Six Local Writers

SIX LOCAL WRITERS!

SHEILA EVANS spent years teaching in California’s Central Valley. Her articles appeared in local newspapers, the Oregonian, Eugene Register-Guard, Newsweek, Oregon Coast Magazine, Northwest Travel, Creative Woman, and Portlandia Review of Books. Her 1996 novel Maggie’s Rags, is set in a small town resembling Yachats.

HOWARD OSBORN abandoned a career in poetry to become an agricultural economist. His career took him from Oregon to Boston to Washington, DC, to most of Latin America. He served with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and with the Organization of American States. He has written two books of poetry and a chapter "Research Technology and the Small Farm" which appeared in a compendium Alternatives in Food Production. He will be reading from his recent poetry chapbooks: Decision Tree and Moon Meanderings and Reflections.

RUTH HARRISON was born in Kansas, grew up in Colorado, and has been an Oregonian since 1950. Her first teaching assignment was in a one-room school. She is now a retired professor of medieval literature who writes and gives occasional poetry workshops. Her poems appeared in regional, national and international publications. Her poetry collection, Bone Flute, was published in 1996 by Cape Perpetua Press of Yachats. She has just completed work on a second book, Nightwalk.

MICHAEL BURGESS is a columnist for Upper Left Edge and the author of Uncle Mike’s Guide to the Real Oregon Coast, a tongue-in-cheek guide for tourists who should vacation elsewhere. Magic and Magicians, an introduction to magic for young readers, was published in 1991. He was founding president of Northwest Writers, Inc. based in Portland, has written for film and television, and has provided humorous social commentary to local radio and television stations. He and his partner, Darlene Dubé recently opened OREGON BOOKS in Depoe Bay. The bookstore is the first and only bookstore devoted solely to books about Oregon and books by Oregon authors. He also writes horoscopes that appear monthly in Inkfish.

SCOTT ROSIN headed for the woods of Toledo, Oregon in 1971 and began writing in 1978. His first three plays were one-acts. Longer plays have been performed at the Next Wave Youth Theatre and the Newport Performing Arts Center. His most recent work, "The Stolen Hours," was produced in November 1996. He is currently working on a collection of poems about surfing, a collection of woods poems, a screenplay, several short stories, a novel, a play and prose poems. In addition to his work as a writer, Scott has been a fire fighter, smoke jumper, tree planter and timber faller.

CARLA PERRY is the founder and coordinator of the Yachats Writers’ Series, co-editor of Talus & Scree International Literary Journal, a photographer, book publisher, and a poet. She received a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Her work has been published in national magazines and is the author and illustrator of two books: No Questions Asked, No Answers Given, published in 1971 and Laughing Like Dogs, published by Cape Perpetua Press in 1996.

Barbara La Morticella

For twelve years, BARBARA La MORTICELLA has been co-host with Walt Curtis of a weekly poetry show "Talking Earth," broadcast on KBOO radio in Portland. From the station’s control booth, she has interviewed almost every writer that ever stepped across Portland city limits. Barbara is also poetry editor of the Alliance, a progressive newspaper.

Her most recent collection, Rain on Waterless Mountain, poems about environment and love, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in 1997. Her work also appears in numerous literary magazines and anthologies including From Here We Speak the Oregon Literary Series anthology, and Women’s Struggles, Women’s Visions published by the Maud Kern Art Gallery in Eugene, OR. She has given hundreds of poetry readings on the east coast and in Washington, Oregon, and California. She was the editor of the Portland Poetry Festival anthology, and is co-editor of Portland Lights. In 1999, she received the very first Oregon grant given specifically for Oregon women poets.

Anndee Hochman

Anndee Hochman has written essays, articles, book reviews and short fiction for the New York Times Book Review, Ms., the Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Review, etc. She is a former Washington Post reporter and her essays on women and family have appeared in a variety of magazines, newspapers and literary journals. Her first book Everyday Acts & Small Subversions: Women Reinventing Family, Community and Home, is a book of essays published in 1994 by Eighth Mountain Press. When writing the book, Hochman looked for women with purposely chosen, nontraditional families they sculpted to meet their own needs. The resulting book presents options for both straight and lesbian women, and the complications and freedoms those options offer.

Honesty and family are central themes in Anndee’s life and in her writing. She has elected to define her life outside society’s prescribed roles so has chosen "truth over tranquility." And because keeping secrets has too high a cost, she lives and writes the truth.

Anndee, a former resident of Portland, Oregon, lives in Philadelphia and teaches creative writing as an artist-in-residence in public schools on both coasts. She has also worked as a counselor for homeless teenagers, coordinator of a women’s writing workshop, a theater critic and a bartender.

Robert Sheckley

Robert Sheckley is a living icon. A national treasure. A man who began writing stories in the 1940’s and ‘50s and was one of the major creators of the genre of science fiction.

