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Oregon Humanities: Summer 2009
From the Director
By now, many of you know about changes that we’ve undergone here at Oregon Humanities, formerly Oregon Council for the Humanities. (See full story on page 5.) How we embarked on making our work and our programs more accessible and relevant in response to a board-directed vision. How we worked with advertising superstar Jelly Helm this year on creating a new image that mirrored these changes, which in large part hinges on three letters: O. Hm., which is not only an acronym for the organization but what we like to say is the sound of hearing a new idea.
But “O. Hm.” suggests more than just a moment of clarity; it represents a moment of insight that changes the way you think about something. For example, when one of our Conversation Project scholars, Elliott Young (see profile on page 10), led a group in Lincoln City on an exploration of thorny topics—immigration, ethnicity, and culture—they began by listening to each other’s stories and slowly realized that, in some ways, they were all immigrants. When seventy high school students from Ashland to Pendleton to Astoria gathered in Portland this summer at Happy Camp, they asked questions, listened closely, and began to consider how they would move forward with their lives. After a Humanity in Perspective student read about and talked with his fellow students about questions of power, justice, and language, he went on to become a vocal advocate for HIV awareness. And when twenty-five high school teachers (who collectively reach 9,000 students each year) gathered at our Teacher Institute to consider class, mobility, and the American dream, they reimagined how they might inspire their students to become better citizens.
Oregon Humanities is doing good, important work. My hope is that the refocusing we’ve done these past few years will be meaningful to Oregonians and will provide us all with a sense of deeper understanding, insight, and connectedness.
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Staff, advisors, etc.
- Kathleen Holt
- Editor
- Pinch. A Design Office
- Graphic design
- Raina Hassan
- Communications assistant
- Allison Dubinsky
- Copy editor
- Editorial Advisory Board
- Tom Booth
- Brian Doyle
- Debra Gwartney
- Julia Heydon
- Guy Maynard
- Win McCormack
- Kathleen Dean Moore
- Camela Raymond
- Kate Sage
- Rich Wandschneider
- Dave Weich
Contributors
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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