Schedule at Glance

Tuesday, October 20th

6:30pm at Paulina Springs Books - Pam Houston presenting Animals Taught Me Everything (Tickets not required)

Pam Houston is the award-winning author of two novels, Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound; two short story collections, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat; and nonfiction works including Without Exception, Deep Creek, and Air Mail. Houston teaches at UC Davis and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and she co-founded Writing By Writers. She lives on a homestead in Colorado with her husband.

About Animals Taught Me Everything:
From Icelandic mares and Irish wolfhounds to elephants, leopards, hyenas, and a desert-adapted lioness named Charlie, Pam Houston has learned life’s most important lessons from animals. How to play. How to rest. How to love. How to die. How to be present with the dying. How to be present with the living and with the Earth. How to find joy in the least likely places. How to find joy, literally, everywhere. With playful sincerity, Houston finds power and promise in the teachings of our fellow creatures and reminds us that animals are here for us, every day and everywhere.

Anthea Kreston: Crescendo: Chronicles of an Adventurous Violinist

Wednesday, October 21st, 6:30pm

Paulina Springs Books

Anthea Kreston is a world-renowned violinist and violist who has performed on almost every major concert stage around the globe including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Royal Academy of Music , Prince Regent Theater, Teatro Nacional, and Chateau d’Ainay-le-Veil, among others. She has played in the Berlin Philharmonic, as Principal Violin in the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, as concertmaster of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project. An avid writer, Kreston is a frequent columnist for the Slipped Disc, the top  international  classical music news site, and the founder and curator of the Inside Music Book Club. She is currently first violinist of the Delgani String Quartet and Trio Libermé and lives in Corvallis, Oregon, with her husband and two daughters.

About Crescendo: Chronicles of an Adventurous Violinist

‍When American violinist Anthea Kreston is selected as the fourth member of Germany’s Artemis Quartet, it is the culmination of decades of dedication. In Crescendo, her enchanting and deeply personal memoir, Kreston writes about growing up in a well-to-do but difficult family in Chicago, leaving home at age sixteen, studying at the ultracompetitive Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia (Hilary Hahn was a classmate), then burning out and leaving it all behind for a commune in Oregon.All the while, Kreston never stops playing her beloved violin, and, in time, she finds her way back, making it to the top of the classical music world. Crescendo is an honest, and ultimately celebratory, reflection on art, ambition, and the choices that compose a life.‍

Marina Richie is an award-winning nature writer. Her 2026 book, Feathered Forest: Aloft with Birds in Ancient Trees, features a foreword by David George Haskell. Halcyon Journey: In Search of the Belted Kingfisher won the 2024 John Burroughs Medal, a National Outdoor Book Award, and a Foreword Indies award. Educated at the University of Montana (MA, Journalism) and the University of Oregon (BA, Biology), she has led conservation initiatives as a communications director, authored two children’s nature books under a prior name, penned award-winning wayside exhibits, and now dedicates her time to writing books, poetry, and advocating for wildlands and wildlife.

About Feathered Forest: Aloft with Birds in Ancient Trees

Beginning with an ascent of a 200-foot-tall Douglas-fir with a bird biologist, author Marina Richie leads us from her home in Central Oregon into the ancient forests of Cascadia, a bioregion which rivals the Amazonian rainforest in significance for climate and biodiversity.

Birds are guides to intricate and imperiled communities thriving at every level, from understory to midstory to overstory. They steer us to cool havens within multilayered, centuries-old groves that are critical refugia in a time of climate crisis. Their songs and flights show us what we must protect for the future of threatened birds, forests, and humankind. A narrative of perception change, memoir, and kinship, Feathered Forest is a soaring ode to birds and wild trees.

Gabriel Urza is a writer, attorney, and university professor from Reno, Nevada. He teaches fiction in the MFA program at Portland State University. He is the author of the novels The Silver State and All That Followed, as well as The White Death: An Illusion and The Last Supper. He lives in Hood River, Oregon.

About An Incomplete History of the American West

An Incomplete History of the American West is a striking collection of twelve interconnected short stories that span 150 years across the stark, haunting landscape of the Great Basin. Moving chronologically through time, each story acts like a literary historical marker-pausing along the timeline to reveal a moment, a voice, a reckoning. Rooted in the traditions of Western literature but unafraid to challenge them, author Gabriel Urza brings a fresh and unflinching perspective to stories that span race, class, and time. Unsentimental yet deeply humane, An Incomplete History of the American West asks readers to reconsider what the West truly means-and why the stories we tell about it still matter.

