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 Because of its wealth of carefully-observed detail it is a valuable historical document in addition to being a work of literature.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.

Desert Landscapes – This month we will hear from two writers who have learned to make a passionate defense for the fragility, austere beauty and rich variety hidden in arid environments.

Laura Winter, as the Introduction to her collection Coming Here to Be Alone declares, “has actually been to all the places she writes about.” She writes about “shadows of moon and cloud painting figures of bronze across the white sand mounds.” These poems are exquisite renderings of the particular way the desert frames and emphasizes solitude. Yet the landscape, as desert lovers know, is actually full of movement and life, and Laura pays attention to the bats, the lizards, the nettles and white-crusted pools. A Portland-based poet, Laura is the author of four previous collections of poetry:Skin Into Dust, No Gravy Baby, Not Gone/Just Not Here, and Sleeping Leaves. She is the publisher of Take Out, “a ‘bag-a-zine’ of art, writing and music that features powerful voices from around the globe.” She has written for and performed with jazz musicians and improvisers in the U.S. and Europe. The art-song clarity of her desert-inspired verses inspired two multi-media artists to translate them into German, and this newest book is published in bilingual form.

Carol Ann Bassett is a teacher of environmental writing and literary nonfiction at the University of Oregon. Her work has tended to focus on landscapes that much of the world regards as “empty” or “lifeless,” such as the deserts of the American Southwest, and most recently, the Galapagos islands of the South Pacific. She goes to these places not only as a writer but as a naturalist; lives among the inhabitants—human and non-human—and brings back stories both personal and universal in an effort to help keep them from literally disappearing from the face of the earth. Carol Ann is the author of three works of literary nonfiction: Organ Pipe: Life on the Edge, A Gathering of Stones: Journeys to the Edges of a Changing World (a finalist for the Oregon Book Award), and most recently,Galápagos at the Crossroads. She has been a regular contributor to The New York Times and Time-Life, and her work has appeared in The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, Condé Nast Traveler and other national publications.