Paula Friedman

Author and editor Paula Friedman lives and works in the Portland, Oregon, area. * Ursula K. Le Guin called Friedman's first novel, The Rescuer's Path, "exciting, physically vivid, and romantic"; Cheryl Strayed termed it "humane and wise--held me from the first page to the last." * Wesley Hogan, the author of Many Minds, One Heart, and director of Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, has called Friedman's second book, The Change Chronicles: A Novel of the Sixties Antiwar Movement, "A triumph--illuminates the transformations experienced by brave people at the center of movements," and Montreal Serai contributing editor Maya Khankhoje notes, "The Change Chronicles is told with the raw intensity, vivid detail, and creditability of someone who was there." * Published in spring 2022, Friedman's book Of Elegant Time: 22 Short Stories, has also received high praise. "These are stories told with elegance. . . the best of images and usage of language," says Hawaiian poet Frances Kukagawa, and "Deeply personal tales, exquisite tales," states Jeremy Lichtman, author of Alien Puzzle Boxes. "These sharp stories pierce one's heart," notes Helen Chuckrow, author of Interpreting the Bible with Chutzpah; and "Dancing close to autobiography, these well-written stories burn from the page," states Richard Bunning, author of Spider World and other fictions. Friedman's stories and poems have received 2 Pushcart nominations and have won honors and awards in the Oregon State Poetry Association, New Millennium Writing, Arch Street Press, Red/Green Press, and other competitions. Friedman has also held residencies and fellowships from Flight of the Mind, Centrum, and other writers workshops. For over 20 years, Friedman has edited books for university presses and individual authors and taught writing workshops in adult education programs in Berkeley, Paris, and Oregon. She is former director of the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience, founding and facilitating editor of the Open Cell international literary review, and first editor (2013-2014) of the Science Fiction Microstories anthologies. Scheduled for 2023, Extremis! Oral Histories of the Garbage Era is a utopian-dystopian science fiction meta/parody novel featuring a brash group of researchers and social-change activists (Native American healer Samantha, dedicated medical biologist Donati, gallant young Car and the alien Nar, as well as the elegant bandit Black Bey, and Tee-Tee, a Bad Girl) as they struggle to save remnant human life on the post-nuclear, post-pandemics, increasingly dessicated and baking Earth of the mid/late 21st century--a struggle dependent on "found object" writings left by . . . us, the humans of their recent past. Still in progress, The Memoir Book promises to shed new light on what it was like to grow up in the World War II and Cold War years, to discover oneself and politics as a '60s activist, to raise, as a "single mom," a child on the trembling arc of late-20th-century America, and to be old, thus expendable, during the COVID19/variants pandemic years of an overheating world. Look for The Rescuer's Path, The Change Chronicles, and Of Elegant Time on Amazon, other online stores, and the brave remaining bricks-and-mortar stores where books are sold.