Valley Writers Series Hosts Three Oregon Authors

Oregon authors Charles Goodrich, Marjorie Sandor and George Estreich will give presentations on the meaning of “home” as part of the Valley Writers Series at Linn-Benton Community College on Wednesday, April 18 from Noon to 2 p.m. in the college Fireside Room, second floor Calapooia Center building, 6500 Pacific Blvd. SW, Albany.

Each has written a book that meditates extensively on the meanings of “home.” All three authors, in very different ways, set the literal, hands-on, messy aspects of taking care of home against the larger questions implicit in living and making a family in a specific place.

Charles Goodrich, in The Practice of Home, provides his account of family, gardening, and building a house. He has made a long career as a professional gardener and writer. He is the author of another volume of poems, Insects of South Corvallis (Cloudbank Books, 2003), and his poems and essays have appeared in Orion, The Sun, Open Spaces, Willow Springs, Zyzzyva and many other magazines.

Marjorie Sandor’s books The Night Gardener: A Search for Home, a 2000 Oregon Book Award winner for Literary Nonfiction, and The Late Interiors: a Life Under Construction, a 2012 Oregon Book Award finalist for Creative Nonfiction, link the hands-on practice of gardening with larger questions of family, loss, and change. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, AGNI, TriQuarterly, Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize XIII, Twenty Under Thirty, The Best American Spiritual Writing 2000, and other anthologies. Sandor teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

George Estereich’s The Shape of the Eye: Down Syndrome, Family, and the Stories We Inherit, a 2012 Oregon Book Award finalist for Creative Nonfiction, details an at-home dad’s memoir of raising a daughter with Down syndrome, set against a backdrop of renovation. Estereich is a poet and essayist whose works have appeared in Superstition Review, Eureka Street, My Great Story project, BLOOM, and many others.

The Valley Writers Series is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the LBCC English Department. The series exists to connect beginning writers with professional writers and to stimulate creative writing among area students, to enhance literary awareness in our community and to encourage Oregon writers.

For questions about this event or suggestions for future events, contact Jane White at whitej@linnbenton.edu or Lucette Wood at woodl@linnbenton.edu. For special needs and accommodations, contact the LBCC Office of Disability Services at Phone 541‑917‑4690 or via Oregon Relay TDD at 1‑800‑735‑2900 at least 72 hours in advance of this event.