David Lee

Since the publication of his first book of poems, The Porcine Legacy (1974), David Lee has written sixteen volumes of poetry, including So Quietly the Earth, Driving & Drinking, and News from Down to the Cafe. Two new collections will be released in 2009; the first, A House Made of Time, is a collaboration with former poet laureate of Nebraska, William Kloefkorn (Logan House Press); the second is Texas Wild Flowers: A Triptych (Wood Works Press).

David Lee, first and former poet laureate of the State of Utah, has studied in the seminary for the ministry, was a boxer and is a decorated Army veteran, played semiprofessional baseball as the only white player to ever play for the Negro League Post Texas Blue Stars, and was a knuckleball pitcher for the South Plains Texas league Hubbers.

David has raised hogs, worked for years as a laborer in a cotton mill, earned a Ph.D. with a specialty in the poetry of John Milton, and is the recently-retired Chairman of the Department of Language and Literature at Southern Utah University. He has received the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award in Poetry, and the Western States Book Award in Poetry, the Utah Governor's Award for lifetime achievement in the arts, and been honored as one of Utah's top twelve writers of all time by the Utah Endowment for the Humanities. David splits his time between Bandera, Texas, and Seaside, Oregon, where he scribbles and wanders available roads, trails and beaches, all at about the same rate and pace. After an 8 year hiatus, which may or may not relate to the bush administration, he has returned to the narrative format in his new work.

Jessica Lamb

JESSICA LAMB walks the night rounds of the spirit in this first, unflinching collection of poems, keeping her accounts of desire and disappointment, loneliness and kinship, fertility and decay. The book is animated by a fierce, imperfect love–a mother's love for her young son; a woman's love for her long-time husband; a human's love for this afflicted earth. In poems of gratitude and lament, Jessica Lamb explores the private, and often silent, negotiations a woman makes between the longings of the solitary heart and the demands of marriage and parenting. In the midst of hunger, plunder, and surrender, she finds small stubborn signs of promise and renewal.

Raised in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, Jessica Lamb received a master’s degree in Italian literature from Stanford University before settling in Portland, where she has taught writing for many years through the Northwest Writing Institute, Portland Community College, and Literary Arts’ Writers in the Schools program. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, The Southern Review, and Willow Spring.

To learn more about Jessica Lamb, click here

Video copyright by Carla Perry
Photo copyright by Carla Perry

Michele Longo Eder

Introduction by Marianne Klekacz:

Michele Longo Eder's first book was published in 2008. Salt in Our Blood: The Memoir of a Fisherman's Wife, draws on Eder's journals, public records, interviews, essays, and other sources to reflect the realities of the life of a commercial fisherman and his family.

Just as Overstory Zero, by Robert Leo Heilman, did for the logging industry several year's ago, Salt in Our Blood opens a window to look in on a unique and endangered Oregon way of life.

Eder's book is aptly titled. Oceans contain roughly the same percentage of salt as do our blood, sweat, and tears. Salt in Our Blood is full of all four.

Eder's narrative shows us the joy, frustration, hard work, and tragedy in the life of a commercial fisherman. Coming from the outside to join her husband in his chosen environment and career, she casts a clear eye not only on the fishing but on the politics, pettiness, and lack of comprehension that endanger Oregon's fisheries and fishermen, and on the very real dangers they face with each trip to sea to harvest food.

Salt in Our Blood is a gripping read.

All of us have, in our veins, the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came.

President John F. Kennedy
Newport, Rhode Island
September 14, 1962

Born in upstate New York, Eder graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1976, moved to Portland, Oregon, and graduated from the Lewis & Clark law school before moving to Newport. She currently serves on the board of directors of the North Pacific Research Board, and, as a two-term Presidential appointee, is a Commissioner with the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. She also serves on the board of directors of the Newport Library Foundation.

To learn more visit saltinourblood.com

Jim Lynch

Video by Carla Perry

Introduction by Marianne Klekacz:

Jim Lynch's first novel, The Highest Tide, was published in 2006 to critical acclaim. It's loosely described as a "coming-of-age fable." I'm not sure that description does the book justice. From the wonderful foreshadowing on page 2 -- "...one freakish summer in which I was ambushed by science, fame, and suggestions of the divine"­- Lynch had me. I read the book in one sitting.

