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Spectacle
Oregon Humanities: Spring 2013
Here, Not There
A wife looks to the Greeks when her husband is called away to war.
At first, I found my solace in Penelope. It was May, and I was in my garden planting radishes when I learned that my husband would be leaving our home in two months and ten days, headed to Iraq to serve as a truck driver in an Army infantry unit. He would be almost seven thousand miles away. In my state of astonishment, I imagined it as a trip through time, too: he would be “over there,” engaged in a medieval battle in camouflage and chain mail. I would be sitting on a cliff somewhere north of Dublin, my brown wool skirt billowing in the wind, listening for the echo of my husband’s voice in the spray off the ocean’s cold waves, knitting socks for our three sons.
Conflicted, in denial, mixed up, I turned to the Greeks.
Penelope is a worthy paragon. Described as “constant” by Homer more than a dozen times in The Odyssey, she is a symbol of marital fidelity; according to Margaret Atwood in The Penelopiad, a retelling of the Greek myth, Penelope is high priestess of the goddess cult of women left behind. Her husband was away for twenty years, some of it fighting in the Trojan Wars (perhaps nobler than our modern wars because they were started over the love of a woman), much more of it variously wandering the Mediterranean and being held love-hostage of the demigoddess Calypso. Homer calls Odysseus “wise but unlucky”; a lesser man, similarly adventurous, might be called “a rolling stone.”
There are, says Peter V. Jones in his introduction to the Penguin Classics revised version of The Odyssey, two possible Homeric interpretations of Odysseus: as the loyal hero-husband, whose only goal is to return home; or as a mean, selfish, deceitful husband. I imagine my husband telling me when taking leave that I should remarry when my toddler grows a beard. I narrow my eyes in suspicion. I hum to myself, “All he left us was alo-oh-oh-one.”
It is hard to say which interpretation Penelope herself might have settled on. It is equally challenging to find a modern Army wife who will admit on record to being an “antihero.” And next to Penelope or any one of millions of war wives throughout history and our Western literary canon, the modern Army wife has it made. Blessed with tours of duty as little as five or six months, and no more than fifteen months, and given the possibility of near-daily communication with our loved ones, how can we take a place in the time-honored tradition of epistolary romances, the trope of the waiting wife, the indefinite and virtuous fealty of so many women who came before us? Is “away at war” even, really, away, when fathers can still give good tongue-lashings via webcam and watch on Hulu the same TV shows that their wives watch at home? Today, members of the Army can tweet, post on Facebook and Flickr, and blog. When I consider the technology of “away” in today’s world, I wonder if the Army wife’s relationship with her husband is all that different from that of the wife whose husband works long hours in a tall office building while she comments on his Facebook posts with loving irony.
But when I read the waiting-wife literature of 2009, I find a distinct lack of irony. What I do find is a twelve-step program. Army wife Melissa Seligman suggests in a New York Times essay that today’s constant communication is the very enemy of constancy. She writes of her contact with her husband, “I wanted to be delighted, to drop everything when the instant messenger paged me, when he gave up badly needed sleep to be with us. But sometimes I couldn’t help being annoyed at the interference. I needed unbroken routines in order to be both a mother and father to my children. At times, I wished he wouldn’t call.” Her book about her husband’s second tour of duty is filled with references to the buzzing of her computer, the signal that her husband was available on instant messenger. Her book, and the video podcasts she creates with another Army wife, are filled with the patois of loss: they must go through anger, denial, bargaining, acceptance.
As I discover that my husband’s mobilization has been delayed, and delayed again, I settle satisfyingly into the framework of denial. His departure date is always—and as I write, still—two months away, and this reinforces the construct of mythology, time travel, chimera, literary whim. I read that Homer added seven years onto Odysseus’s captivity by Calypso solely to give his son Telemachus time to grow up and create the necessary conflict. I don’t know whether to drolly shake my head—funny Homer, you gave Penelope an extra seven years of solitude to make your math work out right!—or to hate him.
