A few of my favorite shots from an unusually sunny midwinter jaunt to the Oregon coast.
Three photographers prepare to shoot the sunset near Haystack Rock.
Found art.
More found art.
Enjoying the day’s end.
Latest Posts
A New Essay of Mine Is Online: How an Oregon Basketball Coach Taught Me to Pay Attention to the Little Things in Coaching, Teaching and Life
(photo from Oregon Quarterly)
I have a new essay up online–in Oregon Quarterly, the University of Oregon alumni magazine. It’s about the Oregon Ducks and going to college and coaching basketball and teaching and learning to focus on the little things in life that make success possible. You can read it here.
Two New Posts on WritingtheNorthwest.com: The Pacific NW Through the Eyes of Rudyard Kipling and Ursula K. Le Guin
Over the past week I’ve put up two new posts on my recently launched WritingtheNorthwest.com website, one by me and one by a former student of mine, David Naimon, the host of the popular podcast Between the Covers.
My post is on a visit Rudyard Kipling made to Oregon in the 1890s, when he fished for salmon on the Clackamas River and visited a salmon cannery. You’ll find what he had to say about each of them by clicking here.
David Naimon’s post talks about the importance of Ursula K. Le Guin‘s connection to the Pacific Northwest (and especially Portland) to the writing of her science fiction classics. You can read that one here.
The Myth of the “Other Place” in Films Set in Oregon
A great new guest post just went up on WritingtheNorthwest.com. It’s by my former student Michael Schepps and explores the myth of the “Other Place” and the Hero’s Journey in Films Set in Oregon. Check it out here.
New Award: 2022 Donald J. Sterling, Jr., Senior Research Fellowship in Pacific Northwest History
I learned this week that I’ve been awarded the 2022 Donald J. Sterling, Jr., Senior Research Fellowship in Pacific Northwest History. The fellowship, given by the Oregon Historical Society, will fund research in the OHS archives for my next book (a biography of a prominent NW figure–details to come) and 1-2 articles for publication in the Oregon Historical Quarterly.
I’m extremely grateful to the people at OHS for this very welcome encouragement as I move more fully into writing history.
Where or What Do We Mean When We Say “the Pacific Northwest”–New Post On WNW Site
If you haven’t had a chance yet to check out my new website, WritingtheNorthwest.com, you might find the latest post interesting. It attempts to answer the question of where and what exactly is the “Pacific Northwest.”
The post offers a number of interesting links, including one to the area covered by the culture of the Coast Indian tribes and one to details about the 9.2 earthquake centered in SW Alaska in 1964 that set Seattle’s Space Needle swaying.
Click here to check out the post.
Audio Version of PURE ACT Released on Audible Today!
TODAY’S THE DAY the audio version of my book, Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax, is being released on Audible! If you click here, you can listen to a short sample.
I’m excited my book will be available to people who need or prefer to listen rather than read, but it’s strange to hear someone else read words I wrote about my own experiences.
New WritingtheNorthwest.com Post: Nature, Stereotypes and the White Default
Fishing, ca. 1920, Asahel Curtis, General Subjects Photograph Collection, 1845-2005, Washington State Archives, Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.wa.gov, accessed: 11-4-21
The photograph here is the illustration for my second post on the new website, WritingtheNorthwest.com. The post is called, “Visions of NW Writing: Nature, Stereotypes and the White Default” and addresses the relative lack of writing by people of color in what we think of as “Northwest writing.”
You can read it by clicking here:
“Visions of NW Writing: Nature, Stereotypes and the White Default”
My New Website, Dedicated to Writing about the Pacific Northwest–Check It Out!
I just launched a new website: WritingtheNorthwest.com. The first post is about a conference held 75 years ago at which writers first discussed what the Pacific NW is and how it should be written about. I’m hoping the new site becomes a forum for discussing literary, historical and contemporary writing about the NW. Check it out!
Halfway Through My Pandemic Project: Reading the Entire Bible in German
In early April 2020, when we were less than a month into the pandemic shutdown, I was going through some old books and found a copy of the Bible in German a friend had given my wife years before. The cover said the writing inside was in “heutigem Deutsch,” which means contemporary German.
I’d never read the entire Bible before and I’d been wanting to improve my German, so I decided to make reading that Bible my pandemic project. I figured if I could average two chapters a day, I could read the whole thing in about three years.
That was exactly a year and a half ago, and yesterday I reached the halfway point in my reading. I still have a year and a half to go, but I have no doubt now I’ll finish. That’s one good thing that has come from this awful pandemic period.
Here’s a look at my low-tech record-keeping:
