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There's a bench in Cully, Switzerland. It's in a little park tucked up against the shore of Lake Geneva. I go there a lot to just sit and think, or not think. I've been doing it for 13 years. I'm sitting on that bench now, writing these words.

First time I came here... Christ, it was a long time ago... spring, 2001. I was still a news cameraman for ITN (the Brit independent TV network) and had been working the Intifada for eight months straight. I'd already seen hundreds of people shot dead or blown apart.

I'd already been hit once and nearly killed twice. I'd been targeted by both Israeli and Palestinian snipers. One shot nearly tore off my leg; another shot almost took off my head. A centimeter either way, I'd be dead.

Then there was the night I was having dinner in Jerusalem and the street blew up (Palestinian suicide bomber). Then there was the night in Bethlehem when another street blew up (Israeli missile strike).

Then there was the night a suicide bomber walked into a bar. He had a bomb ...

Have you ever met a barista with a college degree? What about one with a master's degree? Spend time in Portland, or likely any other major city in North America, and this experience is not uncommon. Between those who are completely unemployed, those who are underemployed, and those who have just gone off the grid, there's no shortage of people who aren't working at the jobs for which they trained.

Last year in Portland, an opening for a receptionist position that paid $14 an hour with no benefits attracted more than 300 people who showed up for interviews, many of them college graduates. As you'd expect, the vast majority of these applicants were qualified or overqualified, but at the end of the process, only one could win the "prize" of moving off the unemployment lists to a menial job.

What's the real problem here?

It used to be that when we met someone with advanced education who wasn't working in their chosen field, we would think they ...

Whatever one thinks of Twitter, the Friday Reads hashtag is kind of a cool tradition. Take some of your favorite books by people you know, hashtag #fridayreads, and link directly to the book at your favorite local independent bookstore.

It looks something like this:

#fridayreads Loving #AVeryMinorProphet by @jamesbfrost. Tall bikes, zines, hipster love! Get it at @powells: http://bit.ly/JNfz8L

In honor of that tradition, here’s a list of some of my friends and their books. It's hard to write a book, so love and respect to all you.

(Oh and though he's not a personal friend, go to Powell's tonight and see Matt Love present his new book Sometimes a Great Movie: Paul Newman, Ken Kesey and the Filming of the Great Oregon Novel. Love a guy dedicated to preserving Oregon's history.

In no particular order:

• Greg Robillard — Captain Freedom
• Laurel Hermanson — Soft Landing
• Kerry Cohen — Seeing Ezra
• Gigi Rosenberg —

When you are a young writer, or an unproven writer, you receive a great deal of well-meaning advice from people who don't write and can't understand why you persist at it. Some of the advice is helpful — most of it, probably, is helpful: keep at it; don't give up, being the most common and broadly supportive. It costs the person nursing the sobbing, recently rejected writer very little in the way of insight or effort to urge them to "keep at it," and the effect is disproportionately useful.

If truth be told, when it comes to the crunch, a writer keeps at it and a non-writer gives up. There's not as much moral courage as we would like to think about the tenacity and immortal optimism of writers, just the compulsion to do it that, following a disappointment and after a period of mourning lasting anything from hours to years, will come to the fore. The writer will keep writing, and simply "keeping at it" will almost certainly improve both their work and their odds of success.

Before my first book, The Outcast, was ...

It's been entertaining watching and listening to reviewers talk about Being Flynn, the movie being made from Nick Flynn's novel, which bears the expletive-laden title Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. You can hear annoyance in the reporter's voices, the fact that they're adults that have to tiptoe around Nick Flynn's title, "Ha ha, we can't say the actual title on the air, but we'll call it "Another B. S. Night in Bleep City," snicker, snicker.

As a writer, though, it does beg some questions: Is that discomfort worth it? Could I lose readers? And, since I'm not a six-figure-book-deal-level writer, do I risk losing an editor's attention with a couple of needless swear words?

For a number of years, I shared a writing group with the author Chuck Palahniuk. Chuck had brought in pages from his then in-progress novel Pygmy and read one of his classic, gut-wrenching, morally deprived scenes. (If memory serves correctly, this one involved the main character drugging the entire family of the ...

