And the season continues– Saturday, January 12th.
Details on our readers just below–
Brian Saluskin will share some of the history and biology of the sockeye, or blueback, and their return to our drainage more than a century after their runs up the Cle Elum River were wiped out by dams.
As Cle Elum fish passage biologist for the Yakama Nation, Brian works to collect the sockeye at Priest Rapids Dam and release them into Lake Cle Elum, “making a way” for the sockeye’s return into the Cle Elum, Yakima, and Columbia Rivers. Come and hear about the return of our former neighbor, the sockeye.
Kathleen Flenniken is Washington State’s current Poet Laureate and the author of two poetry collections. Her most recent book, Plume, is a meditation on the Hanford Nuclear Site. Famous, her earlier collection, considers our estimation of ourselves “Aren’t all of us/ waiting to be discovered?” Famous, was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association and also finalist for the Washington State Book Award.
Flenniken’s awards include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust. She’s working to bring poetry and poets to all 39 counties before her two-year appointment ends in February 2014.
Kathleen Smith comes from a long line of Irish immigrant story tellers, and carries this tribal tradition in her bones. Growing up in Montana, as neighbor to the Flathead tribe, Kathleen learned daily the importance of the tribal sense of place and clan. She also had the good fortune to encounter a wide variety of working poets. Influenced most by the Montana poets, Kathleen has been writing since 1965.
She uses her poet’s voice to craft her songs well enough to point us to the great mystery of our own place, rather than to the great war over place. Recent retirement in Roslyn has freed up more time for writing.
Jonathan Evison In his own words, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving is “a story of total collapse, and ultimately, reconstruction. Before it is over, this calamitous journey will cover five states, resulting in one birth, two arrests, and one instance of cannibalism and including a dust storm, a hail storm, several shit storms, and a six-hundred-mile cat-and-mouse pursuit by a mysterious Buick Skylark.” This is his third published novel.
His first novel, All About Lulu, won the Washington State Book Award. His second novel, West of Here, is a historical novel set on the Washington coast. In his teens, Evison was the founding member and frontman of the Seattle punk band March of Crimes, which included future members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden.
There’s an interview from the Seattle times here.