Lately, I've been chatting with a number of folks about the things we seem to lose as we "grow up" ­the sense of wonder, the less-jaded eye, the curiosity, those sorts of things. It takes a skilled and thoughtful writer to reconstruct the sense and sensibilities of childhood and adolescence and to reproduce those on the page. Jim Lynch is clearly both skilled and thoughtful.

Like Harper Lee's Scout Finch and J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, "little Miles O'Malley," self-described wimpy nerd, teeters on the brink of big life changes. He guides us through a momentous summer in his adolescence with the unflinching eye of "an increasingly horny thirteen-year-old" who looks about nine but is blessed with a brain that wraps itself around the events in the story in a sophisticated way. He took me by the hand, and I gladly shared his journey.

Jim Lynch's second novel, Border Songs, will be released this summer. I can hardly wait.

Lynch grew up on a lake near Seattle. After graduating from the University of Washington in 1985, with degrees in creative writing and journalism, he worked as a reporter in a tiny Alaskan fishing town. He then escaped for Washington, D.C., where he wrote columns for syndicated muckraker Jack Anderson and short fiction for literary magazines.


When he returned to the Northwest, it was to Spokane, where his stories won national honors including the Livingston Young Journalist Award. Later, he wrote for The Seattle Times and served four years as the Portland Oregonian's Puget Sound reporter. He now devotes himself full-time to writing fiction. Lynch lives in Olympia, Washington, with his wife and daughter.

To learn more visit thehighesttide.com

Matt Love

Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon’s Sesquicentennial Anthology

Published by Nestucca Spit Press, edited by MATT LOVE, featuring DOROTHY BLACKCROW MACK, NIKI PRICE, CARLA PERRY, DENNIS E. JONES and ANDREW RODMAN.

February 14, 2009 marks the 150th birthday of the State of Oregon.

In celebration, several local writers included in "Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon's Sesquicentennial Anthology" will be the featured authors of the Nye Beach Writers' Series event held that night.

Matt Love chose the anthology's title from a quote by Oregon's celebrity author Ken Kesey: "Oregon is the citadel of the spirit." The book contains 63 original essays by writers who have called the State of Oregon home. In addition, 61 excerpts from primary documents related to Oregon history are included.

The whole idea was to commemorate Oregon's 150th birthday, said Matt Love, owner of Nestucca Spit Press, the book's publisher. Citadel merges past and present Oregon voices and stories. I wanted to produce an unconventional book that integrated the old stories and new perspectives and reflects Oregon's maverick nature.

a sampling of Citadel contents:

• "Lake Electric," written by Newport High School student Miri Goldade musing on the sometimes-eerie magic of Crater Lake
• "Its Great Vigor: A Letter on the Origin of the Himalayan Blackberry" by Luthor Burbank
• "Break Every Yoke: A Report on the Women's Suffrage Movement in Oregon" by legendary Oregon suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway
• "The KKK in Oregon" by Eckard Toy Jr.
• "That's When I Saw It: A Bigfoot Sighting" by Dr. Matthew Johnson
• "Mainstreaming Cannabis" by Alicia Williamson
• "I Voted to Stay as a Remaining Member: A Klamath Termination Oral History" by Delphine Jackson
• "An Ale Tale" by Brian Doyle
  
• and - believe it or not - "She is a Sexy Thing," a diary entry by the infamous, impeached U.S. Senator Bob Packwood
• Other topics include the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, physician-assisted suicide, the Grateful Dead, Oregon's rivers and the animals who live there, the Portland Trail Blazers, and the perennial University of Oregon vs. Oregon State University rivalry.

Matt Love made a point of having the anthology printed by an Oregon printing press. "I could have shipped my order to Asia and saved a lot of money. Thousands of dollars. But, a book celebrating Oregon's 150th birthday printed in China? Are you kidding me? I'm a real Oregonian - I know who my neighbors are and I don't rationalize my capitalism at their expense."

