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 The
Portland Bridge Book
(Revised
and Expanded)
3rd Edition now available.
Order
information!
Press
Release! |
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Walking
Portland's Bridges Using Poetry as a Compass
New!
Now available!
 The
Regional Arts and Culture Council awarded 38 Artistic Focus grants
in January 2007, including one to Sharon/Urban Adventure Press for
help in publishing Walking Bridges Using Poetry as a Compass:
Poems about Bridges Real and Imagined by 70 Poets, with Directions
for Five Self-Guided Explorations.
The guide book, with step-by-step directions for
bridge walking, features poems about bridges, both concrete and
metaphorica, by more than seventy-five poets. It was published December
2007. Several of the poets featured in the book gave readings of
their poems at publication events held in the Portland area.
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Bridge
Stories—A Storytelling Slide Show
A Curriculum for Schools
 BridgeStories:
A Storytelling Slide Show" - Named "Crossover
Artist of the Year" in Willamette Week's 2006 "Best of
Portland" edition, Sharon presents rare and unusual images
in a 55 minute collection of music, short video clips, and stories.
See all measure of bridges: the singing,
grasshopper, lighted, and London, as well as the longest tied-arch
in the Western world, the country's oldest operating vertical lift,
and the only double lift bridge of its kind in engineering history--the
latter three found in Portland, Oregon. This multi-media presentation
was a favorite in the Oregon Chautauquas of 1999-2002.
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 Bridge
In A Box—
Instructions & Patterns for Making Models of Portland's Truss
Spans
(For Schools)
This step-by-step guide
is designed for elementary and middle school students and teachers.
Choose patterns of Portland’s Steel, Broadway, Burnside, Morrison,
Hawthorne, Marquam, Ross Island, and Sellwood bridges to make wooden
models of bridges rigid enough to withstanding load testing. One
third grader’s bridge supported more than 60 pounds! Using
low-temperature glue guns and wooden craft sticks, create a variety
of Warren and Pratt trusses.
50-page guide comes in the kit Bridge In A Box, with individual
pattern sheets, starter supplies (100 glue sticks, a low temperature
glue gun, trimmers), and “Truss Bridge Span Patterns,”
a 3’x4’ poster that collects all the truss designs in
a large format suitable for framing. |
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Portland
Bridge Walks
 Sharon
has a permit that allows her to take groups into the tower and pit
of the Morrison Bridge—one of the largest mechanical structures
in Oregon. (See: Morrison Bridge
Virtual Tour)
Most groups meet
at the corner of NW Second and Everett, then walk about one
mile to see eight of Portland’s Willamette River bridges,
among them the oldest operating vertical lift bridge in the United
States, the longest tied-arch bridge in the world, and the only
double decker lift bridge of its kind. We usually walk across three
bridges, but the route depends on weather. Includes an exercise
on a tied steel arch to test for synchronous vertical excitation,
and another test where we build triangles with our bodies to feel
tension and compression. Hours: Most tours last four hours, but
hours are flexible. For all ages and group sizes (guide carries
a hand-held microphone). |
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 China
Gate Postcard
Portland China Gate Postcard © Image by Sharon
Wood Wortman used by permission of the Portland, Oregon Chinese
Consolidated Benevolent Association.
This “archival” postcard was created
in the spring of 2005, during the blossoming of Northwest Fourth
Street’s over-the-hill cherry trees just before they were
cut to make way for this National Register district’s (officially
named Portland New Chinatown/Japantown Historic District) new festival
sidewalks.
There are other major gates in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington,
D.C., Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Vancouver, British Columbia,
but Portland’s five-bay gate is among the largest. It commemorates
160 years of Chinese history in Oregon and features 58 mythical
characters and 78 dragons. The characters on the north side read
Four Seas, One Family and on the south Portland Chinatown.
The lion on the left (west) is a female with her paw on a cub. She
signifies the female energy Yin. The lion on the right (east) is
a male with his paw on the globe and signifies the male energy Yang.
In Chinese philosophy and religion, the interactions of these principles
influence the destinies of people and things. There have been such
gates in China for 2,000 years. Portland’s China Gate, assembled
by artisans from Taiwan, was dedicated in 1986.
Available in Chinatown at the Portland
Chinese Classical Garden (239 NW Everett), Dragon
Art (301 NW Third), and Chinatown
Convenience Store (213 NW Third), and in Pioneer
Courthouse Square at the Portland
Oregon Visitors Association (701 SW Sixth Ave.)
For informaton about exploring Portland's Chinatown
on a walking tour please visit the Portland
Oregon Visitor's Associaton website. |
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Oh,
Gravity! — Poems About Bridges in Three Sections
  Oh,
Gravity! gathers poems and artwork by 29 third, fourth, fifth,
and sixth graderss from Portland and Lincoln City about bridges
as seen and imagined. A great book to introduce the poetic concepts
of metaphor and simile.
Oh, Gravity! begins with a poem by Lawson
Fusao Inada—named Oregon's Poet Laureate in 2006. Eight students
from the 2003-2004 third grade class at Metropolitan Learning Center
Public School in Portland created the bridge art (used by permission
of the artists).
Available for purchase at Looking Glass Bookstore,
318 SW Taylor Street, Portland. $5. Also available online. $8, includes
postage and handling. |
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 First
Voice
Poems & Field Notes
by Sharon Wood Wortman
Published January 2006
Different from the book about Portland's big river
spans, First Voice—Poems & Field Notes is a
collection of Sharon Wood Wortman's imaginative writings, though
based, too, on fact and written from a local perspective—mountain
climbers tote pistols into Old Town, rain makes death steel-slick,
a street kid learns to swear off old language, and bridges open
like oysters. This is not to say the fifty-page, handsewn chapbook
doesn't travel. Ann Blaisdell Tracy, novelist and English professor
at State University of New York writes:
In Sharon Wood Wortman's poetry we have a sense
of life entire, from early pain to late passion…it's all
there. But in the crucible of her wit it has taken on order and
meaning, it has become art. Her work is the perfect demonstration
of why we need poetry: Poets build our bridges.
Available at Jackson's
Books (Salem), Looking
Glass Bookstore (Portland) and St.
Johns Booksellers (Portland).
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 The
Other Side of the Bridge—A Memoir in Poems & Essays
My mother read
that the very rich had, what, seven soup spoons
just for salad? More estates than they could burn and time to
live in, like money—
Money wasn't a problem, she said, that July the
three of us picked berries for hamburger and my mother prodded
her prickly daughters
through rows of yearning, where we ate lunch with
all the fingers we could count on wearing elbow-length gloves
of elegant purple.
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