were gone. That was my 911.”

Happier themes, though, come through in other stories and poems. I particularly enjoyed Linda Budan’s free-verse piece, Manifesto for Finding Your Joy at Age 80, as there’s sound advice here, really, for any age: “Keep you books ready at hand … go outside, move the body….” and:

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Memorize the poems that speak to your needs.
These become your comfort.
These become your own book of common prayer.

As satisfying as it is to hear writers read their own work, another highlight is the opportunity to see the judges enjoying it, finally putting names and faces with the pieces they read months ago. Paper Gardens entries are judged blind, so the author enlisted to read the work knows only if the author is in the youth category or an adult.

This year’s judges were poet Carolyn Martin, who judged all the poetry entries, and Kari Luna, doing prose duties. Martin is a retired English professor and management trainer who turned from writing academic papers and business books to poetry. She has several collections published, including The Way a Woman Knows, Finding Compass, and Thin Places.

Luna is the author of The Theory of Everything, a winner of the Oregon Book Award for Young Adult Literature and an Indies Next New Voices pick.

Martin said she was initially hesitant to come aboard because “to judge the quality of someone else’s hard work is hard work, and it’s difficult.” But she didn’t regret the decision.

“I was gobsmacked by the creativity and imagination of all the submissions,” she said afterward. “And I was gratified by how well orchestrated, how incredibly well organized the evening was. It was probably one of the smoothest, most delightful experiences in my poetry career.”

Luna called the entries “an embarrassment of riches, I’d have to say. There was great work in every category from every age group and I was just thrilled.” Addressing the audience before writers took to the stage, she continued:

“It’s one thing to sit down and write, it’s one thing to have an idea, it’s a second thing to sit down and write it and make it happen, and it’s a third thing to enter a contest, which is hard, and then to show up and read it to a group,” she said. “So, I just think it’s a wonderful celebration of what we’re doing here tonight. It’s an act of hope, it’s an act of joy. We could really use a lot more of that.”

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