A debut novelist and throwaway kids

On Wednesday night, I was among three dozen people who squished and their squirmed their way into a North Portland coffeehouse to hear a local journalist, Nancy Rommelmann, read from her new book, "The Bad Mother."

It was a nice evening, on a number of levels.

First and foremost, I got to show my support for Nancy, a talented writer and passionate reporter who wrote a couple of pieces for Sunday Opinion while I was the editor of that section, including a widely-read and well-received piece on the city's 20-something crowd: "Is Portland the new Neverland?"

As of this writing, it's been shared 1,349 times on Facebook. Nancy and two sources in the piece participated in a webchat that I moderated, and the article drew several dozen comments on OregonLive.com and on Nancy's blog.

Nancy and her husband, Din Johnson, are hosting a couple of ongoing events for the literary set, the Ristretto Reading Series and the Loggernaut Reading Series, at their business, Ristretto Roasters on North Williams Avenue.

Second, I got to hear a little more about the book's back story. It's a short novel (just 144 pages) about Hollywood street kids that grew out of Nancy's experiences writing about the city's unglamorous side for LA Weekly and other publications before she moved up to Portland a few years ago. Gritty stuff with rough-edged characters, I'm sure.

Nancy Rommelmann

It took her 10 years, off and on, to do the book while she dealt with other writing assignments and projects (another book is in the works on the hideous case of the Portland mom who threw her son and daughter off a bridge into the Willamette River). She told the audience she just sat down one day and wrote the first chapter, the ending and the title and knew she had nailed it. Everything else in between would follow, along with a plan to get it published.

She and her sister-in-law, fellow author Hillary Johnson, teamed up to get it done through Dymaxicon, "a new kind of publishing company where authors, editors and designers could work in close collaboration on projects of their own choosing – much the way software developers collaborate on bootstrapping projects in their garages."

When I asked her afterward what she had learned about herself during the entire process, Nancy told me it was the realization that "I could do this!" -- conceive and write a novel and find a way to publish it, despite no formal training whatsoever in the world of book publishing. Next on the horizon: trips to LA and New York City to promote the book, plus another Portland book reading on April 21 at Powell's on Hawthorne.

Third, I got to reconnect with some familiar faces in the crowd: Martha Holmberg, founding editor of The Oregonian's MIX magazine and now editorial director for a communications company; Erin Ergenbright, a writer, writing teacher and founder of the aforementioned Loggernaut Reading Series; and Seth Walker, another writer with a background in corporate, university and media communications, who's involved with a group that's bringing the popular TED Talks series to Portland later this month.

Nice to be part of a community with shared interests and overlapping areas of involvement.

Fourth and finally, I learned that Ristretto Roasters and Barista, its sister location in the Pearl District, are participating in a Bake Sale for Japan this Saturday, part of a nationwide effort to raise money for Peace Winds Japan, a partner of Portland-based Mercy Corps. Hours are 10 to 2 p.m. April 2.

All in all, not a bad way to spend a couple hours on a midweek night in Portland.