Nestucca Spit Press

Elinor Langer

On November 12, 1988, a group of Portland, Oregon, skinheads known as East Side White Pride encountered three Ethiopians in a street fight, resulting in the brutal death of Mulugeta Seraw. A year later, Ken Mieske ended up pleading guilty to first degree murder. The other two, Kyle Brewster and Steve Strasser, pled guilty to manslaughter and assault.

Langer originally agreed to cover the skinheads’ trial for “The Nation,” but the accused bargained their way to prison; no trial was ever held. Research for her book began after she persuaded “The Nation” to run a special issue in 1990 on the murder and the neo-Nazi movement. Langer saw a link between the three men who beat Seraw to death, The Branch Davidian conflagration in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh in 1995.

Elinor Langer’s book about the incident, “A Hundred Little Hitlers,” vividly reconstructs the world of the skinheads: their origins in the punk scene, their basement shrines to Nazi power, their moments of glory on Oprah and Geraldo. She examines the long-standing radical groups that encouraged the movement, tracking the progress of such powerful figures as White Aryan Resistance leader Tom Metzger through key bastions of the Far Right. In gripping detail, she follows civil-rights lawyer Morris Dees's efforts to prove Metzger responsible for the Portland killing.

“One of the skinheads lived near me,” explained Langer. “I had a babysitter whose boyfriend played in a band with one of them, and the other had been homecoming king at Grant High School.” Langer hoped her book would serve as a catalyst for debate and further research.

Langer has been a contributor to national publications since the 1960s, including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Mother Jones, and The Nation. Her biography of the American radical novelist and journalist Josephine Herbst was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award. She has received several fellowships, including the Guggenheim, Bunting, and the Open Society Institute. Besides teaching at Reed, she has taught writing at Portland State University and at the Mountain Writers-Pacific MFA Program.

Photo by Carla Perry

Ursula K. Le Guin

Introduction by Marianne Klekacz

Tonight’s guest, Ursula K. Le Guin, is an icon of American literature. This isn’t just my opinion: In 2000, Ursula was awarded “Living Legend” status by the Library of Congress.

Since you’re here tonight, I’m assuming you read the pre-event publicity. If I were to use this time enumerating Ursula’s publications and awards, there would be no time left for her to read, and that would be a great loss to all of us. So instead, I’d like to try to put a little perspective around her body of work.

Had Ursula been writing in a different time, her audience might have been completely different. In the 1950s, fiction of the genres we now call fantasy or science fiction were generally relegated to magazines with names like Amazing Stories or Astounding. Science fiction in particular was generally read by boys and young men that we would now call geeks or nerds. But some things happened that changed all of that, at least in the United States.

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. Sputnik might have been just a “beeping soccer ball” (as it has been described), but it raised a little thrill of fear that the U.S. was falling behind in the technology race. When JFK was elected President in 1960, one of his first major program announcements was his determination to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Suddenly space exploration and other worlds were in the forefront of the public’s imagination, opening the door of mainstream literary status to writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and, of course, Ursula K. Le Guin.

Ursula began publishing in the early 1960s. There are two major awards in the science-fiction/fantasy genres. Each year, the Hugo is awarded to the book that readers select as the best; the Nebula is awarded to the book selected as best by writers in the genres. Seldom are both awards won by the same book.

It happened for the first time in 1965 when Frank Herbert’s Dune won both. The next two times it happened, the books selected were by Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969 (coincidentally the year that the U.S. actually did land men on the moon), and The Dispossessed in 1974.

It seems to me that Ursula’s books represent what is most thought-provoking and worthwhile in imaginative fiction. They force us to explore what it really means to be human. She has earned her own lecture in The Teaching Company course “Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind: Literature’s Most Fantastic Works.” Here is how Professor Eric Rabkin summarizes her work:

“Le Guin induces us to adopt changes of viewpoint, shaping an aesthetic experience that can change our attitudes toward language, gender, human relations, and personal morality.”

It seems to me that this might be the most important function of literature across the ages.
Please join me in welcoming Ursula K. Le Guin.

Ursula K. Le Guin's website www.ursulakleguin.com.

China Miéville interviews UKL about her life and work for BBC Radio 4, 17 March 2009.