Both Seligman and Atwood have diagnosed the waiting wife as an angry woman. Seligman’s feelings toward her husband swing from heroic to antiheroic in one page, and it is the wily Odysseus I read about in her words. “I feel betrayed and abandoned,” she writes. “I feel tricked, cheated. I am overwhelmed and short of breath.” Atwood is funnier, but no less biting: her Penelope seethes toward Helen and lets the twelve slaughtered maids voice her anger toward Odysseus, who still cannot stay at home, even in Hades, and keeps heading toward the River Lethe to be born again, leaving Penelope to peek in on him in séances.
Are we modern and ancient spouses really so much alike? When I compare myself and other wives of Army and Marine reservists and Oregon National Guard soldiers to Penelope and the long-suffering and stoic wives of wars past, I am ashamed to admit to any hardship. Here, life goes on much as it does for anyone whose partner is occasionally or permanently distant. I fail to see in myself the oft-weeping Penelope. I look at the painting of her by Joseph Wright of Derby, unraveling her web, and I see even less recognition. This woman has a depth, a disconsolance, a distance, I have never known and never could know.
I have known sadness only in the dailiness of life, the bickerings brought on by unwashed dishes and ill-spent money; the more desperate arguments over dire misunderstandings and disparities in the functionality of our extended families. We are here in the trenches of ordinary civilian marriage. He is here, he is so very much here, and I alternate between embracing his closeness and wishing he were already away, taking with him the anticipation and dread and fear.
Penelope gets it all: anticipation, dread, and terror, two decades’ worth. Penelope had but this: the songs of traveling minstrels, some that gave her hope and most that caused her maids to whisk her up to her room where she could weep, despairing, until bright-eyed Athene closed her eyes in sweet sleep. Penelope’s husband had set upon her a vexing bargain: that she would remarry when she saw a beard on the chin of Telemachus, who was only an infant when Odysseus set sail. The soothsayer Halitherses had foretold it would be twenty years before Odysseus would return. Which would come first? Surely it would not take a diviner of signs to understand that the beard may come before the conquering hero.
In twenty years, Penelope raised a headstrong son who loved his mother but desperately doubted her. (“My mother certainly says I am Odysseus’s son; but for myself, I cannot tell,” he confides to Athene, when the goddess is disguised as his father’s friend Mentes.) He is impatient, incautious, worried only about instigating his mother’s tears. It takes the extremity of her cunning to devise the ruse to put off her insolent suitors by weaving a shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes, undoing the stitches every night after the suitors have tired of watching her needlework, having promised she would choose one of them to marry only when the shroud had been completed.
In twenty years, Penelope never has the favor of direct messages from the gods and has lost all of her in-laws through death, retirement, or marriage. When her deception is discovered by her suitors, she learns that her only son has gone off on a fool’s errand, in search of news of Odysseus. She has nothing but her loom, her famous constancy, and her husband’s things to keep her grief from overcoming her.
In place of a dozen handmaidens, I have sisters and friends; instead of wraiths sent by goddesses (who, even in Penelope’s dreams, will not tell her plainly that Odysseus is alive, equivocating instead), I have e-mail, webcams, Google chat. I read about Seligman’s middle-of-the-night conversations with her husband and imagine that my husband and I might be even closer half a world apart, favored by the gods of fiber optics with a spectrum of communication media. Who needs a god masquerading as my sister in my dreams when I can retweet my husband’s status updates in real time? And scar or no scar, I’ll surely be able to recognize my husband upon his return, unlike Odysseus’s wife, who had to resort to secrets and clever tests to identify him. I’ll have dozens of photos from his Facebook album to click through at my leisure.
I write about Seligman on my blog, and she writes to me, telling me that she turns to James Joyce’s Molly Bloom as a role model, not Penelope. “The choice to stay, struggle and all, rather than the sense of duty, is the propelling altruistic virtue, in my opinion,” she writes. But instead of the romance of the waiting war wife, all she finds in her own life is reality. “Only bombs, charred bodies, and PTSD loomed over our relationship,” she says, and her children, Telemachus-like, are “impatient … angry … questioning … blaming their mothers.”
