Portland, Oregon, is the setting for a decisive transition in Dominick Corvaisis’s life: it is where he taught English, met Parker Faine, and confronted the possibility that his academic career might end. His eventual departure, carrying little more than books and clothes in a small U-Haul trailer, turned the city into a point of departure from the cautious life Parker called Dom’s rabbit hole.

Teaching and Meeting Parker

Dom held a position in the Department of English at the University of Portland. Six years before the lunch at which they discussed his recurring nighttime episodes, Parker had moved to Oregon for eighteen months to find subjects for a series of landscapes. He gave one lecture a month at the university, where the two men met. Their friendship grew from a shared seriousness about their different arts: Dom wrote, Parker painted, and both valued craft and friendship.

Career and Retreat

As his time in Portland continued, Dom’s academic prospects became uncertain. He believed the university’s tenure board might reject him, in part because his wish to remain inconspicuous had made him seem insufficiently engaged with campus life. He feared that a refusal would also make it harder to secure a position elsewhere, since other universities would ask why Portland had turned him down. In an unusual effort at self-promotion, he applied to institutions in several Western states and emphasized his published stories.

Those stories had already sold in more than twenty magazines in less than a year, but publication did not dispel Dom’s doubts about his ability. After Parker left Oregon and returned to Laguna, his letters and calls could not sustain the momentum he had helped create. Dom stopped submitting stories, tucked new work into his desk drawer, and resisted Parker’s encouragement to attempt a novel. The pattern made Portland more than a workplace: it was the setting of a life in which professional security and creative withdrawal sat uneasily together.

Departure for Utah

Mountainview College, a small institution in Utah with a student body of four thousand, invited Dom to interview after being impressed by his publication record. He made an effort to appear more outgoing and received an offer to teach English and creative writing with guaranteed tenure. He accepted with relief, even though the move did not bring great delight.

Dom left Portland late in June with a small U-Haul trailer attached to his car, filled mostly with books and clothes. He remembered the journey as a fresh start rather than a defeat, and recalled being unusually happy as he set out for Mountainview. Parker later interpreted the appeal of the new post differently: it offered tenure at a school where little would be expected of Dom and where his introversion could pass as an artist’s temperament. The departure thus carries two meanings at once—a hopeful beginning for Dom and, in Parker’s view, the risk of finding another refuge from public and creative demands.