Feb. 28th, Jean Marie Purcell read her poems at the Groundwaters Live program held at the Veneta Library.

Kay Ryan, U.S. poet laureate, will visit Lane Community College on May 13
and 14. Ryan will give a public reading on Thursday, May 13, at 7 p.m. in
the Center for Meeting and Learning, building 19, main campus, 4000 E. 30th
Avenue, Eugene. She will meet with students on Friday, May 14.

Ryan is 16th poet laureate of the United States. Last fall, she initiated a
project called Poetry for the Mind¹s Joy, in collaboration with the Library
of Congress and the Community College Humanities Association. The initiative
³highlights poetry being generated on community college campuses, as well as
the vital role played by community colleges in nurturing lives and minds.²
For details go online at www.loc.gov/poetry/mindsjoy.

Ryan¹s visit is part of the Reading Together project at Lane which engages
students in reading and discussion of shared texts, with each other, with
the greater campus community, and with the community at large. Reading
Together is indebted to Jane King, a long time supporter and patron of
interdisciplinary studies at Lane.

Sandy Jensen feels like she hit the jackpot in February–she had two essays from her memoir Special, Gifted, Divine: Twenty Years in Emissary of Divine Light Community accepted by peer reviewed journals:

• “‘I’ve Seen It Raining Fire In the Sky’: Sunrise Ranch, Eden Valley, Loveland, Colorado, 1973″ will appear in the Spring issue of Community College Moment.
  
• “Bearers of the Sun: The Emissary Myth System as a Unifying Community Force,” will appear in the Fall issue of Communal Societies, the journal of the Communal Studies Association.

Toni Van Deusen has had three poems accepted by Yellow Medicine Review (guest editor Ralph Salisbury).

Howard W. Robertson’s fifth book of poems, TWO ODES OF QUIDDITY AND NIL, was published by Publication Studio in January, 2010 (http://www.publicationstudio.biz/books/31).  Howard will be signing copies of his fourth book, THE GAIAN ODES (Evening Street Press, 2009: http://eveningstreetpress.com/sinclair_poetry_prize.html) on April 8, 2010, in Denver at the Annual Conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.  Howard is a Eugene poet and has been a Guild member since 1987.  Recordings of his latest two odes, “Cape Perpetua” and “This ancient spot near home”, can be reached via his blog: “Odes to Gaia” (http://odestogaia.blogspot.com/).

Michael Hanner and Toni Van Deusen have each had poems accepted by Cloudbank.

WINDFALL: WAYS OF FISHING

Ted Leeson and John Larison

Tuesday, March 16, 5:30-7:00 – Eugene Public Library/Bascom-Tykeson Room

Two friends who love to fish for wild trout in the rivers of the Northwest, have each allowed a single river to act as the central character in their fiction and nonfiction tales.

Ted Leeson has been fishing almost as long as he has been walking. Fish and the waters they inhabit have constituted a mother-lode of ideas, experiences, and metaphors to feed his writing for many years. Not only is he a nationally  respected source of practical information about the many aspects of the fishers’ craft, his passion for the beautiful and solitary in the natural world constantly enlivens his writing, sometimes as prose poetry, sometimes as extended rant. Leeson is the author or editor of nearly a dozen books, and he has been a regular contributor to magazines such as Fly Rod & Reel, Big Sky Journal, Field & Stream, Trout and Gray’s Sporting Journal. His essay collections include The Habit of Rivers, Jerusalem Creek, and most recently Inventing Montana. Each collection has focused attention on one or more of a set of fishing waters, the fish that inhabit them, and the people who are from time to time bonded to and enthralled by these places. His work has been compared to that of Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, and even Henry David Thoreau. Leeson teaches in the English Department at Oregon State University.

John Larison, a former student of Ted Leeson’s in the MFA program at OSU, has also turned to his avocation as a source for his writings. In addition to being a regular contributor of articles to fishing and outdoor journals from his background as a fly fishing guide, and publishing a full length book The Complete Steelheader, Larison has chosen to go down the fiction path with his combined skills. His debut novel Northwest of Normal presents a contem

porary culture in Western Oregon that has lingered and evolved from the tradition so well exemplified through the work of Ken Kesey. Larison narrates his own version of this tradition with its particular issues, not unwilling to challenge along the way some of the entrenched sacred cows of the environmental movement and the “old hippy” scene. In addition to a vivid group of human characters, he has invented his own river, the Ipsyniho, as the central stream running through their lives. Larison teaches writing at Oregon State University.

WINDFALL: LIFE IS IN THE DETAILS

Helen Frost and Pamela Steele

Tuesday, April 20, 5:30-7:00 – Eugene Public Library, Bascom-Tykeson Room

Shreds of lichen, tangles of stockings, curls of hair—two poets stitch their vivid stories from an amazing variety of fragments.

Helen Frost is a noted children’s book author and teacher, who has extended her teaching into community work by creating and guiding a variety of strategies, including writing and dance, to help young people deal with violence in their lives. She has published poetry, five verse novels for children and young adults, anthologies, a play, and a book about teaching writing. Her second and recent collection of poetry as if a dry wind helped her earn a 2009 NEA Poetry Fellowship. Through the years she has lived in Scotland, Massachusetts, Vermont, Oregon and Alaska, and has taught writing at all levels from pre-school through university. She and her husband have two sons and presently live in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In her visit to Eugene Frost will take part in a week-long Glitterary Festival that the Young Writers Association and Lane Literary Guild are sponsoring for area schoolchildren. She will also conduct an adult writing workshop. Her poetry is finely-textured with small detailed observations and radiates a positive energy.

Pamela Steele was born in her grandfather’s house on the banks of Laurel Creek in West Virginia. At age six months her parents took her on a train to eastern Oregon, and she has been traveling back and forth ever since. She has been writing since high school, and has had poems published in numerous journals in both East and West. She received an MFA in Writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, and most recently has been a Fishtrap fellow, which has led her to the completion of the first draft of a novel. Her first full length book of poems, Paper Bird, was published by Wordcraft of Oregon in 2007. Many of these poems sing a kind of archaeology of ordinary artifacts, a discarded pair of shoes, a rusted pocket knife, decaying nails, and even words themselves drifting like ash into the trees. Steele lives in Echo, Oregon