I cannot identify with Homer’s Penelope for other reasons—too weepy, too suspicious, too wishy-washy—nor can I relate to Atwood’s catty, jealous, profane wife. Modern soldiers are not away, I decide, idly plotting a series of husband-wife video podcasts, wondering, when I see a story in the local paper about soldiers running a leg of the Hood-to-Coast relay via satellite from Iraq, if I can find him a team before he leaves.
Perhaps I am sodden with denial. But then I remember Tennyson. I forgive him for calling Penelope the “aged wife” and characterizing Ithaca as “barren,” for Tennyson’s rhythms drop heavily into my lilting, twittering conscience. “Much have I seen and known,” his Odysseus says, “… and drunk delight of battle with my peers, / Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. / I am a part of all that I have met.”
And with a thud, it hits me that it is not the number of miles or hours it takes to fly home, or the milliseconds’ delay in our voices as they reach each other, nearly seven thousand miles apart. It is what my husband will drink, how he will delight of battle and thunder and sunshine, death and sailing beyond the sunset. It is who he will wake up next to, eat with, the souls he will have toiled and wrought and thought with. It is far, so far that I cannot possibly see, I cannot bathe in the Middle Eastern stars, cannot strive, seek, find. This distance is what I must yield to soon, in a minute or a month or a century: that he will be gone—away, over there—and I will be here.
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Contributors
Eric Gold
Eric Gold is a freelance writer in Portland.
Eric Gold
Eric Gold is a freelance writer in Portland.
Alex Behr
Alex Behr is a writer in Portland. Her last piece for Oregon Humanities appeared in the spring 2009 “Nostalgia” issue.
Eric Gold
Eric Gold is a freelance writer in Portland and regular contributor to Oregon Humanities.
Kristy Athens
Kristy Athens’ nonfiction and short fiction have been published in a number of magazines, newspapers, and literary journals, most recently High Desert Journal, Eclectic Flash, Diverse Voices Quarterly, and Five Fishes Journal.
Rich Wandschneider
Rich Wandschneider was the founding director of Fishtrap, a literary nonprofit in eastern Oregon, and is now building the Alvin Josephy Library of Western History and Culture at Fishtrap. He writes a regular newspaper column and has written for the Oregonian, High Desert Journal, High Country News, and others. He is on the editorial advisory board of this magazine and on the board of directors for Oregon Humanities.
Ellen Santasiero
Ellen Santasiero is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Northwest Review, The Sun, Marlboro Review, Oregon Humanities, and in a recent anthology from the University of Oklahoma Press. She is at work on a memoir.
Caroline Cummins
Caroline Cummins is the managing editor of Culinate.com.
Jedidiah Chavez
Jedidiah Chavez is a visual artist and writer based in Portland. His work has been showcased in a variety of venues nationally and in the Pacific Northwest. Chavez was awarded a 2010 project grant by the Regional Arts and Culture Council.
Kristin Kaye
Kristin Kaye is a Portland-based writer. Her book, Iron Maidens, was an Oregon Book Awards finalist. She has recently completed her novel To Catch What Falls.
Lucy Burningham
Lucy Burningham is an independent writer and journalist who lives in Portland. She holds a master’s degree in nonfiction writing from Portland State University.
Eric Gold
Eric Gold is a freelance writer in Portland and former communications assistant at Oregon Humanities.
John Frohnmayer
John Frohnmayer is chair of the Oregon Humanities board of directors.
Sarah Gilbert
Sarah Gilbert is writing a book about mothers looking for emotional healing in food. In February, she decided to begin homeschooling her eldest son.
Courtney S. Campbell
Courtney S. Campbell is the Hundere Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University. You can try friending him through his Facebook page.
