SNEAK PEEK: Nightmare on Anis' street.

In preparation for Portland's fourth annual Wordstock Festival (Nov. 6-9)—which, by the looks of the roster of writers they've gathered, is gonna kick epic amounts of ass—Willamette Week picked the fertile, fetid minds of a bunch attending novelists, historians, sci-fi writers and critics on everything from their creative process to which wordsmiths they really, really want to beat up.

The results were...interesting to say the least. In the process, we received this back-and-forth from Portland's own Anis Mojgani, otherwise known as the current No. 1 ranked slam poet in the world.

We innocently asked him: "Describe your most recent nightmare." Here's what we got back:

Most recent nightmare: usually i have more emotional nightmares, like someone turning on me or losing them, but i just woke up in reno from having one with some monsters in it. in the dream the folks that i'm doing a show for here in reno tell me that my check wont be ready for awhile, there was a flub somewhere, but that they have two free rooms for me at this reason in town for the night. but when they give me in the info for it they also give me a gun, a silver revolver with a long barrel and tell me that there's also a problem apparently, the city has started having these strange scorpion like creatures popping up. it's not long before me and the folks i'm with encounter them. they sound like falling water and they come out of the shadows and drop from the trees and look like scorpions that were birthed from a marriage of the creature from the black lagoon and the critters from the movie critters. they're fast and they're getting bigger and we still have to go get bullets.

Happy Halloween everybody.

You can read the rest of our Wordstock authors' responses to "What's your most recent nightmare?" and other random questions in next Wednesday's print edition of Willamette Week.

Take a peek at Mojgani in action, here.

Photo of Anis Mojgani plucked from http://www.myspace.com/anismojgani. Many thanks.