Nighttime is the prime time in local editor’s new anthology

By Joseph Gallivan

The Portland Tribune, Feb 4, 2005, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Kevin Sampsell is Portland’s literary utility player. His Future Tense Books has published 30 chapbooks (small books that look like fanzines). He discovered Gresham schoolgirl Zoe Fisher, now at Oberlin College. (She wrote “Please Don’t Kill The Freshman” under the name Zoe Trope when she was in high school.) And you’ve probably already seen him introducing writers at Powell’s Books, where he oversees author events.

Now Sampsell has edited “The Insomniac Reader” (Manic D. Press), a collection of stories about nighttime.

Slim volumes of themed shorts often provide writers you’ve never heard of a point of entry into bookstores. But Sampsell managed to land a few better-known names. The book opens with Jonathan Ames recounting his night after the 2002 Lennox Lewis-Mike Tyson boxing match. Rick Moody’s characters get soulful on the Cyclone at Coney Island.

If editing has gotten quicker since the advent of e-mail, wrangling writers has, too. The pull of 1005 W. Burnside St. helped.

“I knew some of these people from Powell’s. Jonathan Ames I’m a big fan of. I’d seen him at readings and hung out with him afterwards and we’ve e-mailed so that we’re almost like friends now,” Sampsell says.

He calls Ames the most hilarious author he’s ever been around, and says working with Moody was exciting. “It was an interesting experience to work with these big, award-winning writers, and have to e-mail Rick Moody and say, ‘This sentence is kinda sloppy. Could you change it?’ ”

No anthology would be complete without a Jonathan Lethem story. “One of these other people contacted him for me, and he sent me ‘Call Waiting.’ Some of the people are fairly easy to get hold of,” Sampsell says.

He cites Davy Rothbart, the Found magazine guy, who writes a nice memoir of living with his granny in Florida for three months. Then there’s a two-page slip of a thing under the name Lucy Thomas. “It’s a female alias for Dave Eggers. He writes these weird, short, experimental kind of stories that get published in little magazines.”

Former Portlander Thorn Kief Hillsbery (he wrote the book “War Boy”) was easy, as was the only other Portlander, Monica Drake, whose story “Gymkhana” is typical of the genre. Uppers seem to be a common theme in the book (coke, meth), along with sex, and minor, mood-socking, blue-state alienation.

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