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I am one small part of the best writing workshop ever to exist in the entire time-space continuum.

What's that — you question my assertion? You're already doubting the memoir I haven't yet written? Go ahead, parse the definition of "workshop." Hold up the Bloomsbury group, the Algonquin Round Table, a history of Native American story tradition, the "tribe scribe," Greek orators and students, the apprenticeship of Chinese storytellers.

Fie.

Truth is subjective. I offer, in all hyperbole and no qualifications: ours. Try to change my mind.

Sometimes writers, getting started, ask if I think they would do well to join a workshop. They ask if I like workshop. Sometimes they ask if they can join mine. I appreciate the urge, and understand entirely. But it's like asking if I like marriage in general, if they should get married, and then if they might join our long-standing union of nine, walk in, and be intimate.

A good workshop is intimate, even when it seems like it's not.

Once a week, every week, we get together in whatever space we have — basements, living rooms, most recently the back room ...

People ask how long it takes to write a novel. It's a hard question to answer. There's the writing process itself, but also the life history, time spent collecting material whether you know you're doing it or not.

When I was 17, I saw a flyer tacked up in a school hallway offering an internship at the Oregon Zoo. I applied and got it.

Then I had this lovely, unpaid gig watching animals. I was sort of an animal babysitter, minus the frozen pizza and any actual power to set a bedtime. For hours, usually in a light rain, I'd stand near an enclosure at the zoo and watch a herd of three elephant cows and their three babies. I had a clipboard, a checklist, and a timer. I'd read long textbooks on animal behavior. Once in a while I'd take a test on theory and terminology. Mostly, my job meant being alone, sometimes in a crowd, with time to think.

Every 45 seconds, when the timer went off, I'd record behavior: Play behavior. Motoring. Grooming. Nursing.

This habit of observation became a way of looking at ...

Find a notebook small enough to slide into your shirt pocket, or your back pocket, the pocket on your jeans; small enough to lose in the depths of your purse or slip in a tiny purse next to your ID and credit card when you go out dancing. It works best if it can be there, with you, when you don't know it's there.

This notebook might cost 79 cents out of a bin. You could lift it from a hotel lobby or bedside, where housekeeping arranged it near the phone. Maybe on a flush day you'll spend $4.95 or even $8 at the art museum so your notebook can sport a yellow-toned reproduction of van Gogh with his bandaged ear or one of Toulouse-Lautrec's dancers kicking up a heel.

It's all the same. That's the cover.

What matters is that it has paper inside, and you've already scored a pen. Feel the cover between your index finger and your thumb. Open your notebook. Uncap your pen.

My father grew up on Portland's Eastside, in a part of town some call Felony Flats. His mother, my grandmother, said there was ...

There's an art to making a scrambled egg sandwich. Even more, there's an art to enjoying an egg sandwich, and if you can manage that, you can own the world. Count yourself lucky.

I'll tell you how.

Pour a golden drop of virgin olive oil in a clean pan. That's the most expensive ingredient. A little goes a long way.

Half the town? They're out chasing moneyed thrills. They're standing in long lines, blowing good cash, ordering high-end drinks, paying as much for a glass as they would for a bottle while they wait for a table smaller than any table they'd allow in their own place. They're spending their lifetime earning money, pouring it out.

But you.

Stay home, money in your pocket. If you buy anything, buy a pencil. Buy a book. Underline sentences that lift your heart, make your guts sing. Maybe there's one that pushes tears to your eyes for no reason you can remember.

But you want to speak back to it.

Make a scrambled egg sandwich and get your writing done. That's the big deal: write your book. Time and money go ...

I'm in the midst of the longest stretch of not traveling I've had in maybe 10 years. My last real trip was almost two years ago, to Sweden, ostensibly for guidebook research but also to complete a certain family-related mission. Or you could just call it a road trip. My mom, who was born and raised in Uppsala, Sweden, had been coming back several times a year to visit her parents, an increasingly demanding job. She hadn't had a chance to really travel in Sweden in a long time. So she and I decided to combine one of my guidebook research trips with a long-delayed quest. We met at Stockholm's Arlanda Airport, rented a tiny car, and headed off into the heart of the country. Our goal: to find her father's old cabin.

We knew only vaguely where to look: near Arådalen, a scattering of summer cottages in the wilderness that barely qualifies as a village, in the wild, sparsely populated province of Jämtland. My grandfather, an artist and journalist, had recently died; he'd given the cabin to friends we didn't know, decades earlier. We had no detailed ...

