Thrillers and Suspense
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our guests for the October edition of Literary Ashland were Dr. Erik Palmer, chair of the communications department at SOU, and Caroline Cabral, Editor in Chief of The Siskiyou, the Voice of SOU Students.
Erik is a Digital First educator who helps students learn, think and be better with new technologies. In his most recent scholarly work, he has explored changes in the culture and politics of image-making motivated by the emergence of visual social media platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr.
Caroline has worked both in online media, like The Siskiyou, and traditional news outlets, like the Klamath Falls Herald and News.