David Lee

In the beginning, there were no writers, because there was no written language. But there were poets and poetry, which began with a simple, purposeful objective: to record local history and pass it on orally in such a memorable, entertaining way that future generations could hear and learn from past tragic and foolish events so that they might have some advance warning about committing similar miserable mistakes during their own lives. From that ancient, oral, poetic tradition evolved the thoughts and judgments that have resulted in all religion, philosophy, education and government.

This great narrative tradition lives on in the work of our first guest, author of twelve books and winner of the 1995 Western States Book Award, the Plains States Booksellers Award of 1996, and a Critics Choice Award. He has worn many hats on his journey to being named one of Utah's top twelve writers by the Utah Endowment for the Humanities and the Utah Governor's Award for lifetime achievement in the arts, including those of decorated soldier, boxer, semi-pro ball-player, hog farmer, professor of literature and seminarian.

But he didn't become the head of the language and literature department at Southern Utah University or the celebrated poet that he is by churning out the elitist, obfuscated and unmemorable drivel that often passes for poetry these days, which has largely served to drive modern readers away from honest poetry.

In an interview, he comments upon his narrative impulse: I'm really out of love, disenfranchised with the modern lyric poem or the 'language poem' that has no spine or character to it. Such poems are simply lumps of words that may or may not even connect. I want to get back to the original traditions of what poetry and art are—storytelling. I love stories, but I'm not a good storyteller. I have to think about it, brood, steal, lie, to create a story. As for sitting around the campfire, I'm the quietest person there. That's why I chose writing as my outlet."

The only line from that quote I'd have to dismiss outright is the one about our guest not being a good storyteller. But judge for yourself.

For more information http://www.entradainstitute.org/about_david_lee.htm
and http://www.herondance.org/David-Lee-Poetry-W191C49.aspx

photo by Carla Perry

Barbara Coombs Lee

Barbara Coombs Lee is the President of Compassion in Dying Federation and was one of the three Chief Petitioners for Oregon's Death with Dignity Act. Compassion in Dying is a nonprofit that provides legal activism, public education, and client services to expand and protect the rights of the terminally ill. For over ten years, Compassion in Dying Federation has been advocating for more humane and caring options for dying individuals.

Barbara is also the editor of the book Compassion in Dying: Stories of Dignity and Choice. The book is a compilation of the stories told by people in the process of dying, by their family members, friends and by spiritual leaders who respect and support choices of dying individuals. The stories are about people who chose to use Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act to control how they died.

Oregon's law has been in place since 1994 and during that time Oregon citizens have used the law sparingly. The many safeguards and guidelines established by the state have allowed its implementation without complications. As a result, and primarily under the leadership of Barbara Coombs Lee, Oregon has become a national model for end-of-life care.

Barbara received her undergraduate and nursing educations at Vassar College and Cornell University. She obtained training in medicine at the University of Washington and a law degree from Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College. She is a member of the Oregon State Bar.

She has appeared on NBC News, CNN Crossfire, 60 Minutes, McNeil Lehrer News Hour, NPR Morning Edition, The Today Show, has testified before Congress on end-of-life issues, and was interviewed by Bill Moyers for his four-part television documentary ''Our Own Terms,'' which looked at death and dying in America. She has personally battled US Attorney General John Ashcroft regarding his vendetta against Oregon’s law, and won. No easy task. She continually presents programs on end-of-life choices throughout the US and abroad. And has won too many awards to mention.

Please welcome the amazing Barbara Coombs Lee.

Mitch Luckett

A fellow recently asked me if being a good writer was anything like being a good liar. I shot from the hip and told him that I hadn't thought about the topic too much, but conceded that I considered myself a good writer and an adequate liar.

I've been ruminating on his question and all its ramifications ever since.

An essential aspect about being a good writer and an adequate liar is that you hope your hindsight is better than 20-20, and if you have doubts, you ruminate until it is.

I had to consider the fact that my questioner was, after all, an attorney, so where did he get off asking me if I was a good liar? I judiciously and perhaps generously decided that being a good attorney was not necessarily synonymous with being a good liar, even though I have seen Johnny Cochran in action. I finally concluded that being a good attorney had more to do with concocting a version of the facts that was more favorable towards a particular point of view. Which turned out to be a bad idea, because that made me think of politicians.