Kathleen Boland is the author of the novel Scavengers. Her fiction has appeared in Tin House, Conjunctions, and Gulf Coast, among other places, and she has received support from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family.

About Scavengers

After being fired for taking an uncharacteristic risk at her commodities trading job, Bea Macon sublets her New York apartment and books a one-way ticket to stay with her mother, Christy, a free spirit who has been living in Salt Lake City on Bea’s dime. Usually the responsible one, Bea isn’t about to admit exactly why she’s suddenly decided to visit, but she isn’t the only one keeping secrets: Christy has a man. She has a map. She has . . . a username on a forum devoted to unearthing $1 million in buried treasure that an antiquities dealer claims to have hidden somewhere in the western U.S.? Bea is convinced this is just another one of her mother’s wild larks, an elaborate way to refuse, as she has for Bea’s entire life, to finally grow up. But Christy believes she’s onto something—and she’s arranged a rendezvous in a rural town called Mercy with the guy she’s been obsessively trading theories with online to prove it. Out in the desert that one woman believes to be a promised land, the other a wasteland, they find themselves barreling toward a more high-stakes, transformative escapade than either of them could have imagined. Populated with unforgettable characters and set against one of the world’s most oddly enrapturing landscapes, Scavengers is a funny and heartbreaking novel about old injuries, new beginnings, and the lengths to which we’ll go to find, escape, and reinvent ourselves.

Nancy Foley grew up in New Mexico. She has been a writer in residence at Hedgebrook, and divides her time between New Mexico and Oregon. I Am Agatha is her first novel.

About I Am Agatha

Agatha, a bristly painter fleeing her own darkness, decamps to rural New Mexico to live the reclusive life of a small-town curmudgeon. It is there she meets Alice, a mild widow with a deepening case of dementia who keeps steady vigil at her daughter’s backyard grave. Despite Agatha’s rough edges and fierce aversion to sentimentality, she surprises herself by falling in love, and her well-worn convictions begin to upend.

As Alice’s condition worsens, Agatha hatches a plan for them to live together at her remote residence at Mesa Portales. But when Alice’s wayward son comes along with different ideas—and Alice suddenly goes missing—Agatha takes matters into her own hands with the help of a faithful thirteen-year-old-neighbor, a pair of shovels, and her trusty pickup, embarking on an unusual mission that calls into question whether some secrets are better kept buried.

Sharp, watchful, at once thrillingly perceptive and hidden from herself, Agatha is as imposing as the vast landscape her rustic adobe home overlooks. Loosely inspired by the life of Agnes Martin, I AM AGATHA introduces us to this irascible, indelible character who learns—over a stretch of strange, singular days—new ways to fathom life, death, and her own heart.

Kiliii Yuyan is a National Geographic photographer, Explorer, and speaker whose work spans the polar regions and cold seas, documenting wildlife and Indigenous communities at the edges of the inhabitable world. In the field, he has faced a stalking polar bear, dived with ancient Greenland sharks, and built relationships with communities from Alaska to Mongolia. The argument at the center of all his work: the world's most beautiful places are beautiful because of the people who live in them. He has photographed 15 stories for National Geographic including three cover features, and his work appears in TIME, Vogue, and WIRED. In 2023, National Geographic honored him with the Eliza Scidmore Award for Outstanding Storytelling. Based in Seattle, he is more commonly found beneath the sea or atop the ice.

About Guardians of Life

How have the world’s most iconic natural wonders—the Pacific’s coral reefs, the Amazon rainforest, the Arctic tundra—remained so vibrant? They have flourished under the careful guidance of Indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Guardians of Life reveals why these communities are the planet’s most effective conservationists. Join National Geographic photographer Kiliii Yüyan, bestselling author Charles Mann, and a chorus of Indigenous contributors on a breathtaking visual journey—from Mongolia’s sacred mountains to Australia’s fire-managed woodlands—celebrating the power of Indigenous values, traditional ecological knowledge, and modern innovation in protecting the life that sustains our planet.

Elissa Minor is the author of the award-winning collection The Prisoner Pear: Stories from the Lake. Her work has appeared in New Letters, Glimmer Train, Juxtaprose, Baltimore Review, The Ledge, and Crab Creek Review, among others. She lives on the north Oregon coast with her wife and their two dogs.