Barry Johnson
Barry Johnson has written about the arts since 1978 when he started writing about dance for the now-defunct Seattle Sun. He has edited arts sections at Willamette Week and The Oregonian, where he recently finished a twenty-six-year stint. You can find his up-to-the-minute thoughts on the arts at http://artsdispatch.blogspot.com.
Nancy Rommelmann
Nancy Rommelmann’s recent books include Transportation, The Bad Mother, and The Queens of Montague Street, a memoir of growing up in 1970s Brooklyn Heights that was excerpted by the New York Times Magazine. She is a long-form journalist whose work appears in the LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Byliner, and other publications.
Phil Busse
Phil Busse recently took the position of editor of The Source, a weekly paper in Bend. He also continues to serve as the executive director for the educational nonprofit Media Institute for Social Change and is an adjunct instructor at Portland State.
Sarah Mirk
Sarah Mirk is a Portland journalist who often writes about gender, sexuality, and politics as the online editor of Bitch magazine and as the author of the forthcoming book Sex from Scratch (Microcosm, 2014). Her other interests include writing comics and talking to strangers.
Courtney Campbell
Courtney Campbell is Hundere Chair in Religion and Culture and professor of philosophy at Oregon State University. He is also an Oregon Humanities Conversation Project leader for the program “Friendship: Reviving, Surviving, or Dying?”
M. Allen Cunningham
M. Allen Cunningham is the author of the novels The Green Age of Asher Witherow and Lost Son, and the recipient of a 2013 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission. His story collection, Date of Disappearance, was recently published in an illustrated limited-edition by Atelier26 Books and his first nonfiction volume, The Honorable Obscurity Handbook, is forthcoming. He leads an Oregon Humanities Conversation Project program on the subject of e-reading.
Dan DeWeese
Dan DeWeese is the author of Disorder, a story collection, and You Don’t Love This Man, a novel. He is also the editor in chief of Propeller, a web magazine.
Margaret Malone
Margaret Malone’s work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Swink, Coal City Review, latimes.com, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2009 Oregon Literary Fellowship and a 2011 Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship. She lives in Portland with her husband and son.
Dave Allen
Dave Allen is director of interactive strategy at NORTH, a branding agency in Portland. He is also an adjunct lecturer in digital strategy at the University of Oregon, as well as the founding member and bass player of the UK band Gang of Four.
Dmae Roberts
Dmae Roberts is a Peabody-winning radio producer and Oregon Book Award–winning writer. Her work has been on NPR and published widely. She is a USA Rockefeller Fellow and received the Dr. Suzanne Award for Civil Rights and Social Justice from the Asian American Journalists Association. She lives in Portland with her hubby and twin kitties.
Brian David Johnson
Brian David Johnson is a futurist at Intel. His book Vintage Tomorrows: A Historian and a Futurist Journey Through Steampunk into the Future of Technology, coauthored with James H. Carrott, wil be published next year by O’Reilly Media. He is featured in Oregon Humanities’ Bring Your Own video series. This essay was written on a 747 somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.
Mott Greene
Mott Greene is a historian of science and technology. He was an Oregon Humanities Think & Drink presenter earlier this year for a program about the future of human and artificial intelligence. A former MacArthur Fellow, he is affiliate professor of earth and space sciences at the University of Washington. He admires Portland’s civic life and wishes Seattle could figure that out.
Jill Owens
Jill Owens works in marketing for Powell’s Books. She enjoys interviewing authors as part of her job and for publications like Oregon Humanities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dionisia Morales
Dionisia Morales is a freelance writer and teaches writing at Linn-Benton Community College. Her essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in CAYLX, Brevity, Cream City Review, and Silk Road.
Wendy Willis
Wendy Willis is a poet, Conversation Project leader, and the executive director of the Policy Consensus Initiative and the deputy director for Research and Development at the National Policy Consensus Center at Portland State University. Her book of poems, Blood Sisters of the Republic, is forthcoming from Press 53 in fall 2012.
