In-Store Reading: Jeff Fearnside with Kim Stafford

Annie Bloom’s welcomes Oregon author Jeff Fearnside for the launch of his new book, Ships in the Desert. Jeff will be in conversation with Portland writer and Oregon poet laureate Kim Stafford.

This in-store reading is first come, first served. Seating is limited. Please be mindful of any store health policies that might be in effect on the night of the reading.

Signed and personalized copies are available for pre-order! Please, please, please include the name for personalization in the order notes; all orders without a name specified in the order notes will be signed only.

About Ships in the Desert:

In this linked essay collection, award-winning author Jeff Fearnside analyzes his four years as an educator on the Great Silk Road, primarily in Kazakhstan. Peeling back the layers of culture, environment, and history that define the country and its people, Fearnside creates a compelling narrative about this faraway land and soon realizes how the local, personal stories are, in fact, global stories. Fearnside sees firsthand the unnatural disaster of the Aral Sea—a man-made environmental crisis that has devastated the region and impacts the entire world. He examines the sometimes controversial ethics of Western missionaries, and reflects on personal and social change once he returns to the States. Ships in the Desert explores universal issues of religious bigotry, cultural intolerance, environmental degradation, and how a battle over water rights led to a catastrophe that is now being repeated around the world.

Jeff Fearnside is the author of two full-length books—the short-story collection Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air (Stephen F. Austin State University Press) and the essay collection Ships in the Desert (forthcoming from SFWP)—and two chapbooks: Lake, and Other Poems of Love in a Foreign Land (Standing Rock Cultural Arts) and A Husband and Wife Are One Satan (Orison Books). His stories, essays, and poems have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies such as The Paris Review, Los Angeles Review, Story, The Pinch, Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest (University of Washington Press), and Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet (Press 53). Fearnside lived in Central Asia for four years and has taught writing and literature in Kazakhstan and at various institutions in the U.S., currently Oregon State University.

Kim Stafford is a writer in Oregon who teaches and travels to raise the human spirit. He founded the Northwest Writing Institute in 1986, and co-founded the Fishtrap Writers Gathering in 1987. He is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including Having Everything Right: Essays of Place, and Singer Come from Afar. In 2018, Gov. Kate Brown named him Oregon’s ninth poet laureate.