Community Events

Darkside Cinema: Movies showing 5/2 to 5/8, showtimes daily, Darkside Cinema, Corvallis. Visit their website for showtimes.

• Jodorowsky’s Dune–PG-13 Part thoughtful tribute, part bittersweet reminder of a missed opportunity, offering a fascinating look at a lost sci-fi legend. 99% on RT!
• Finding Vivan Maier–NR A penetrating exploration of the link between art and obsession and a major discovery of a 20th-century master. 97% on RT!
• Blue Ruin–R Smart, stripped-down, and thrillingly grim, proving that a well-told revenge story can still leave its audience on the edge of their seat. 95% on RT!
• The Lunchbox—PG Charming and whimsical, it's a feast for the eyes. Subtitled Hindi. 97% on RT!
• The Wind Rises–PG-13 This animated film is one of the most rapturously beautiful that Miyazaki has made. Subtitled Japanese.
  
  
  
  
  

Literary Events:

• Random Review Wednesday, May 14th, 2014, 12:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m., Corvallis Library Main Meeting Room, Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of a Mysterious Continent by Gabrielle Walker. Reviewed by Andrew Thurber. Sponsored by the Friends of the Library.
• OSU MFA Reading Series at New Morning Bakery, Thursday May 15, 2014, 7:30 p.m., featuring Adrian Stumpp, Rachel Ratner, Phillip Brown, and Maya Polan.
  
  

Opportunities

• Call for Submissions, Campus Creature Census: We invite students, faculty, staff, and community members to explore campus as a natural environment where sequoias and gray squirrels, rhododendrons and chickadees, lichens, spiders, garter snakes and moss co-create the OSU ecosystem. Register for your creature by April 28, submit your Census entry by May 10. Please check the Campus Creature guidelines for details here.
• Spring Campus Creature Ramble: Sunday, May 4, 9 a.m.-noon, a walking workshop for photography and creative writing; celebrate the distinctive flora, fauna and landscapes of spring with a slow Sunday morning stroll through the OSU campus. Participants will pause at a handful of sites around campus to experience a sense of place. Guides will prompt creative responses to the environment at these locations through photography and writing of any kind. Participants with all types of cameras and with all levels of writing and photographic experience are welcome. Participants will be strongly encouraged to unplug for a few hours and fully experience their immediate surroundings. The ramble will be followed with an evening session—place and time TBD—when participants can share their favorite images and writing from the ramble.
  Free. Open to the first 12 people to register (the workshop can accommodate participants with disabilities). TO REGISTER: e-mail: carly.lettero@oregonstate.edu. Meeting location and other info will be sent upon registration.
• Summer Fishtrap Gathering of Writers 2014: Registration is still open! Join fellow writers July 7-13, 2014 for a week of writing and conversation filled with generative workshops, afternoon breakout sessions, open mic events, evening readings and panel discussions all in the beautiful setting of Wallowa Lake. Our theme this year is What the River Says: The Art of Listening in a Turbulent World as we will celebrate the themes and ideals of poet William Stafford on the centennial of his birth. Workshops still open include: Kim Barnes (fiction/non-fiction), Marv Ross (songwriting), John Daniel (poetry, prose, with an activist bent), Robert Wrigley (poetry), and Amy Minato (a workshop for youth). For full details, see their website here.
• 2014 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize through Calyx Journal Please submit up to three unpublished poems (six pages maximum). Open from March 1 - June 30, 2014, postmarked. Simultaneous submissions are discouraged. The CALYX editorial collective reads all manuscripts first, then selects 10-20 finalists to send to the final judge. See website for full guidelines.
• Short Story Writing Workshop Saturday, May 17th, 2014, 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m., Corvallis Library Main Meeting Room. This workshop is offered in anticipation of Tobias Wolff’s visit to Corvallis on Thursday, May 22, when he will receive the Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement. We will read and discuss samples of Wolff’s fiction and nonfiction and engage in writing exercises focusing on Wolff’s craft and style. Sean Crouch, Keith Scribner, & Dahlia Seroussi of Oregon State University will lead this interactive workshop. For more information, visit the library's website here.
• Sunriver Writer's Conference on June 7-8, 2014 in Sunriver, Oregon. An extension of the Southern California Writers’ Conference (SCWC), which has facilitated over $4 million worth of first-time authors’ book and screen deals, the Summit is committed to helping storytellers break the cycle of rejection and attain a level of exception necessary for their work to succeed in today’s marketplace. For more details, visit their website here.

Ticket Sales: Grass Roots sells tickets for local music events. Please call or stop by the store to see what's currently available.

Thursday, May 1, 7:00 p.m.

LaSells Stewart Center

875 SW 26th Street

Craig Childs

On the Trail of the First People: A Journey into the American Ice Age Sponsored by the Spring Creek Project for ideas, nature, and the written word

Writer and world-traveler Craig Childs will share stories and images from his recent travels into the American Ice Age. Through spectacular images and storytelling, Childs will take us through Paleolithic landscapes from Alaska to Chile to Florida. Childs is a writer who focuses on the relationship between humans and the landscape, often told from mind-blowing journeys in the wilderness. He is a regular commentator for NPR’s Morning Edition, and the author of more than a dozen critically acclaimed books, including Apocalyptic Planet—which won both the 2013 Orion Book Award and the 2013 Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award—and The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild (2009). His work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Men’s Journal, Outside, and Orion. He is a contributing editor at High Country News, and he teaches writing at the University of Alaska in Anchorage, and at Southern New Hampshire University. FMI: Craig Child’s website: http://www.houseofrain.com/

Grass Roots will be selling books at this event.

Friday, May 16, 7 p.m.

Corvallis Public Library
Main Meeting Room

645 NW Monroe Ave.

Amy Schutzer

Spheres of Disturbance

Amy will read from and answer questions about her newly published novel (April 2014), Spheres of Disturbance—a haunting, sensual, and brilliantly cunning novel exploring how we can bear to approach, or even choose, our inevitable end. Amy Schutzer’s first novel, Undertow (Calyx Books, 2000), was a Lambda Literary Award finalist, a Violet Quill Award finalist, and a Today’s Librarian “Best of 2000” Award-winner. She is the recipient of an Astraea Foundation Grant for Fiction and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Finishing Line Press published Taking the Scarecrows Down, a chapbook of poetry, in 2011. She has worked as a U.S. Postal Carrier, a cashier, a bookkeeper, a legal assistant, and a Nabisco factory worker. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Grass Roots will be selling books at this event.

Thursday, May 22, 7:30 p.m.

CH2M Hill Alumni Center

725 SW 26th Street

Tobias Wolff

Stone Award

Tobias Wolff will be presented with the Stone Award at the Portland Art Museum on May 21, and will visit the Oregon State campus in Corvallis on May 22 to give a public reading at the CH2M Hill Alumni Center Ballroom (725 SW 26th Street). In the spring, OSU Master of Fine Arts program students will lead “Everybody Reads” programs featuring a selected book by Wolff.

The biennial award is given to a major American author who has created a body of critically acclaimed work and who has—in the tradition of creative writing at OSU—mentored young writers.

Wolff is best known for his work in two genres: the short story and the memoir. His first short story collection, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, was published in 1981. Wolff chronicled his early life in two memoirs, In Pharaoh’s Army (1994) and This Boy’s Life (1989), which was turned into a 1993 movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. He is also author of the novel Old School (2003).

Grass Roots will be selling books at the May 22 reading.