Thrillers and Suspense
I’ve started translating some German poems that speak to me. They’ve been translated before, and I don’t claim to offer anything new. Still, it is good writing exercise and sometimes, I have a different sense of the German than the other translators.
Our June guest was our colleague Alma Rosa Alvarez. She’s a professor of English at Southern Oregon Unversity where she’s just ended her term as chair of the department. Alma Rosa received her PhD from the University of California at Santa Barbara. At SOU, she teaches U.S. Literature with a specialty in U.S. Ethnic Literature. She loves the way literature guides students through new experiences. Her research interest is in the formation of the Chicanx canon.
And, she writes poetry, the reason for our interview.
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.
Pepper Trail is a naturalist, photographer, writer, and world traveler who has lived in Ashland since 1994. He works as a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and in his spare time leads natural history trips to every corner of the world, including Jackson County.
Pepper is a regular essayist for the Jefferson Journal and for High Country News, and his writing has been included in several anthologies, including Intricate Homeland and What the River Brings: Oregon River Poems.
In 2009, he published Shifting Patterns: Meditations on Climate Change in Oregon’s Rogue Valley, a collection of essays and poems, with photographs by Jim Chamberlain and himself. Pepper’s poetry has appeared in the Jefferson Monthly, Windfall, Kyoto Journal, Borderlands, Comstock Review and many other publications. His writing combines a scientist’s insights with deeply personal meditations on memory, mortality, and the human place in the natural world.
The September edition of Literary Ashland Radio focused on the upcoming Ashland Literary Arts Festival, scheduled for October 28 at the Hannon Library on the SOU campus. Tod Davies, Vice President of the Board of the Friends of the Hannon Library, explained this years event and how it’s different from earlier years. Have a listen.
