From the thriving literary community of Portland, Oregon, VoiceCatcher presents new prose and poetry by award-winning and emerging women writers. This eclectic collection offers stories of bubbles and bicycles, hairdos and peanut butter, gratitude and loss, growing up and growing old, finding love and finding work, memories, dreams and other adventures in between. VoiceCatcher grew out of a community of women writers and is an offering to the wider community of readers. We are a non-profit entity – revenue from the sale of VoiceCatcher support its publication and funds scholarships for Write Around Portland writers.
Excerpt from Ravyn’s VoiceCatcher contribution, Love is a Verb:
...My best friend, Melina, was frozen on the couch in the middle of the basement, repeating in a slurred voice “I can’t believe I’m friends with you people.” She remained there, statuesque and unaffected while Angus and the skin head bellowed at each other and the gun became a pendulum pointing in every direction. We beckoned with furious hand signals for her to duck and crawl over to us but she stared straight ahead. I wondered how surreal the gun was to Melina, who did not live in our neighborhood. Her parents owned a six-bedroom house in the Highlands and I often thought her life was all about bluegrass, horse races and mint juleps. Her family sat down to dinner together every night and went to Hilton Head every summer. As far as I knew, she had never seen anything like this before except in the movies. In that moment, the gun was the most authentic thing in the room. It was the only pertinent element in my world, a twisted tool of divination. If that gun spoke, would I ever write? Would I get the hell out of this town? Would it always be like this? I gripped Carl and waited unobtrusively to see if the steel fortune teller would articulate anyone’s fate…
