A POET-POURRI – Celebrate Poetry month with an exquisite grouping of fragrant poems by some of our local favorites.

Deb Casey published a poetry chapbook with Finishing Line Press last year, AS-IS, Several Sisters, a collection that draws the reader into a vicarious experience of everyday life as it would be in the constant presence of a very lively group of sisters. The poems exhibit a unique style that Deb has developed over the years, publishing earlier versions of these and other poems in numerous magazines including Calyx, Chicago Review, Epoch, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares. At the UO she directs a grant-funded program that provides support-services for non-traditional students.

Michael Hanner worked in Eugene as an architect for 35 years, during which hedeveloped a variety of ancillary skills such as poetry, sitting on porches, cooking, tango, travel and photography. He is a member of the Lane Literary Guild’s Red Sofa Poets, and has published a number of chapbooks, including the most recent Closing Down the Piccolo Bar (2008) and Palm Sunday (2009). He is a frequent OSPA contest winner, and has published poems in Cloudbank, Crab Creek Review, Nimrod, Tiger’s Eye, and other magazines, as well as in several anthologies.

Jenny Root moved to Eugene in 1989 from Detroit, Michigan to attend the UO, and chose to make this her home. Over the years she has never ceased to offer her skills to local literary enterprises, both professionally and as a volunteer. She worked with Story Line Press, Tsunami Books and other independent booksellers, as well as the Lane Literary Guild. She also helped get the Poetry Slam—in an earlier incarnation—off and slamming in Eugene. She is currently preparing a manuscript, while planning future multi-voiced readings. Jenny works as an editor and graphic designer with a nonprofit organization in criminal justice.

Amanda Powell teaches Spanish and Latin American literature and literary translation at the U of O, specializing in the poetry and prose of early modern Spanish and Latin American women. Her most current translation project, however, is a contemporary novel by a male author. The novel represents a breakthrough in Latin American fiction for direct scrutiny of homosexuality and homophobia. A Cat on His Own Behalf (El gato de sí mismo), by Uriel Quesada, was published in Costa Rica in 2005. The story seamlessly fuses parody and satire to address trauma, repression, and the outlaw status conferred by the so-called deviancy. The charm of the novel lies in the light touch of a narrative that darts between elements of science fiction, fantasy, the surreal, historical romance, epic, cinema, and detective fiction.  Amanda earned her B.A. at Yale and M.A. from Boston University, and her translation publications include The Answer/La Respuesta by the celebrated 17^th-century Mexican poet Juana Inés de la Cruz (2^nd edition 2009). Her poems have appeared in journals including Agni, CAB/NET, Canary, Hunger Mouhtain, Mudfish, Northwest Review, Poetry Northwest, and in various anthologies. She has received awards for poetry and translation from the Massachusetts Poetry Foundation, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition to her novel translation, she is currently researching the widespread 17^th-century European fashion for love poems written by women, to women, in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Dutch, Flemish, and English.

Zachary Schomburg is the author of Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean 2009), which is a finalist for this year’s Oregon Book Award. The poems have been described as “funny and ridiculously original, “ and “a tour through a liminal world of dream-logic, informed by its own myth and folklore.” In his poems he compensates for the falseness of memory by exaggerating it into his own version of child-like fantasy tales.  Schomburg published a previous poetry collection, The Man Suit in 2007, and several chapbooks. He especially enjoys practicing poetry as a collaborative and multi-media art, and has produced a collaborative chapbook with poet Emily Kendal Frey, as well as a collection of poem films, available on DVD with the title Little Blind Thing. Schomburg lives in Portland, where he and Mathias Svalina co-edit Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books.

FEBRUARY WINDFALL, Tuesday, February 15, 2011, 5:30 p.m., Eugene Public Library

Stories, Jokes, Tears and Singing – “Readings should be fun,” says Portland author Brian Doyle, who promises to “wander around laughing” as he “sails off hilariously into one nutty story after another, sometimes to good effect.”

Doyle, who is editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, has most recently published a novel with Oregon State University Press called Mink River. Before that, four of his ten books of essays, “proems” and nonfiction have been in the list of finalists for the Oregon Book Award. One of his most popular books is The Grail, the journal of a year in which he spent large amounts of time in a local winery, documenting the winemaking process from branch to bottle in a grand mix of fact and opinion. His essays have appeared in the annual Best American Essays, Best Science & Nature Writing, and Best Spiritual Writing anthologies, and he earned the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 2008. He describes himself (in his own publicity material) as “a hirsute shambling shuffling, mumbling grumbling muttering muddled maundering meandering male being” (note the absence of commas!) Doyle “and the woman who married him (after the longest pause in history when he proposed) live with their wild children in Portland.” Doyle promises to fill the unforgiving Windfall hour with sixty seconds worth of storytelling and other Irish blarney

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.

SEPTEMBER WINDFALL

Tuesday, September 21, 5:30 p.m.

Eugene Public Library

Fierce Tenderness

Jennifer Richter and Carlos Reyes open this year’s Windfall series with strong, lucid poems that strike directly through the ear to the heart.

