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Kate Greene in Conversation With Sian Proctor

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Kate Greene’s Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth (St. Martin’s) is an essay collection inspired by the author's four-month stay inside a simulated Martian habitat. When it comes to Mars, the focus is often on how to get there: the rockets, the engines, the fuel. But upon arrival, what will it actually be like? In 2013, Greene moved to Mars. That is, along with five fellow crew members, she embarked on NASA’s first HI-SEAS mission, a simulated Martian environment located on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawaii. For four months she lived, worked, and slept in an isolated geodesic dome, conducting a sleep study on her crew mates and gaining incredible insight into human behavior in…

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Free

Listen to Learn & Lead: Stories from our Black Community

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

The social unrest in our country isn’t anything new. It has been there along. We don’t have nearly enough spaces where the black voice can be highlighted, uninterrupted and not be dismissed or discounted. With heightened tension on social media and digital platforms we can become desensitized to the injustices that have plagued the black folks in our community for years. Unfortunately, there are still too many people in our community who are unwilling to take off their personal lens of life, so they gain clarity from another perspective. Our hope is that people walk away with a growth in empathy and understanding from a black person's point of view. This is why we are creating a space... to listen, to learn and take action.…

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Free

Justin Taylor in Conversation With Tracy O’Neill

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

When Justin Taylor was 30, his father, Larry, drove to the top of the Nashville airport parking garage to take his own life. Thanks to the intervention of family members, he was not successful, but the incident would forever transform how Taylor thinks of his father, and how he thinks of himself as a son. Moving back and forth in time from that day, Riding With the Ghost (Random House) captures the past's power to shape, strengthen, and distort our visions of ourselves and one another. We see Larry as the middle child in a chilly Long Island family; as a beloved Little League coach who listens to kids with patience and curiosity; as an unemployed father struggling to keep his marriage together while battling…

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Free

Steve Olson in Conversation With Tom Carpenter

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

In the desert of eastern Washington State, far from prying eyes, scientists Glenn Seaborg, Enrico Fermi, and many thousands of others — the physicists, engineers, laborers, and support staff at the facility — manufactured plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and for the bombs in the current American nuclear arsenal, enabling the construction of weapons with the potential to end human civilization. With his characteristic blend of scientific clarity and storytelling, Olson asks why Hanford has been largely overlooked in histories of the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. The Apocalypse Factory (W. W. Norton) offers a new generation this dramatic story of human achievement and, ultimately, of lethal hubris. Olson will be joined in conversation by Tom Carpenter, attorney and Executive Director of…

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Free

Molly Wizenberg in Conversation With Emma Straub

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

From bestselling memoirist Molly Wizenberg (A Homemade Life and Delancey) comes The Fixed Stars (Abrams), a thoughtful and provocative story of changing identity, complex sexuality, and enduring family relationships. At age 36, while serving on a jury, Wizenberg found herself drawn to a female attorney she hardly knew. Married to a man for nearly a decade and mother to a toddler, Wizenberg tried to return to her life as she knew it, but something inside her had changed irrevocably. Instead, she would discover that the trajectory of our lives is rarely as smooth or as logical as we'd like to believe. The Fixed Stars is a taut, electrifying memoir exploring timely and timeless questions about desire, identity, and the limits and possibilities of family. In…

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Free

Bonnie Tsui in Conversation With Crissy Van Meter

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Bonnie Tsui’s Why We Swim (Algonquin) is an immersive, unforgettable, and eye-opening perspective on swimming — and on human behavior itself. We swim in freezing Arctic waters and piranha-infested rivers to test our limits. We swim for pleasure, for exercise, for healing. But humans, unlike other animals that are drawn to water, are not natural-born swimmers. We must be taught. Our evolutionary ancestors learned for survival; now, in the 21st century, swimming is one of the most popular activities in the world. Why We Swim is propelled by stories of Olympic champions, a Baghdad swim club that meets in Saddam Hussein’s palace pool, modern-day Japanese samurai swimmers, and even an Icelandic fisherman who improbably survives a wintry six-hour swim after a shipwreck. New York Times…

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Free

Summer 2020 Online: Turning Life Into Fiction

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“Because something happened to you, you own it. Tell your stories. ~Anne Lamott Often, when we set out to write a story we don’t know where to begin. In this class we will look at the wealth of possibility in our lives, in our family life, our work life, or something a friend has told you that seems perfect fodder for fiction. What is a story that’s often retold to the point of folklore in your family? What is the anecdote that you trot out over a beverage with friends? In this class we will use life as the starter for stories to which we apply our imagination, the skills in our writers’ toolbox, and the joy that comes from being in charge of how…

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$240

Delve Summer 2020: The Case for Oregon Reparations

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of the most culturally-relevant examinations of America’s tradition of systematic economic exploitation, particularly of Blacks. Published in 2016, this Atlantic article, which veers into being a short book in length, looks at the foundational policies of the land: 400 years of slavery, decades of Jim Crow and separate but equal that have set the scene for the massive disparties found in the coutry today. The real human collateral of America’s plunder sets the scene for the question of Coates’ question: why hasn’t the country made a serious attempt into, at the very least, examining reparations. We will pair this reading with Portland State University professor Dr. Karen Gibson’s cutting delve into the effects of racist policies…

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$110

Corbin Reiff in Conversation With Mark Yarm

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Total F*cking Godhead (Post Hill) is the complete story of the complex and enigmatic artist, Chris Cornell. It’s the riveting account of a blue-collar, high school dropout emerging from Seattle, Washington, to become one of the greatest singer-songwriters and voices of his generation. With input from people who knew and worked with him — together with Cornell’s own words — the book recounts in great detail the rise of his immortal band Soundgarden as they emerged from the 1980s post-punk underground to dominate popular culture in the ‘90s alongside other Seattle bands like Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Nirvana. Long-time Seattle resident and rock writer Corbin Reiff examines Cornell’s dynamic solo career, as well as is his time in Audioslave. He delves into Cornell’s…

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Free

SUMMER Online: What My Stomach Says: Food Writing Workshop w Zahir Janmohamed | Aug 8

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

If you did a scan of my brain, food would probably occupy at least 70% of my thoughts. And for good reason: food is an incredible vehicle to speak about pleasure, pain, history, family, nostalgia, place, race, gender, class, sexuality, colonialism—you name it. In this generative class, students will be asked to think about a dish that they love. It could be savory or sweet. They will then write the opening of an essay about this dish as well as the recipe for this very dish. We will then conclude the class by discussing ways to get this piece published. Register for this workshop NOTE: To protect everyone during the COVID-19 pandemic, we're offering our workshops via Zoom. All students must first sign up for a free Zoom account. Setting…

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$65 – $83
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