Let me toss this on here for good measure

The Columbia Writers Series Presents
Author and Clark College English Professor

David Oates

~ FREE: Thursday, November 19th, 12:00 noon, in the Cannell Room of Clark College’s Cannell Library

David Oates will read from and discuss SteelHead, a work in progress that presents the life story of Ranald “Tole” MacDonald, a half-Chinook, half-Scot adventurer who, in 1848, smuggled himself into still-closed Japan – years ahead of Commodore Perry's famous gunship "opening." From Fort Vancouver MacDonald had travelled halfway around the world searching for what he imagined was the racial/ancestral home of his own, vanishing, Chinook people. Welcomed, but imprisoned in Nagasaki, MacDonald taught fourteen of the Emperor's best scholars, so that Perry later found himself greeted by English-speaking Japanese – MacDonald's students.

In addition, Oates will be reading from his latest book, What We Love Will Save Us. In this collection of brief, intense lyrical essays, Oates finds wildness and grace breaking out in unexpected places – from city streets to mountain peaks – offering a crucial balance to his dramatically personal account of what it has been like to be a "citizen of the regime" during eight years of unprecedented propaganda, torture, waste, and war. What is the right response, when the government that belongs to us goes seriously off course? How does a person's private and creative life relate to the life we share in common? Readable, memorable, smart but straight from the heart – these essays give voice to our shared experience of a dark and frustrating time in the nation's life. This book is about keeping faith and experiencing darkness:

There's a random dangerous rightness abroad in this wide shining world. It's a rightness, not a correctness. We don't need so much to counter other people's errors as to bring the light and joy of that right and beautiful world: what we desire for our planet and ourselves. What we are doing instead of hating and denying and bombing.
Our job is to work on what we love. Daily. With precision and determination.

~About the author:
David Oates writes nonfiction and poetry about urban life and the natural world. Most recently he explored the urban experience in City Limits: Walking Portland's Boundary. In his ground-breaking book Paradise Wild: Reimagining American Nature he challenged environmental sacred cows. His personal essays are widely read in newspapers, through Writers on the Range Syndicate, and in popular, environmental, and scholarly periodicals, including Creative Nonfiction, Earth Island Journal, Orion (forthcoming), High Country News, Northern Lights, etc. In Portland he teaches the Wild Writers Seminar and writing courses at Clark College, Marylhurst University, and (starting in Summer of 2010) Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Author's website: http://www.davidoates.info/.

~Praise from advance readers:
"What We Love Will Save Us is a journey. David Oates knows what kind of place he’s looking for—a place for hope and truth, imagination and renewal. What We Love Will Save Us is. . . compact and expansive, erudite and carnal, playful and angry and full of subjunctive dreaming and inescapable facts."
– Ana Maria Spagna, author of Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: a Daughter's Civil Rights Journey and Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw.

"Personal honesty, humor, zinger endings. . . This is a stirring, creative collection of essays stoked with ideas, some of them urgently of our time and place, some timeless. People with regard for language will reread passages for their genuinely beautiful writing. I got a lump in my throat (and had to take a walk) after I read the final six words: 'Brief lists, perseverance, and long vistas.' AMEN. A mantra for our century."
– Jeff Gersh, founder and principal of NarrativeLab Communications

"There is a tightly wound lyricism to these very American essays, crafted out of bumps and bruises and sheer joys. David Oates is a writer companion you'll want to have as you hike across this beleaguered planet – testy on the switchbacks but more than congenial around the fire; at the end of the day, he always chooses the best campsite."
– Paul J. Willis, author of Bright Shoots of Everlastingness: Essays on Faith and the American Wild.