More ruminating, and I realized politicians concoct versions of something in their line of work, but don't rely on all the facts, the use-ratio at best one or two out of a hundred. They call this spin. Politicians are, I must admit, much better liars than writers or lawyers, but when you get right down to it, I'd rather read a good book or hear a good yarn than be harangued by a politician or cross-examined by an attorney, and if the writer, who in this case is an adequate liar and can also sing and play blue grass banjo and harmonica and has written a very strange and humorous book called To Kill a Common Loon, I think the best thing to do is just introduce him and sit down.

Please welcome Mitch Luckett

Paul Lisicky

PAUL LISICKY received his BA and MA from Rutgers University and his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the author of the novel Lawnboy, and the memoir Famous Builder published in 2002.

Lawnboy is the adventure of 17-year-old Evan. The book begins with Evan mowing a neighbor's lawn, an ordinary chore that launches him into an extraordinary world of adult desire, confusion, and betrayal. It is a book about the possibility of finding love and finding self in a world of broken relationships and decaying motels sinking back into the swamps of South Florida.

"Nobody writes about hilarious longing the way Paul Lisicky does," writes Elizabeth McCracken about Lawnboy.

"I love to make people laugh," says Lisicky. "I love to be with people who make me laugh. If one of the goals of memoir is the attempt to capture the self on the page, then it would be false not to enact my sense of humor.... The truth is the tone of Famous Builder is probably just as heartbroken as it is funny. The reader can only stand so much rawness and pain before he/she starts to feel annihilated by it."

Lisicky's stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Sonora Review, and other magazines and in the anthologies Men On Men; Best American Gay Fiction 2, Flash Fiction, Boulevard, Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, Black Warrior Review, and the Carolina Quarterly.

Lisicky's honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, James Michener/Copernicus Society, Henfield Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He lives in New York and Provincetown, teaching fiction/creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College and in the low-residency MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles.

Jennifer Lauck

What is memoir? The dictionary defines it initially as "records of facts or events in connection with a particular subject, historical period, etc., as known to the writer or gathered from special sources."

That sounds rather like what history is supposed to be. Trouble is, I can't recall a memoir that fits the description. Memory is subject to bias. There are rarely any 8 X 10 glossies with circles and arrows. On a personal level, I can't think of any incidents mutually agreed upon as historically accurate ever occurring between myself and either of my two ex-wives. I'm sure we were all hoping for the best. I still am, actually.

The second definition is a closer fit, "records ones life experiences." But memoir is not a laundry list of events in one's life. Nor is it a diary. Memoir is organized writing that is meant to make a point. Just like any other good story.

In the case of JENNIFER LAUCK and her two-volume memoir, Blackbird and Still Waters, the point seems to be that spunk may not conquer all, but is an excellent counterpoint to misfortune and adversity. Hers is a Cinderella story, except Fairy Godmother got lost on the way over and Prince Charming didn't show up until several years later. No carriage, no gown, no royal ball, and no glass slipper. Jennifer had to do it all herself. An American Cinderella with attitude.

Which has served her well. Once a grade-school dropout, Jennifer Lauck went on to carve out a prestigious career in broadcast journalism before becoming a wife and mother and the successful author of her two books. She is currently working on a novel.

www.jenniferlauck.com

Suzanne Lummis

One of my favorite quotes comes from a fellow named T.S. Eliot, who once said about writers, "Hacks imitate, artists steal" which, while acknowledging the fact that all new work is connected with what has come before, doesn't define the distinction between artistic plagiarism and artistic recycling.

Obviously, the first is only about a superficial re-rendering of established work, but the second is really about the wholesale theft, absorption and creation of new work from old. West Side Story from Romeo and Juliet.

Nearly every film and pulp Western, Shane, The Magnificent Seven and True Grit, all from the Sixth Century Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf.

Tonight we have with us a poet who is not only a fan of T.S. Eliot, but also of Raymond Chandler and fairy tales and the misty, dark, cruel-streets-of-the-city genre known as noir.

