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An Evening with Ellen Waterston & Friends
March 21 @ 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
$5
Please join us for this in-store author event. Required tickets are a $5 per person GA or book purchase. Please call 541.306.6564 with any questions.
Where the Crooked River Rises by Ellen Waterston
There is an otherness to the high desert, something momentous and sacred in the purity of the silence. In this compelling collection of personal essays, award-winning poet and author Ellen Waterston illuminates the people, places, and landscape of Central Oregon’s vast high desert.In “Where the Crooked River Rises, ” Waterston reveals the blessings and challenges of decades spent as a rancher and town resident in a place that “has been, and remains,” her touchstone and crucible. The high desert is Waterston’s teacher, and she describes its lessons with grace and care, inviting readers to look at their own lives through a lens of wide-open spaces, sagebrush and juniper, pumice and rabbit brush.
Weave Me a Crooked Basket by Charles Goodrich
A beautifully unconventional love story.
It’s the summer of 2008, and thirty-five-year-old Ursula Tunder, reeling from the breakup of a bad marriage, has abandoned her career as a botanist and moved home to the family farm to start a wholesale garden-plant greenhouse, and, perhaps more importantly, to care for her ailing father, Joe. Her younger brother, Bodie, now that a shoulder injury has ended his NFL career, comes home as well, to try his hand at organic farming. Their land at the edge of a prosperous college town is coveted by developers. Ursula wants to sell the farm to Camas Valley State University, which has promised to create a research facility on the land, but Bodie and his idealistic wife, Fleece, are committed to farming.
Enter Nu, Ursula and Bodie’s Vietnamese-American cousin by adoption, and an up-and-coming visual artist. When Nu gets arrested after a fight with a pair of dirt bikers, Joe persuades him to take refuge at the Tunder farm. Nu gets pressed into service helping Bodie with farm chores and taking care of Joe, so Ursula seizes the opportunity to get away from the farm, accepting a temporary job surveying native plants in the Cascades. But when Joe’s health plummets and Bodie’s finances crash, Ursula abandons her summer job to return home once again.
Facing bankruptcy, Ursula, Bodie, and Nu enlist a ragtag troupe of land-defenders in a festival of resistance in a last-ditch effort to save a way of life that may disappear forever.
Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone by John Daniel
In November of 2000, after the presidential election but before the final results had been handed down by the Supreme Court, John Daniel climbed into his pickup, drove to a remote location in Oregon’s Rogue River Canyon, and quit civilization. The strictures were severe. No two-way human communication – not even with his wife – no radio, no music, not even his cat. He would isolate himself in a cabin sure to be snowed in soon after his arrival, intent on hearing no human voice but his own until spring thawed the road. This experiment in solitude was an attempt to clarify his identity while pursuing daily life without the distractions of the world at large. Daniel had spent a week or two alone before, but this would be an entirely new challenge, and as he drove off into the mountains he felt a fear-tinged freedom. This book chronicles his journey in solitude, a season of memory, and his search for a coherent place to stand on the earth.
Ellen Waterston is the author of Walking the High Desert, Encounters with Rural America along the Oregon Desert Trail, University of Washington Press; Where the Crooked River Rises, Oregon State University Press; a memoir, Then There Was No Mountain, Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group; and four poetry titles: Hotel Domilocos, Moonglade Press, Between Desert Seasons, Wordcraft of Oregon and I Am Madagascar, Ice River Press. Her fourth poetry title and verse novel, Vía Láctea, A Woman of a Certain Age Walks the Camino, published by Atelier 6000, she subsequently converted to a libretto. It premiered as a full-length opera and is slated for a second staging.
Her award-winning essays and poems have been featured in many journals and anthologies. Her memoir Then There Was No Mountain was recognized by the Oregonian as one of the top ten books of the year and garnered recognition as a WILLA and Foreword finalist. Poetry awards include the WILLA Award in Poetry for two of her collections and the Obsidian Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, grants and residencies. She was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by Oregon State University Cascades for her accomplishments as an author and poet and her promotion of the literary arts.
As a literary arts advocate, she is the founder of the Writing Ranch which offers workshops and retreats for established and emerging writers. She was the founder and, for over a decade, the executive director of The Nature of Words, a literary arts nonprofit featuring an annual literary festival in Bend, Oregon and creative writing workshops in regional schools, social welfare programs, and at its literary arts center’s Storefront Project. She subsequently founded the Waterston Desert Writing Prize which, in 2020, was adopted by the High Desert Museum. This Prize annually recognizes a nonfiction book proposal that examines the role of deserts in the human narrative. Waterston is on the faculty of OSU Cascades MFA Low Residency program.
Following a long career as a professional gardener and a decade working with the Spring Creek Project, Charles Goodrich writes and gardens at his home near the confluence of the Marys and Willamette Rivers in Corvallis, Oregon He is the author of four collections of poetry, Watering the Rhubarb, A Scripture of Crows, Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden, and Insects of South Corvallis, along with a collection of essays, The Practice of Home, and two co-edited anthologies, Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest and In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens.
John Daniel is the author of ten books of essays, memoir, poetry, and fiction. Born in South Carolina and raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., Daniel has lived in the West since 1966. After attending and dropping out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, he worked as a logger, railroad inspector, rock climbing instructor, hod carrier, and poet-in-the-schools. He began to write poetry and prose in the 1970s while living on a ranch in south-central Oregon. In 1982 he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, where he then took an M.A. in English/Creative Writing and taught five years as a Jones Lecturer in Poetry and a lecturer in Freshman English. He now makes his living as a writer and itinerant teacher in workshops and writer-in-residence positions around the country.