Jennifer Richter’s book Threshold was chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. Published in April, 2010, the book went into a second printing two months later. The poems tell of the many small and astonishing revelations that come with motherhood and illness, and are presented with a lyricism and tenderness that is often surprisingly fierce and gorgeously complex in the way that poetry best does its work. Richter’s work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, CALYX, and Cloudbank. She was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship in Poetry by Stanford University, where she taught in the Creative Writing Program for four years. She currently teaches poetry at the Corvallis Arts Center and online for Stanford, and lives in Corvallis with her two children and her husband, the novelist Keith Scribner.

Carlos Reyes is a poet, teacher, translator and editor whom Carolyn Kizerhas referred to as “one of our local and national treasures.” He has published nine chapbooks of poetry and four full-length works, one of which—A Suitcase Full of Crows (1995) was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. In addition to his books, his poetry has been widely published and anthologized throughout the country, under a variety of subject categories such as Poets against the War, Urban Nature, Poems of Oregon and Peru, An Anthology of River Poems, and Hunger and Thirst. His poems are both visual and aural sketches, vivid and clear, and shot through with a sense of justice and a passion for the poor and the abused creatures of the world, yet with the deft touch of a saintly wisdom. His poems of Ireland are full of stone walls, peat, cows, pubs and salt-laden wind; but he writes just as well of sagebrush, banana leaves, and Panamanian rice beer. As an Irish-American with an Hispanic name, Reyes is totally conversant with at least these three cultures. He has published translations from the Spanish of Canary Island poet Josefina de la Torre, Ecuadorian poet Edwin Madrid, and most recently La Señal del cuervo/The Sign of the Crow in 2009 by Ignacio Ruiz Pérez. Reyes lives in Portland with his wife, editor and book designer Karen Checkoway. Currently he is at work on “Zena,” a series of prose pieces recounting his life in Panamá from 1953-56.

Tuesday, May 17, 5:30 p.m., Eugene Public Library, as always, Free!

Margaret Chula, a Portland poet, lived in Japan for twelve years, where she not only taught English but also studied the traditional arts of woodblock printing and flower arranging, and became a practitioner of the Japanese haiga tradition, where a painting is accompanied by a poem. Her book What Remains: Japanese Americans in Internment Camps is a series of poems and photographs in which Chula responds to a series of quilts (rather than paintings) that honor Japanese-Americans who were imprisoned in internment camps in the U.S. during World War II. Both quilt artist Cathy Erickson and poet Chula spent seven years gathering material for their collaboration, by interviewing former prisoners, gathering photographs from their families, and enriching this material with elements of traditional Japanese arts. Maggie Chula has published poems in a variety of journals, has received grants from the Oregon Arts Commission and fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. She has published four previous collections of poetry.

Kenneth Helphand is a professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Oregon, where he has taught since 1974. His work has led him to a study of what he calls “defiant gardens,” which he defines as “gardens created in extreme or difficult environmental, social, political, economic, or cultural conditions.” In his book Defiant Gardens, and on the website which continues the work begun in the book, he documents a selection of gardens built by prisoners of war, especially those in World War II ghettos under the Nazis. More recently he has turned to Iraq and Afghanistan for his gardens, and continues to discover gardens flourishing under the most brutal of circumstances. Helphand is the author of numerous articles and reviews on topics in landscape history and theory, and has published four books on various aspects of landscape design. He has guest lectured at dozens of universities and is the recipient of distinguished teaching awards from the University of Oregon and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture. He served as editor of Landscape Journal (1994-2002), and is Chair of the Senior Fellows in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011, 5:30 p.m. at the Eugene Public Library

Affirming Flexibility — The work of two local writers gives insight into how traditional flash-points of conflict can sometimes gestate surprisingly positive results.

Quinton Hallett’s third poetry chapbook Refuge from Flux was published in 2010 by Finishing Line Press. The poems offer the reader  fresh new ways to arrange the seemingly chaotic clutter of life into temporary but clearly defined little islands of “refuge.” For seventeen years before turning to poetry, Quinton was an art administrator, and her poems reflect a keen sensitivity to the art of sculpture as well as the purely visual arts. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she has won state and national awards. Her poems have been on view at the Karin Clarke Gallery in Eugene, the Rane and Taos Galleries in Taos, New Mexico, and she will be among the poets featured in the 2011-12 traveling ekphrastic exhibition “Original Weather,” poets responding to works by Robert Tomlinson. In 2004 she established Fern Rock Falls Press, which has three titles in print. Quinton has long been active in the local literary community. She lives with her husband, artist Dennis Gould, in the Coast Range foothills of Noti.

Henry Alley is a Professor Emeritus of Literature in the Honors College at the University of Oregon. He has publishedfour novels over the past 30 years, as well as a fiction chapbook, and his short stories have appeared in journals such as Seattle Review, Outerbridge. Virginia Quarterly Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Gertrude, and Harrington Gay Men’s Quarterly Fiction. His most recent novel, Precincts of Light explores the Measure Nine crisis in Oregon, when gay and lesbian people were threatened with legislation that would endanger their social and civil rights. The novel explores a variety of ways that an extended family struggles to come to terms with their own intolerances, and offers the prospect of a peaceable kingdom—the precincts of light.

Henry, like Quinton, has long been active in supporting various literary endeavors in the Eugene-Springfield area, especially as an early and long-standing member of the Lane Literary Guild.