Several of the stories and facts I learned while researching Walking Portland made me wonder if there have been any great historical novels set here. I can't think of any, but if there isn't one about Dr. James C. Hawthorne, namesake of Hawthorne Boulevard, that would be a good place to start. Born in Pennsylvania, Hawthorne (1819–1881) spent several years working in medicine in California, where he also served in the state senate. He arrived in Portland in 1857 to run a hospital for the mentally ill; in 1862 he took over running the Oregon Hospital for the Insane, as it was called at the time (it occupied 200 acres near lower Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard). Hawthorne was married twice: his first wife died a few weeks after they were married — automatically good material for a historical romance — and then in 1865 he married another woman, and they had three daughters, one of whom died in infancy. As for the details in between — who knows? But I for one am curious.

So about this book. Originally I'd signed on to coauthor Walking Portland with my pal Ryan Ver Berkmoes, who wrote Walking Chicago for Wilderness Press. He'd moved to Portland a few years back and we thought it would be fun to team up on a project. I've known Ryan — and our friend Tom Downs, who wrote Walking San Francisco — since my first Lonely Planet author workshop, around 10 years ago (is it possible?). The way I (fog-headedly) remember it, after the workshop one night Ryan (who worked in-house for LP at the time) led us all on a boozy meander across San Francisco. We went to all the places you would go: Vesuvio, Tosca, the (old) Gold Dust, Specs', undoubtedly others. Attrition was high, but everyone who stayed out until 3 a.m. trying to find the very last open bar in the city ended up getting work on the next USA guide. Coincidence? Maybe. Poetic license, more likely. I won't swear that's exactly how it happened, but it's close enough. A career built on pints.

Anyway, it turned out that Ryan's travel schedule ...

The first thing you discover when you write a guidebook is this: You are wrong about everything.

I've spent the past several years updating travel guides. It quickly becomes apparent that whoever wrote the previous edition of the book you're working on was an idiot, even (especially) if that person was you.

This is partly because of the inconvenient fact that books take a long time to publish, and places change quickly. A guidebook's shelf life may be three or four years, so anything wrong stays wrong for a while. People will write in to let me know the ferry tickets cost two dollars more than the book says, or that there is no crayfish risotto on the menu, and the Rauschenberg goat sculpture is not in the middle of the room or even in that museum at all. This is of course very helpful.

Then there's the other kind of wrong, when the author's perception of a place simply doesn't match the reader's. One person's adorable B&B is another's floral nightmare. Where you see an edgy, no-frills dive bar, somebody else sees the bathroom in Trainspotting. (It ...

I've always liked walking. It's easy. You can get pretty good at it even if, like me, you're desperately uncoordinated. You don't have to study for years to achieve mastery; basically, by grade school most of us have it nailed.

At least, that's true about the kind of walking you do when you're working on a book like Walking Portland. But not all walks are created equal. My first serious walk, also for a guidebook, was back in 2006. An indulgent editor at Lonely Planet let me cover a few of the long-distance trails in LP's guide to Walking Britain. One of these was the 135-mile Glyndŵr's Way, which makes a loop through the middle of Wales.

(Years later when I was telling someone about this trip, she thought I said I'd walked across whales — a much more exciting idea.)

Glyndŵr's Way is named after Owain Glyndŵr (1359–1416ish), a Welsh rebel who fought the English at various points along the trail. His revolt was ultimately squashed, but he was never captured and is probably still lost somewhere between waymark posts. I'm pretty sure he's not ...

Here are THREE books I'm looking forward to:

1) September: Poems by Rachel Jamison Webster, TriQuarterly Books. I published some of Rachel's poems in the online magazine I edit, M Review, and her work is beautiful, weird, OPEN. It does not shy away from despair, from joy, from human mystery, from the expressions of deep grief, of childlike wonder. Look at some of her poems from the recent issue of Poetry magazine, and click here to listen to a recording of three poems from her forthcoming book.

2) Trances of the Blast by Mary Ruefle, Wave Books. Enough said.

3) Zibaldone by Giacomo Leopardi (translated by Michael Caesar and Franco D'Intino), Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This is like a gazillion-page prose journal by the Romantic Italian poet Leopardi, one that Italo Calvino quotes from generously in his eloquent, elliptical book of lectures on writing, Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

Today I find Plastic Indigenous Man by Sarah Arvio's new book of poems, Night Thoughts: 70 Dream Poems and Notes from an Analysis. ...