WINDFALL READERS FOR JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010
January 19 – 5:30 p.m.
LOVE AND ISLANDS
Two writers whose work is especially charged by the atmosphere of foreign lands where they have lived and traveled.
Alison Cadbury
Alison Cadbury
In 1971 Alison Cadbury took a trip to the island of Paros, Greece, intending to stay for three weeks; she ended up staying for five years. During that time she developed a great love and respect for the village way of life that had existed in this part of the world for thousands of years, with its essentials unchanged. She was able to observe and take part in the village culture at the time when it was coming to a rather abrupt end in Greece, as tourism finally came to dominate every facet of these islanders’ lives. In her travel essay book Panigýri, she tells the story of the village of Naousa through the voices of its inhabitants, her neighbors and friends,
Cadbury has been a resident of Eugene for over 30 years. Her stories and essays about Greek island life have won her a NEA fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and an Oregon Literary Arts fellowship. Stories from her book have been published in literary magazines and anthologized. The book has become very popular on Paros, especially among those who knew the old way of life. Because of its wealth of carefully-observed detail it is a valuable historical document in addition to being a work of literature.
Henry Hughes
Henry Hughes
The love poems in Henry Hughes’ 2009 poetry collection Moist Meridian are physical, erotic, but they are also filled with incidents and images from places all over the world: China (where he spent much of five years teaching English), San Salvador, Uganda, the Bronx, and the war zones of the Middle East—all of these places and more inhabit his poems and lend them evocative color and energy.
Hughes has also lived in a number of the major regions of the U.S.: he grew up on Long Island, went to Dakota Wesleyan University in South Dakota on a football scholarship, then to Purdue University in Indiana for an M.A. in writing. His love of river fishing has drawn him to water in all the places he lives, and this also is evident in his poetry, which includes everything from pools, to ponds, to the ocean. His collection Men Holding Eggs won the 2004 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Hughes has been on the faculty of Western Oregon University since 2002.
February 16—5:30 p.m
PARALLEL WORLDS
When snow is falling up it can be a magician’s plot, a poet’s insight, or a trick of the light, depending on who is telling the story.
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Over the past twenty-some years Nina Hoffman has been the author of adult and young-adult novels that are generally classified as “fantasy/science-fiction” because they include elements of non-ordinary reality as a regular part of the plot. Her works have been finalists for the World Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, and Endeavour awards. Her first novel, The Thread that Binds, won a Stoker award. Her novel Fall of Lightcame out from Ace in May, 2009, and her middle-school novel Thresholds will come out from Viking in August, 2010. She has been called “this generation’s Ray Bradbury,” after the (still-living) fantasy/science-fiction giant.
Hoffman does production work for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She also works with teen writers. She lives in Eugene with several cats and many strange toys and imaginary friends.
Don Colburn
Don Colburn is one of the rare literary artists earning a living as a writer, but not on a university campus. After working for many years at The Washington Post, and receiving an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, he came to Portland in 2000 as a reporter for The Oregonian. Here he won the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Award in 2008 for Best Writing. Previously he had been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.
While at Stanford University on a mid-career Knight Fellowship, Colburn began writing poetry. He has published two poetry collections: a chapbook Another Way to Begin, which won the Finishing Line Press Prize, and a full collection As If Gravity Were a Theory, which won the Cider Press Review Poetry Prize. His poetry reflects an unusual ability to make ordinary scenes and objects leap into temporary character roles, as if all life were a series of quick stories.
