Check out the latest books by our Terroir Presenters

 

 

 

 

Barbara Drake, Morning Light

Drake articulates the lessons she’s learned from her long stint of country living in her new book, Morning Light. Replete with records of native wildflowers, an encounter with an elderly man who lived on her farm eighty years ago, and an old family recipe for wild blackberry pudding, Morning Light is an appreciation and exploration of the landscape of western Oregon, and readers will come to know it better through the book.

Drake will be presenting a nonfiction workshop, Creative Nonfiction: Making Life into Literature, at this year’s festival.

 

 

 

 

Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

In her evocative first novel, Denfeld, a boxer and author of the hard-hitting nonfiction book, All God’s Children: Inside the Dark and Violent World of America’s Street Families (2007), seeks to revolutionize our perception of convicts. One of three nameless narrators, a man on death row, states that prison is a place of enchantment. He convincingly describes the mythic beauty of his dank dungeon before introducing the other two mysterious speakers, the jail’s fallen priest and a woman hired to exonerate the condemned men. Referred to only as “the lady,” she serves as the plot’s catalyst. She is enlisted to spare an inmate named York, who was doomed to misery long before he became a criminal. Denfeld’s humanizing of the potential for horror that is within all of us and her insistence that the reader see the beauty in the darkest corners of life sizzles through her sharp prose, which both makes us flinch and invites us to imagine. Those familiar with the world of corrections will especially appreciate Denfeld’s nuanced portrait of prison life. –Amber Peckham, Booklist

Denfeld will be giving a keynote talk on writing from experience as part of the festival.

 

 

 

 

 

Adam Gallardo, Zomburbia and Zombified

My name is Courtney, and I don’t sell Vitamin Z at the Bully Burger anymore. These days my friends and I spend our after-school hours kicking zombie butt. Half the school is mad at me, even though I’m the one keeping their gray matter off the menu. And my dad won’t let me talk about going to Columbia next year, even though the Army’s clearing shufflers out of NYC.

These fast new super-zombies are pretty scary, and if it wasn’t for the new guy’s awesome moves we’d be toast. Between him, my maybe-boyfriend Phil, and my Z-head ex Brandon, stupid boys are going to lead the undead right to my doorstep. They can chase me all they want–whatever else happens, I am going to get the Z out of Zomburbia.

Gallardo will be holding a workshop on how to write for YA audiences as part of the festival.

 

 

 

 

 

Harold Johnson, Citizenship

Harold Johnson’s Citizenship is a down-to-earth good read. These accomplished poems are built on hard-earned wisdom, rich with human situations every reader can recognize as his or her own. Johnson teaches us how to comprehend our lives through the close-up lens of everyday particulars and the long-view lens of global and historical concerns. He reminds us that we ve been given the gift of citizenship in a diverse and miraculous world where, amidst tragedy and conflict, compassion triumphs. Out of the heart of the neighborhood, Johnson writes, music from/ the Good Humor van rises, rolling this way.

Harold Johnson will be holding a joint poetry reading with Stephanie Lenox at the festival.

 

 

 

 

Stephanie Lenox, Congress of Strange People

Commune with the Leopard Man. Strut with Bernie, the world’s oldest male stripper. Fly through the air with the Amazing Cannonball Couple. With humor, insight, and a deep appreciation for the beauty of the world, the voice-driven poems in Stephanie Lenox’s debut collection sing a collective ode to our common strangeness.

Lenox will be holding a joint poetry reading with Harold Johnson at the festival.

 

 

 

 

 

Lisa Ohlen Harris, The Fifth Season: A Daughter-in-law’s Memoir of Caregiving

Just after our tenth anniversary, my husband and I bought a large home together with his widowed mother and established an extended-family household. When my mother-in-law’s health began to fail, I became her primary caregiver. This memoir explores the struggles and intimacies of caregiving and end-of-life issues.

Harris will be offering one-on-one editorial sessions as part of the festival, please schedule ahead.

 

 

 

 

 

Paulann Petersen, Understory

As with a forest’s understory — the level of vegetation growing under its canopy — these poems bear the shadows of a darker realm. Informed by myth and archetype, Paulann Petersen’s work grows close to the earth, frequently delving into the chthonic. Occasioned by a wide geography and characterized by a large embrace, Petersen’s work celebrates both the singular and the quotidian, both the sidereal and the earth-bound — including poems for her furrier grandfather, for a revered poet’s first spoken word, for Hinduism’s sensuality, for a star-map painted on deer hide. Here a reader encounters a voice steeped in the music of the English language, a voice intent on the musical possibilities of poetry’s open and nonce forms. In these pages, a reader finds a voice indebted to the power of metaphor — the capacity of metaphor to transform both language itself and the way we humans see this world. Understory is the sixth full-length collection of poems from Petersen, who was Oregon’s sixth Poet Laureate.

Petersen will be giving a two-hour workshop on writing to create ourselves.

 

 

 

 

 

Peter Sears, Small Talk

Published by Lynx House Press, Small Talk gathers poems from Peter Sears’ eight previous collections, and adds thirty entirely new poems. The many admirers of his poetry will be delighted to find so many old friends back in print and under a single cover. Eclectic, comic, disarming, deadly, and ever fresh and surprising, these poems offer a feast of necessary delights.

Peter Sears will be giving a keynote address at the festival.

 

 

 

 

 

Samuel Snoek-Brown, Hagridden

As the Civil War winds violently down, fears of the South’s uncertain future fuse with its unraveling traditions. Against the backdrop of this post-apocalyptic landscape, so littered with corpses and mythology and desperation, two women, stranded and alone in the Louisiana bayou, fight to survive.

Snoek-Brown will be holding a workshop on getting the details right in historical fiction.