boomtowns

Cathy Park Hong reads from Engine Empire (2012) and Dance Dance Revolution (2007); she also reads an unpublished poem.

Bruce Dobler explains the relationship of his work to documentary fiction. He speaks of the necessity of journalistic fiction and the writer's task of capturing "the spirit and mood of a place and a time that would otherwise be inaccessible." Dobler reads from his novel, The Last Rush North (1976), exploring the construction of the Alaskan pipeline. Rather than picking a single chapter in the novel, Dobler reads an assortment of excerpts following one of the novel's many characters, a truck driver named Jill Jones. He closes with an excerpt following a character named Little Nasty, who gets into a fight with a much larger man.