About Another Eve: Shame and Desire on the Oregon Coast

When she walks away from the Mormon church and a twenty five-year marriage, Elissa Minor abandons the only life she’s ever known to embrace her identity as a queer woman. In this intimate memoir, she explores shame, desire, beauty, and acceptance. Minor realizes that her desire isn’t the problem but the solution. Finding solace outside of the church in the wilderness that surrounds her, she eventually begins to understand what it really means to be pure and worthy. On the rugged terrain of the northern Oregon coast, Minor discovers passion and harmony in the grip of nature and in the arms of a lover who will become her wife. In the salty sea air, she learns that her own queerness—though less-charted territory—is like her love of backwoods hiking and that to accept her sexuality, she must take full pleasure in the wild that encompasses her. Poignant and powerful, Another Eve reexamines past truths and celebrates honoring oneself and living authentically. For Minor, the end of her transformation is only the beginning

Brian Laidlaw is an author of the two collections of poetry, The Mirrormaker and The Stuntman . A songwriter and musician, he has released several albums, most recently This Aster . He writes for outdoor magazines including Outside, Climbing, Alpinist, and Orion . Based out of Moab, Utah, he moonlights-often by literal moonlight-as a rock climber.

About Erratica: On Climbing, Language and Touching Stone

After Brian Laidlaw climbed El Capitan, Yosemite’s iconic stone monolith, he found himself facing a repeated question: “So, what was it like up there?” It isn’t enough, he knows, to just to describe the sensation of the rock beneath his hands and feet—a climb is so much more than physical movement. This seemingly simple question initiates Brian’s poetic quest for the perfect metaphor, traveling from the erratics of his youth in California to the towers of his current home in Moab, Utah. He traces lines up moon-washed faces in Indian Creek and edits his body language under boulders in Joe’s Valley. He lives parallel lives and dies parallel deaths on free solos in Colorado, and eventually, back in his childhood stomping grounds in the Sierra Nevada, he writes and revises routes of his own. 

Along the way, he beckons us into a community bound as much by narrative as by rope. They exchange gear, chalk, and advice as they test each foothold and fissure. Kindred strangers knit into traveling bands of belayers, swapping snacks and cautionary tales. Here, any passing climber holds the ability to shift “spontaneously into the best coach I’ve ever known.” Exhilarating and lyrical, approachable yet profound, Erratica invites us to share a rope with this community of climbers, to measure our humanity against the expanse of stone..

Beth Piatote is a Nez Perce writer, playwright, scholar, and Indigenous language activist. She is the author of three books: the scholarly monograph, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013); the mixed-genre collection, The Beadworkers: Stories   (Counterpoint 2019); and the poetry volume, distant water(Milkweed 2026). Her play, Antíkoni, premiered in Los Angeles in 2024. Her scholarly essays, poems, short stories, and other works have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where she co-founded the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization and established the Indigenous Poetics Lab. She is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.

About distant water

Drawing its title from the Nez Perce word for ocean, distant water explores the mysterious process through which language is conveyed from one body to another, moving through waters, kin, memory, and breath. In this meditative, expansive collection, Beth Piatote reveals language as a shared vibration, a life force that sustains an intimate, animate world. Anchored in the Nez Perce homelands of the Northwest, the poems in distant water explore sonic and spiritual ecologies, recognizing land and language as living beings with whom we seek a common mode of expression.

Here, poetic forms mimic the verb-centered structure of Nez Perce language, showing its capacity to express from a single shared root the movement of a sewing needle, the flow of a river, or the memory of a lost love. Language resonates with the land in poems that recall the drumbeat pulse of blood, an echo of grief, the sigh of a dying fire, an archive held in the mouth of a crow. Characters and motifs from traditional stories are recast, celebrating their timeless beauty, humor, and wisdom, and remedies imagined for historical wounds borne by the language itself. Inventive and resonant, precise and playful, distant water is an invitation to enter a vibrant thought world, to dwell in a grammar and sound born of and belonging to Nez Perce homelands and people, a language at once ancient and ever new.

This live storytelling competition invites ten brave souls to step up and share their personal, unscripted tales in front of a supportive audience. No notes, no filters—just you, a mic, and your story.

Come to tell a story or just to listen. The night’s theme is “Origins”. You are invited to share a true, personal story about beginnings: the people, places, moments, or choices that shaped who or where you are today. Maybe it’s where you came from or how a journey started (the more unexpected the better!) or it’s the first sprout of roots tying you to a place. Bring us your stories that are tender, funny, cringey, strange, or tear-jerking. New and seasoned storytellers welcome!