Bob was born in Brooklyn in 1928 and raised in New Jersey. He studied at NYU after serving in Korea. He began writing stories and selling them to science-fiction magazines after graduation, producing several hundred stories over the next several years. He became a bohemian writer on the Spanish island of Ibiza in the 1970s, haunting Paris and London as well. He returned to NYC ten years later as fiction editor of OMNI magazine.

Bob has written about sixty-five books to date, including twenty novels and nine collections of short stories. He often worked in collaboration with Roger Zelazny. He wrote fifteen scripts for the "Captain Video" television series, and sixty scripts for "Behind the Green Door," narrated by Basil Rathbone. He won the Jupiter Award for the best science fiction story of 1974. Was named Visiting Scholar, Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT in 1983. In 1991, he received the Daniel F. Gallun award for contributions to the genre of science-fiction.

Several of his books have been made into movies. His first novel, published in 1958 was Immortality, Inc. That became the movie, "Freejack," starring Mick Jagger, Renee Russo, Emilio Estevez, and Anthony Hopkins. He wrote the story for "The Tenth Victim," starring Marcello Matroianni and Ursula Andress. Outside of science-fiction, his most famous work is The Game of X.

Harlan Ellison wrote: "If the Marx Brothers had been literary rather than thespic fantasists….they would have been Robert Sheckley."

www.sheckley.com

Robin Cody

ROBIN CODY grew up along the rivers surrounding Portland, his family moving frequently in the search for financial survival. Robin graduated from Yale, taught at the American School of Paris, in France, then returned to Oregon and became Dean of Admissions for Reed College. He decided, in 1984, to be a writer and penned many feature articles for Northwest Magazine of the Sunday Oregonian. One of those stories won the Western Writers of America’s Silver Spur Award for short non-fiction in 1986.

As a freelance technical writer, Robin joined the Bonneville Power Administration’s Writer’s Pool. One assignment was to write a children’s booklet explaining the Columbia River. The research for that book encouraged Robin to spend a summer solo canoeing from the mouth of the Columbia to the Ocean. A trip that took 82 days. Voyage of A Summer Sun, the book written as a result of that trip, won him an Oregon Book Award.

Voyage of A Summer Sun is historical, giving the geological history of the Columbia. Yet it’s personal, really him, Robin Cody, paddling down and looking through his own particular eyes. He declares he wasn’t an environmentalist when he began his trip and he wasn’t one when he finished it. But he comments on how the dams destroyed the area’s Indians, wild fish runs, and the small towns which were flooded when the water backed up.

Robin’s first book, Ricochet River, a novel, was published by Knopf in 1992.

Jeff Taylor

JEFF TAYLOR lives in a haunted valley somewhere in the Coast Range and writes columns for This Old House magazine, Harrowsmith Country Life, and other journals. He has been a contributing editor of New Age Journal and Mother Earth News. His first book, Tools of the Trade, was published in 1996. He often speaks on his favorite subject: the need for more humor in a pernicious, unfriendly, perilous, and ugly time in human history, called NOW.

Jeff will read from the title story of his forthcoming book, The Flight of the Vampire Quade, which is based on his experience as a hospice volunteer.

Robert Heilman

ROBERT HEILMAN is an essayist, public radio commentator and storyteller. He dropped out of high school into a life of seasonal manual labor in 1970, picking up work in moving and hauling, construction, reforestation, and gyppo logging..

Ten years later, he accidentally fell — ten feet, head-first — into freelance writing. Heilman will read from Overstory: Zero, Real Life in Timber County

Susan Hauser

SUSAN HAUSER is a Portland freelance writer who has been writing for the Leisure & Arts page of the Wall Street Journal for twelve years, mostly about amusing people and events in the Northwest. Susan studied journalism at Portland State University and joined the staff of the Oregonian.

She also writes regularly for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Parade, and Sunset. She was People magazine’s first Oregon correspondent.

Evelyn Sharenov

— the very first Writers’ Series event

EVELYN SHARENOV has published stories and poems in Wigwag, Glimmer Train, Rain City Review, Story Quarterly , and Talus & Scree #2. Her story "Magic Affinities" was chosen as one of the 100 Best American Short Stories in 1993. Her novella, Early Warnin, is being published by Alms House Press in New York.

Evelyn will read from her forthcoming book Mad River and Other Stories, a work finished under a fiction grant from the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts.

Evelyn lives in Troutdale, Oregon.

Margareta Waterman

— the very first Writers’ Series event

MARGARETA WATERMAN has performed, recorded and toured the US and Canada. She’s been involved with the Red Sky Poetry Theatre, Bumbershoot, the Seattle Small Press Poetry Review, Alternative to Loud Boats, Raven Chronicles, etc. She founded the poet’s collective: Nine Muses Books, and produced the Manifest Arts peotry video series. Her most recent published books include: some south american colors in 1995, and five songs from the primordial alphabet in 1996.

As a performance poet, Margareta often accompanies her spoken words with music, song and dance. Each performance is designed for the particular occasion.

Margareta lives in Winston, Oregon.