Our May 2020 guest was Amber McGee. Amber is a Creative Writing major and English minor at Southern Oregon University and winner of this year Outstanding English Minor award. She is a club officer for the Multi-Racial Student Union, Queer Student Union, and Creative Writing Club. Her previous writing experience includes being book columnist and editor-in-chief of the James Logan Courier, as well as receiving the 2018 Outstanding Student award for English at Ohlone College. She has been published in Southern Oregon University’s Main Squeeze, inQluded‘s first issue, “Welcome Home,” and will be featured in Mixed Rice Zine’s “Queering Friendships” edition.
Literary Ashland with Alma Rosa Alvarez and Michelle St. Romain Wilson
Our April 2020 guests were Alma Rosa Alvarez and Michelle St. Romain Wilson. They just published a collaborative book of poetry entitled Promised Fruit. Alma Rosa is a professor of English at Southern Oregon University. 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.
Michelle St. Romain Wilson has taught creative writing to children and teens through the Oregon Writing Project at Southern Oregon University (SOU) and the Academy program at SOU. She has a BA in English from Loyola University, New Orleans and an MA in English and Creative Writing from California State University, Sacramento. She is the wellness program manager at La Clinica, an organization which offers affordable, quality health care services to underserved communities in Southern Oregon.
Literary Ashland with Rebel Heart Books
Our March guests were Eileen Bobek and Marcella Bell of Rebel Heart Books in Jacksonville, Oregon. Since 2017, Rebel Heart Books has been an important presence in Jacksonville. As they state on the bookstore’s website: “Independent bookstores are not just physical spaces to house books. They anchor communities. They house real people and ideas, stories of love and hope, pain and loss, failure and redemption and any emotion and circumstance that can be imagined or experienced. Their fuel is a belief in the written word. They take care of people.” In this interview, they tell us how the bookstore grew from an idea to reality, how they choose books and the role an independent bookstore plays in a small community.
Literary Ashland with Ed Battistella and Michael Niemann
The February 2020 edition of Literary Ashland was a little different from our usual routine. Given the uncertainty about the station’s new location, we didn’t invite any guest. Since both Ed and I have new books coming out this year, we decided to spend the half hour talking about them.
For those of you who may not know this, Ed Battistella teaches Linguistics at Southern Oregon University. He is the author, most recently, of Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology. His new book, also published by Oxford University Press, is entitled Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President, Washington to Trump.
My next Vermeulen thriller, Percentages of Guilt, will see the light of day sometime this year. The current shutdowns due to SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID19, the disease it causes, has thrown a wrench into the schedule. We’ll see how that develops. In any case, give it a listen, you’ll learn something about each of our books.
Literary Ashland with Ryan Pfeil
Our January guest on Literary Ashland was Ryan Pfeil, a reporter and web editor for the Ashland Tidings and the Medford Tribune.
Note: the audio file is incomplete, because I was late to the station, and didn’t get everything set up properly. That’s why the first minutes are missing. The recording was also cut off at the end for reasons that escape me. I do hope you enjoy the rest of the interview. My apologies for the poor handling of my responsibilities.