Carl Abbott
Carl Abbott is professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University. A specialist on the history of cities, his recent books include Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West and Portland in Three Centuries: The Place and the People.
Monica Drake
Monica Drake is the author of Clown Girl (Hawthorne Books),which was optioned for film by Kristen Wiig. Her next novel, The Stud Book, is forthcoming from Hogarth Press in February 2013.
Tara Rae Miner
Tara Rae Miner is a freelance writer and editor, former managing editor of Orion magazine, and author of Your Green Abode: A Practical Guide to a Sustainable Home. She lives with her family in Portland.
John Holloran
John Holloran lives in Portland and teaches at Oregon Episcopal School. His last essay for Oregon Humanities was “After the Fall” (Spring 2011).
Rebecca Hartman
Rebecca Hartman is an associate professor of history at Eastern Oregon University. She received her PhD in history from Rutgers University in 2004. Her current research is focused on twentieth-century U.S. rural history.
Dmae Roberts
Dmae Roberts is an award-winning independent radio producer and writer based in Portland.
Jennifer Ruth
Jennifer Ruth is a professor of English literature at Portland State University and the author of Novel Professions, a book of literary criticism.
Richard J. Ellis
Richard J. Ellis is the Mark O. Hatfield Professor of Politics at Willamette University. In 2008 he was named Oregon Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and in 2007 he was chosen as Oregon Scientist of the Year by
the Oregon Academy of Science. His book The Development of the American Presidency is forthcoming from Routledge in January 2012.
Leigh van der Werff
After ten years in Oregon, Leigh van der Werff now lives in central California, where she runs a record store with her husband and their dog, Edgar. When she’s not at the shop, she’s writing essays and music criticism.
Joanne Mulcahy
Joanne Mulcahy teaches creative nonfiction and humanities classes at the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, where she is codirector of the Documentary Studies Certificate Program. Her writing combines memoir and personal essay with ethnographic exploration. Her book Remedios: The Healing Life of Eva Castellanoz was published by Trinity University Press in 2010.
Marion Goldman
Marion Goldman has passed through the social worlds of Rajneeshees, Jesus People, and Nevada prostitutes. In her latest book, The American Soul Rush (forthcoming in December 2011), she describes how a small group of 1960s seekers at California’s Esalen Institute cultivated and spread spiritual alternatives ranging from transpersonal psychology to yoga to Zen golf. She is professor of sociology and religious studies at the University of Oregon.
Guy Maynard
Oregon Humanities editorial advisory board member Guy Maynard is the editor of Oregon Quarterly, the magazine of the University of Oregon, and the author of The Risk of Being Ridiculous, a historical novel of love and revolution set in Boston in the the late 1960s, into which he managed to slip several Red Sox references. He lives in Eugene.
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri is an associate professor of religion and humanities at Reed College in Portland. He is the author of A History of Islam in America (from which this selection is excerpted) and Competing Visions of Islam in the United States. He was also a faculty member at the Oregon Humanities Teacher Institute in July 2011.
Tim DuRoche
Tim DuRoche is a writer, jazz musician, artist, and cultural advocate. He works as the director of programs for the World Affairs Council of Oregon. Tim hosts the The New Thing, a weekly jazz program on KMHD-89.1 FM in Portland, is currently developing a program on jazz and community values for Oregon Humanities’ Conversation Project, and is the author of the recently published collection of essays, Occasional Jazz Conjectures.
Walidah Imarisha
Walidah Imarisha is a founding editor of AWOL, a national political hip hop magazine and has toured nationally and internationally as part of the poetry duo Good Sista/Bad Sista. She has taught in Portland State University’s Black studies department and leads three Conversation Project programs for Oregon Humanities on hip hop, the history of race in Oregon, and reenvisioning the prison system.
Kim Stafford
Kim Stafford is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College and author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Elegant Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft. This essay is a section from his book-in-progress, 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do.
