Califoregonian

by Austin Beaton

⅓ memoir, ⅓ essay collection, ⅓ letters written to strangers, ex-lovers, and acquaintances, Califoregonian is a walking through what it might mean to leave your home and leave your body. On the other side of driving from Oregon in his used Honda Civic 850 miles south to a town and new home in California, Beaton recounts: meeting SNL star Kyle Mooney, learning to articulate his feelings about In-N-Out Burger, how he felt undeserving of loving indie music (specifically Regina Spektor), his experience of depersonalization disorder, of panic and anxiety, of living in a (deceptively) bohemian apartment straight out of college for 250$, and his reactions and obsessions to all of it.

211 pages, Paperback

Published November 18, 2018

About the author

You're not an alien! is what Austin Beaton is sometimes remembering to tell the little boy hiding inside his memory. Through poetry and memoir, Beaton confronts what it means to feel like you're always outside of where you should be: the right job, the present moment, at a party in a hip city with food trucks and cleverly-named martinis.

Raised in Oregon as an only child in a forest beside a river, and now living in a pretty California that doesn't fit right, Beaton's poems are little stories about dealing with change, trauma, and the heartbreak of that life we live doubly: in our head and on the planet. As an experiencer of anxiety, depression, and depersonalization (a condition in which you don't feel like you're in your own body), his narrators comes to shake hands, share tea, and stay until you're ready to return to the safety and anarchy of what created them—the thoughts we listen to when we're alone.

Austin Beaton is a poet and essayist that studied regret at the University of Oregon, where he was a finalist for the Walter and Nancy Kidd Memorial Writing Competition in Poetry. His work has appeared in Boston Accent, Porridge Magazine, Angel City Review and elsewhere. He lives near the Pacific Ocean and gives nicknames.