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Summer 2012 : Fight
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Oregon Humanities: Summer 2012
Full Spectrum
Idea Lab and other OH programs help bring the world to Josephine County.
After twenty years of working as a self-employed fishing guide, Gary Enoch, a native Oregonian and Josephine County resident since 1964, returned to college in his mid-40s to become a high school teacher. While he misses spending every day on the river, he says, “This was something I was meant to do.”
Now in his tenth year of teaching language arts at Illinois Valley High School, Enoch is one of twenty Oregon secondary school teachers chosen as an Idea Lab Teaching Fellow for the 2012 Idea Lab Summer Institute, a three-day residential program for Oregon high school students that takes place at the University of Portland in July.
Enoch believes Idea Lab is important for his community, which is tucked away in the southwestern corner of the state. “We are pretty remote,” he says, “and it’s easy to get a narrow perspective on the world, but coming to Idea Lab opens students’ minds up to a broader spectrum of concepts, ideas, and perspectives that they don’t have much opportunity to see in our little town.”
Josh Free, a senior at Illinois Valley, participated in Idea Lab (then called Happy Camp) last year. “It affected my final year of high school by helping me make better decisions,” he says. “I realized how important it is to get through school and accomplish your life goals.”
High school students and teachers aren’t the only ones benefiting from Oregon Humanities programs in Josephine County. In 2012, several readings, discussions, and events happened in the region because of Oregon Humanities Grants, the Conversation Project, and the Oregon Poet Laureate program (which is administered by OH).
Kate Lasky, executive director of Josephine Community Libraries, says, “Ongoing events like these provide the residents of Josephine County with unique opportunities to broaden the scope of their imagination, to think critically about and participate thoughtfully in larger trends in our culture.”
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- Jen Wick
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Oregon Humanities magazine examines topics of broad public interest from a variety of perspectives and approaches. Recent issues of this publication have focused on stuff, nostalgia, and civility. Through good and thoughtful writing, Oregon Humanities magazine enriches our understanding of important subjects and stimulates conversation and reflection among readers, their friends, families, colleagues, and neighbors.
Contributors
Camas Davis
For more than a decade Camas Davis has been a magazine editor and writer for national magazines such as National Geographic Adventure and Saveur, and local publications such as Portland Monthly, Edible Portland, and Mix. In 2009, she traveled to France to study butchery. Upon her return, she founded the Portland Meat Collective, a traveling butchery school.
Eric Gold
Eric Gold is a freelance writer in Portland.
J. David Santen Jr.
J. David Santen Jr. has written about books, business, the environment, and communities for the Oregonian, the Portland Business Journal, and other publications. He lives in Portland.
Jill Owens
Jill Owens works in marketing for Powell’s Books, where interviewing authors is the most interesting part of her job. She’s originally from the South but has lived in Oregon for eleven years and is here to stay.
Jim Lommasson
Photographer Jim Lommasson received the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University for Shadow Boxers: Sweat, Sacrifice & the Will to Survive in American Boxing Gyms. Previous publications include Oaks Park Pentimento. His photographs have been widely exhibited in museums and galleries.
John Frohnmayer
John Frohnmayer is chair of the Oregon Humanities board of directors.
Margot Minardi
Margot Minardi is an assistant professor of history and humanities at Reed College, and the author of Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (2010). She is currently working on a history of the nineteenth-century American peace movement.
Sarah Gilbert
Sarah Gilbert is a writer, photographer, struggling urban farmer, mama to three boys, and military wife in southeast Portland. She is editor-in-chief of the new literary magazine for parents, Stealing Time, and is working on two memoirs and at least one novel.
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