Debra Gwartney
Debra Gwartney is the author of the 2009 memoir Live Through This, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Oregon Book Award, and the PNBA award. She is currently working on a memoir about growing up in the West and the heritage of Narcissa Whitman, a project for which she received a research grant from the American Antiquarian Society. Debra lives on the McKenzie River with her husband, Barry Lopez, and is on the nonfiction faculty at Pacific University.
Susan Meyers
After growing up selling corndogs and cotton candy at carnivals up and down the West Coast, Susan Meyers extended her gypsy lifestyle by spending several years in Latin American before coming home to the Pacific Northwest. Her work has recently appeared in CALYX, Dogwood, Terra Incognita, and The Minnesota Review, and it has been the recipient of several awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship. She teaches writing at Oregon State University.
Matthew Stadler
Matthew Stadler is a writer and editor in Portland. He writes about cities and urbanism for journals including Volume, Netherlands Architecture Bulletin, Domus, and Camerawork. His book about urbanism, Deventer, is forthcoming from 010 Uitgevrij, in Rotterdam. In 2009 he cofounded Publication Studio (http://www.publicationstudio.biz) in Portland.
Amanda Waldroupe
Amanda Waldroupe is a freelance journalist living in Portland. Whenever she fails, she buckles down and tries, tries again.
John Holloran
John Holloran lives in Portland and teaches at Oregon Episcopal School, where he is the chair of the history department. His last essay for Oregon Humanities was “Under a Spell” (Summer 2009).
Scott Nadelson
Scott Nadelson’s most recent book is The Cantor’s Daughter. A new collection of his short fiction, Aftermath, is forthcoming from Hawthorne Books in Fall 2011. He teachers creative writing at Willamette University. His latest essay for Oregon Humanities was “Go Ahead and Look” (Spring 2010)
Todd Schwartz
Todd Schwartz is in reality a very serious and reserved person who divides his time between being a Calvinist minister and a funeral home director. Wait…wait! A funeral home director and a Calvinist minister walk into a bar…
Courtenay Hameister
Courtenay Hameister is the host and head writer of LiveWire Radio, the co-creator of “Road House: The Play!,” a screenwriter and filmmaker. In her spare time, she likes to imagine what it would be like to have more spare time.
Ariel Gore
Ariel Gore is the author of seven books including Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), from which this selection is excerpted. She is also the founding editor of Hip Mama, and editor of the Lambda-award-winning anthology Portland Queer. She teaches creating writing online at the University of New Mexico and The Attic in Portland.
Jamie Passaro
Jamie Passaro lives in Eugene, where she is a freelance writer and an editor for Northwest Book Lovers, a blog produced by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. Her last essay for Oregon Humanities was “Driving Mrs. Spacely” (Summer 2008).
Andrew Guest
Andrew Guest is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Portland. When not watching, playing, coaching or writing about soccer, he does research on youth developmental and educational experiences through sports, arts, and service activities.
David Bragdon
David Bragdon served on the Portland regional Metro Council for nearly twelve years and was elected president in 2002. The major accomplishment of his service was an expansion of the regional parks and natural areas network known as the Intertwine. He resigned from the Metro Council in September 2010 in order to accept New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s appointment as director of the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability.
M. Allen Cunningham
M. Allen Cunningham is the author of Lost Son, a novel about the life of Rainer Maria Rilke. His first novel, The Green Age of Asher Witherow was a #1 Booksense Pick and was shortlisted for the Booksense Book of the Year. He’s the recipient of an artist fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission and a Yaddo residency. His third novel, set partly in the Pacific Northwest, is forthcoming.
Bette Lynch Husted
Bette Lynch Husted lives and writes in Pendleton. She is the author of Above the Clearwater: Living on Stolen Land (OSU Press, 2004) and At This Distance: Poems (Wordcraft of Oregon, 2010). Lessons from the Borderlands, her collection of memoir essays about teaching, class, gender, and race, is forthcoming from Plain View Press. She is a 2004 Oregon Book Award and WILLA finalist and was awarded a 2007 Oregon Arts Commission fellowship.
