Home 
Features GO Magazine Northeast Oregon poets to read from new books
Northeast Oregon poets to read from new books
 Misha Nogha is the award-winning author of poetry and prose volumes. (Submitted photo). LA GRANDE - The First Thursday Reading series will feature two Northeast Oregon poets who have new books out from La Grande publisher, Wordcraft of Oregon, LLC. The reading is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Sept. 6 at the Community Room of the Cook Memorial Library. "Paper Bird" is Pamela Steele's first full-length book of poetry, though she previously published a chapbook of poems ("Other Rivers' Distant Song," Spring Tree Press, 1997). Pamela is a Fishtrap Fellow who recently completed her MFA from Spalding University of Louisville, Ky. While in the writing program there, she was honored with the Jim Wayne Miller Poetry Prize from the Kentucky Writers Coalition. A turning point in her career came halfway through the MFA Program when two mentors, separately on the same day, told her it was time she got honest and stopped writing around what she wanted to say. "Up to that point, I'd been using imagery to flirt with ideas, but I'd never written about the difficult topics I've since addressed." Debra Magpie Earling, author of the novel, "Perma Red," attests to the result of Pamela's turning point when she says "Paper Bird is a luminous collection. Honest and spare. Wistful and haunting." Sentiments echoed by the poet, Frank X. Walker. "Steele's poems are honest and visceral. They get under the skin and instruct us on how to squeeze our eyes tight and still see real beauty in the world. An important collection of love letters to everything that bleeds." Pamela was recently awarded an artist's fellowship from Jentel Foundation and spent a month living and writing on a working cattle ranch in Wyoming. "That lifestyle attracts me," she says, "especially the landscape of the West, so I started a chapbook of poems about my experiences on my partner's small horse outfit on the Umatilla Indian Reservation. My father was a West Virginia boy who came out to Oregon to be a horseman, so that's a thread of my life that I want to keep." Pamela teaches at Hermiston High School and hopes to teach at the college/university level. Misha Nogha, like Pamela Steele, draws much of her inspiration from an active relationship to the landscape of the West and her daily experience with the horsebreeding operation in Cove, which she shares with her husband and composer, Michael Chocholak. "Mapgies & Tigers" is her fifth book. Many of the poems in this collection revolve around the coalescing of animals and animal spirits in mythic alignments with Norse and Native American traditions realized on a forty acre farm called Badger Sett. "I want to show you that a tiger is not just a large cat, but a power of the Universe through which all powers of the universe can be manifested," Misha says. "When the spirit of tiger ghosts through your soul, you are more alive than you were before. A Magpie is not just a black and white corvid, but a bird through which you can experience The Void. The Void, or Ginnungagap is not nothingness, but everythingness." Misha Nogha is the award-winning author of prose and poetry volumes, "Prayers of Steel" and "KeQuaHawkas" and the novel, "Red Spider White Web." "Red Spider White Web" won the 1990 Readercon Award and was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke award. Misha also won the 1989 Prix D'Italia with her piece, Tsuki Mangetsu which was performed by two Australian artists. "My fictions are tour guides to the multiverse; a stone is not merely a rock, but a small living mountain, a horse is karmic psychic energy, a cat is the Great Mystery and the seidr-working shamaness is the one person who connects you with your own fate, that special place in the wheel of time which is uniquely yours. The meditative mythologies of Magpies and Tigers' are meant to unleash us from the tethers of the mundane." The reading is free to the public. Books will be available for sale before, after and at break. Both poets will sign copies of their books after the reading. Refreshments will be offered. The event is sponsored by the non-profit group, RondeHouse Media Arts Konsortium. Donations, of course, are welcomed. |
