Today, after a matinee performance of All’s Well That Ends Well, the extended Scatter Family leaves Ashland and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for dinner, bed and breakfast at the old Wolf Creek Tavern north of Grants Pass before a Labor Day drive back to Portland.

And by coincidence, today I have an essay in the books pages of the Sunday Oregonian that is inspired partly by a visit more than a year ago to the Wolf Creek Tavern, where Jack London stayed a spell in 1911 and wrote his short story The End of the Story. The essay took seed many months later when I was buying groceries back in Portland and encountered a checkout clerk who insisted on letting his customers know how much he liked Rudyard Kipling and detested Jack London. You never know where The Beginning of the Story is going to come from.

You can check out the essay, A Portland Moment: Literary Criticism in the Grocery Line, in the O! section of today’s Oregonian. Or, you can read it online here, on Oregon Live.