Bob Bussel
Bob Bussel is associate professor of history and director of the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon. He has published numerous articles on labor history and contemporary labor issues, including a history of the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. He is currently working on a book about working-class citizens.
Dave Weich
Dave Weich is the president of Sheepscot Creative. The Portland-based company fosters engaging and profitable communication among businesses, consumers, colleagues, and fans. Weich is on the editorial advisory board of Oregon Humanities magazine.
Camela Raymond
Camela Raymond is a Portland-based writer whose work has appeared in Modern Painters, Plazm, the Oregonian, and elsewhere. She was previously an editor at Portland Monthly magazine and the founding editor/publisher of the Organ. She serves on the editorial advisory board of Oregon Humanities magazine.
Scott Nadelson
Scott Nadelson’s most recent book is The Cantor’s Daughter. He teaches creative writing at Willamette University.
Karen Karbo
Karen Karbo‘s three novels, as well as her Oregon Book Award–winning memoir, The Stuff of Life, have all been named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her most recent book is The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman.
Lisa Radon
Lisa Radon has written about art and design for Portland Spaces (as associate editor), Portland Monthly, Surface Design Journal, SHIFT (Japan), FLAUNT, Hyperallergic, and ultra (ultrapdx.com). She’s written a handful of catalog essays and is working on her first book.
R. Gregory Nokes
R. Gregory Nokes has worked as a reporter and editor for the Associated Press and the Oregonian. His reporting about this incident has resulted in a formal designation of the massacre site as Chinese Massacre Cove. He lives in West Linn.
Christine Dupres
Christine Dupres is the former director of the Office of Sustainability and Community Engagement at the Native American Youth and Family Center in Portland. She is a freelance writer and an Oregon Humanities board member.
Apricot Irving
Apricot Irving is a writer and radio producer whose most recent project, Boise Voices Neighborhood Oral History Project , brought together elders and youth in Northeast Portland. She has lived in Haiti, Indonesia, and the United Kingdom, but currently calls Portland home.
Brian Doyle
Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, and the author most recently of Thirsty for the Joy: Australian & American Voices, from One Day Hill Press in Melbourne, Australia.
Lucy Burningham
Lucy Burningham is an independent writer and journalist who lives in Portland. During the past decade, she has traveled on assignment for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and Lonely Planet guidebooks. She holds a master’s in nonfiction writing from Portland State University.
Vicente Martinez
Vicente Martinez lives in Portland and works at a fast food restaurant.
Susan W. Hardwick
Susan W. Hardwick is a professor of geography at the University of Oregon. Her research and teaching focus on the geography of immigration, identity, and place in the Pacific Northwest. She is the author or co-author of nine books, including Russian Refuge: Religion, Migration, and Settlement on the North American Pacific Rim (University of Chicago Press, 1993). This article is adapted from Hardwick’s Commonplace Lecture that she delivered for Oregon Humanities in 2007.
Sarah Gilbert
Sarah Gilbert is a writer and photographer who lives in Portland with her husband and three little boys. She writes about food and finance for several web sites, including DailyFinance, WalletPop and Culinate, is cofounder of the Portland parenting resource urbanMamas.com, and keeps a blog, cafemama.com.
Kevin Nute
Kevin Nute is a professor of architecture at the University of Oregon. He is the author of the American Institute of Architects award-winning monograph, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan (1993) and Place, Time and Being in Japanese Architecture (2004).
Commentary
Interesting post. I know communication with one’s family is easier now than it has been in other wars. And the fact that some communication can even be seen as an interruption really floors me but I can understand that..the ease of communication is taken for granted.
My father served overseas in Korea and Viet Nam and I remember my mother getting a red and white air mail envelope and how treasured those letters were. We got to talk with my dad one time on the phone when he was in Viet Nam thanks to the MARS (don’t remember what it stood for but had something to do with Ham radio operators…another era).
Glenn Sojourner | 28 Apr at 08:44 PM
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