Our March guest was Tim Wohlforth. Tim, an Ashland resident, has been writing fiction and nonfiction writer for more than forty years. He has published over seventy short stories and six novels, including the Jim Wolf series. He’s also published a number of non-fiction works, including On The Edge: Political Cults Right and Left and his memoir The Prophet’s Children. Over the past months, Tim has been rewriting his ecothriller Harry as a play. A staged reading of the play was performed at the Ashland library on March 25, 2019.
Literary Ashland with Clive Rosengren
Our February guest on Literary Ashland was Clive Rosengren. Clive, a South Dakota native, is a veteran actor with stage, screen and television credits that include the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, Ed Wood, Bugsy, Twin Peaks, and Cheers.
He’s also the author of four novels featuring actor/private investigator Eddie Collins: Murder Unscripted, Red Desert, Velvet on a Tuesday Afternoon, and most recently Martini Shot.
Literary Ashland with Steve Dieffenbacher
Our first guest of 2019 was Steve Dieffenbacher. He is a poet and travel writer, whose full-length book of poems The Sky Is a Bird of Sorrow was published by Wordcraft of Oregon in 2012. The collection won a ForeWord Reviews 2013 Bronze Award for poetry.
Steve’s poem, “Emptiness,” was the winner of the 2010 Cloudbank poetry prize sponsored by Cloudbank magazine of Corvallis, Oregon. His poems are also included in numerous anthologies including Deer Drink the Moon, a 2007 anthology of Oregon poetry published by the Ooligan Press at Portland State University; in the chapbooks Universe of the Unsaid, 2009; Voices of the Siskiyou, 2006; and At the Boudary, 2001. His work is also in the anthology, Intricate Homeland: Collected Writings form the Klamath Siskiyou, published in 2000, and in A Path Through Stone, a cycle of poems with three other co-authors.
Literary Ashland with Sharon Dean
Sharon Dean grew up in Chelmsford Massachusetts where she and her two siblings rode bikes, read books, and visited the historical sites made famous by the Pilgrims, the Revolutionaries, and the many famous writers of New England’s nineteenth century. From Massachusetts, it was a small leap to the University of New Hampshire and a degree in English. Armed with a Ph.D. and facing a declining job market, Sharon spent several years laboring on the adjunct teaching circuit before she began a full-time career at Rivier University in Nashua, New Hampshire.
Four academic books later, Sharon has become professor emerita and has moved to Ashland, Oregon. Embracing a change she never anticipated, Sharon is learning to bike and hike and garden in the Siskiyous instead of the Whites. She has sworn off books that require footnotes and has reinvented herself as a writer of mystery novels.
Literary Ashland with Melissa Matthewson
Our November guest was Melissa Matthewson. Melissa lives on a small mountain homestead in the Applegate Valley of southwestern Oregon. She is the author of a collaborative chapbook, (un)learning, with Andrea Beltran from Artifact Press (2016). Her essays have been published in numerous places including DIAGRAM, Mid-American Review, Guernica, River Teeth, and Bellingham Review among other publications.
Her first book of nonfiction, Tracing the Desire Line, is coming out in 2019 from Split Lip Press. The book, as memoir-in-fragments, follows the narrator’s journey as a pirate radio DJ, writer, mother, and organic farmer exploring identity, sexuality, and feminine desire through opening her marriage with her husband.
Melissa also teaches writing and literature at Southern Oregon University.
