Semi-Urban Cartography

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.

Try again. Fail again.

Fail better.”

– Samuel Beckett

Erick Mertz is a writer and filmmaker from Portland, Oregon, a distinction he’s been cultivating for the better part of three decades. It began with the scribbled spiral notebooks his father graciously brought home from work, continuing through the manifestations of precocious storytelling: poems, doggerel, short stories in the vein of King, and screenplays, both feature and short narrative. Time has further engrained the need to experiment, to keep struggling with things through completion and then to simply abandon those things without heart or quarter.

Time has taught him to have faith in the verb – in it above all things.

Current projects, while teeming, tend to be difficult to describe in any lucid fashion. The writer moves from storyline to storyline quickly, his process never linear, notebooks, tapes filled and then moving on. He’s working on a feature screenplay from long imagined treatment, “Promise Before The Sword” a taut thriller set in the divided, decaying American urban landscape (see updates of this dark, cathartic writing process in “Collected Writings”). On his desk as well, the novel, “Pale Doors Don’t Open” the semi-autobiographical tale of four friends and their trip cross country in search of, among other things, long since sacrificed identity. Like most autobiography though, it stalls at the hands of a changing, awake and aware subject.

Credits have been fewer than desired, certain magazines still proving to be elusive. He has a poem (“Self-Inflicted Famine”) coming out in the next issue of Deronda Review with recent works in 580 Split, The Binnacle, Stringtown, and Fireweed: Poetry Of Western Oregon. There have been others as well. “Apostles To The Scimitar” was featured in the re-vitalized version of the Chiron Review. In 2004 he produced the comic short film, “Too Many I’s”, followed by 2005’s “A Housebuilder’s Son”. The year 2009 will see the completion of “City Story”, a young woman’s dark and comic misadventure on her first day in the city. Feature length screenplays have been recognized as outstanding in contests such as the Nichol Fellowship (“The Fawn”) the Austin Film Festival (“The Fawn”) and The Writer’s Place (“The Fawn” and “At Cross Purposes”). He is a Kay Snow award winner in poetry through the Willamette Writers, as well as a designated Sterling Writer with the Multnomah County Library. In the fall of 2008 an essay on the semi-charmed history of baseball in Portland, Oregon appeared next to some of the finest local authors in the Citadel of the Spirit anthology offered by Nestucca Spit Press chronicling the state’s sesquicentennial.

As a day job Erick works as an Assistant Program Director for a DHS contractor, serving adults with Developmental Disabilities in the Portland metro area. In addition he is the acting Chairperson for an access committee, which advises the police department on issues pertinent to the disabled and mentally ill. He is newly married to the former Lisa Hendrick, a massage therapist from Atlanta, Georgia. Together they live in the Woodstock neighborhood with a dog and two cats in a 1910 Sears Kit home, tend a year round garden, bike when the skies clear and have an on-going cribbage game ever on hand.

As of October 2009, he does not “Tweet”. It feels more prudent, he believes, to wait for the next, next thing. To write it down longhand, after all, has been the process for thirty years.

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type faster.”

– Issac Asimov

Erick can be contacted at edesade@yahoo.com. He’d love to talk to someone.