Not only Director of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, actress, playwright, performance artist and founder of the high-spirited, text-driven troupe Nearly Fatal Women, but also a thief in the highest artistic sense, her work and words crisp and not only teeming with irony and humor, wisdom and spirit, but pure magic... mercy... I want to have her baby.

www.cortlandreview.com (Issue #16)

www.thedrunkenboat.com (Spring 2001)

www.poetix.net/closeup.htm

barbara Lefcowitz

Barbara Lefcowitz has recieved writing fellowships and prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and Maryland Arts Council, among others. Her fiction and essays have appeared in over 400 journals. A native of New York, she obtained a Bachelor of Arts from Smith College, a Masters in English from State University of NY in Buffalo and a Ph. D. in English from the University of Maryland.

Recently retired from her professorship of English at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland, Lefcowitz is also a visual artist who creates collages and silk paintings, studies languages and has educated herself in astronomy and neurology. Teacher, world traveler and a prolific writer of poetry, fiction and experimental essays, her work is a reflection of her life, the arts, science, memory and the landscape of the mind. A self-described loner, she distances herself from the current self-defined literary schools and feels that university-based creative-writing programs in America are more problematic than helpful to aspiring writers.

Barbara Lefcowitz is the author of seven books of poetry and one novel. Her newest collection, The Politics of Snow, contains the poem "Pacific Shadows," which she wrote while visiting Newport in 1999. The collection contains poetic conjecture on subjects ranging from the Great Cosmic Yawn to Andalusia, from Josef Mengele to Joe DiMaggio, from Warsaw to Brooklyn. Resisting the current tide of literary obfuscation, her poetry is decidedly comprehendable and accessible.

Dorianne Laux

Dorianne Laux, born in 1952 in Augusta, Maine, is of Irish, French and Algonquin Indian heritage. She began writing seriously in her early twenties, after her daughter was born. As a single mother, she worked as a housecleaner, gas station manager, TV Guide salesperson, cook in a sanitarium, and doughnut holer. She returned to school to earn a BA in English from Mills College in 1988 and for six years she worked in the Poets in the Schools program in Berkeley and Oakland. Eventually, she moved to Eugene to teach at the University of Oregon and is currently Associate Professor and Director of the University’s Program in Creative Writing.

Dorianne has published two collections of poetry, Awake and What We Carry, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She also co-wrote The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry which was chosen as an alternative selection by the Book of the Month Club, Quality Paperbacks and Writer's Digest. Her poem, "The Shipfitter's Wife" was chosen by Robert Bly for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 1999. Her work can also be heard on National Public Radio's "The Writer's Almanac" hosted by Garrison Keillor.

Her third book, Music in the Morning, is scheduled for publication this year. Presently she is at work on a libretto with composer Wally Brill. As for honors, Dorianne won a Pushcart Prize for Poetry and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the National Endowment for the Arts.

When asked about the confessional nature of her poetry during C.K. Tower’s interview on the Perihelion website, Dorianne replied, "I am often afraid of how much I love my daughter, how much I trust my husband, how helpless I am in the midst of my own hatred and anger, how terrified I am of death. And so, I watch for the stories that will tell these feelings and thoughts, and sometimes it's not the whole story but merely an image: a boat moored to a dock, the gesture a stranger made before walking into a room. Then I confess what that meant to me using the many and varied resistances of poetry. As soon as you begin to pay as much attention to the language as to what you are trying to say, you've set a challenge for yourself that denies the simplicity of confession."

Rodger Larson

Rodger Larson‘s first novel, What I Know Now, was published last year Henry Holt. The book was a finalist in the 1997 Oregon Book Awards’ and received the Andrés Berger Award for Fiction. The novel is aimed at the young adult audience and is about family breakdown and the dawning awareness of sexuality. His second novel, with the working title of ELI RIDDLE, is set in the foothills of the Oregon Cascades.

Rodger received a BA in Humanities from Evergreen State College, and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from Antioch University. He completed course work at the Northwest Writing Institute of Lewis & Clark College, and at Portland State University.

He currently teaches writing part-time to high school students at the Metropolitan Learning Center in Northwest Portland. He has taught at Portland State University School of Extended Studies and their Salem Center, and for Portland Community College at the Columbia River Correctional Institution. For the past two years, he has also been teaching ten-week fiction workshops in his home.