I can't wait to see the Look again, the "Powell's Look," as I defined it a few years ago after taking my high school students from the Oregon Coast to the epic downtown Portland store. I swear some of them almost pass out when they walk in the main entrance.

But, that's not when the Look occurs. That happens after I tell them to get lost in the store and later come across them with a dazed countenance somewhat similar, I imagine, to Moses after the burning bush or anyone who saw Hendrix play the national anthem at Woodstock.

The Look means they will be a reader for life, a book reader, a paper book reader. The Look also means they understand in a tactile way the vast beauty of the literary universe. Sometimes the Look even means: I'm going to be a writer too.

I couldn't teach that in a million years in a classroom. Powell's City of Books can teach it in one hour.

This Friday night, May 25th, I'll see the Look again, because I'm bringing 35 of my students from Newport High School to accompany me ...

I love Dave Eggers. I hate Dave Eggers. If I could become any other living writer, I would answer faster than anyone else in the room, "Dave Eggers."

On the other hand, if I were to become Dave Eggers, I would immediately take Benzedrine, stop showering, write for seven days without cease, finish a novel, and then turn back into James Bernard Frost to edit it.

Let me try to explain this.

I first became familiar with Dave Eggers's work when I was living in San Francisco and enrolled at USF's MFA Program. I was taking an autobiography class, the first class that all students in this program take. The first thing my professor said to me after reading my work was, "You write just like Dave Eggers." The first thing I did after leaving class was to go to the bookstore and pick up a copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

I went home with the book, started reading it, and did not look up until I was done. It was the most startlingly energetic piece of writing I have ...

Writing is running away or — wait — writing is like running away. Okay, I'm too busy escaping through the door to be sure which.

The compulsion to run has always been with me, as natural as picking scabs and torturing little brothers. I still fight the impulse daily. Sit down at the desk. Do not move. DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR. Much as Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream plots to whisk Hermia to his Aunt's house on the outskirts of Athens, I too am on the permanent look out for a bolt-hole.

Know of any nice houses on a Greek island I can borrow?

I could try changing my name to Adrasteia which means "not inclined to run away," but it also has the mirror-meaning of "inescapable," and there is the paradox of writing: all stories are a form of running away, but getting there — to run with the story, to venture far into invented, fabricated territories — can only be done whilst sitting still. True, you might walk or cycle or swim as you imagine your ...

For everyone I know who is a writer, there was some awkward time in their lives when they had to learn to call themselves one. You'd make a few sales to the local newspaper... Did that make you a writer? Your friends who ran a small literary journal and published a story of yours... Did that make you a writer? You self-published a poetry chapbook... Were you a writer now? Even when bigger things happened — your first sale to a major magazine, a book deal with a small press — you still weren't comfortable with the words I'm a writer.

I had just turned 28 and sold my first book, a travel guide for vegetarians , but I'd tell people about the day job that I didn't care about instead — I placed banner advertisements on the web for a search engine company. And when I quit my job in order to finish the book, I'd tell people that I was unemployed, or even, with a chuckle, that I'd retired. But never that I was a writer. It sounded fake or pretentious to say it.

Once ...

I have learned a lot from reading historical romance novels. Unfortunately, one of the primary things that I have learned is incorrect. During the Napoleonic Wars, many Englishmen were spies, as many as a quarter to a third, apparently. Not only that, but a lot of them were seemingly very bad at it and got captured by the French. Not all of these fictional English spies were awful enough to be captured, but enough were to make me wonder how, if this was the quality of the opposition, Napoleon was ever defeated. Okay. Okay. It's true that the villainous French captors often let slip Very Important Information during their sessions questioning/torturing their British captives. And these captors almost inevitably met their deaths at the hands of their erstwhile captives. But that doesn't excuse the fact that they got caught in the first place.

I think the book that finally made me roll my eyes at the frequency of the capture of English spies was A Lady's Revenge by Tracey Devlyn. Not that the book itself is deserving of eye-rolling, just that it started right off with the rescue of a captured spy called ...