Fall 2011
Charles Goodrich
Charles Goodrich worked for twenty-five years as a professional gardener, and has also worked as a correctional work crew supervisor, a short-order cook, and a carpenter. He is the author of two volumes of poems, Insects of South Corvallis, and Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden, as well as a collection of essays about nature, parenting, and building his own house, The Practice of Home. He also co-edited the volume In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Oregon State University, and presently works as Program Director for the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word at OSU. Learn more about Charles.
Charles Goodrich
Diane Cook
Diane Cook is a writer, audio producer and educator. She studied documentary storytelling at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine and went on to work for public radio's This American Life for six years, receiving Peabody and duPont awards for her work on the show. She returned to fiction writing, and recently finished an MFA in fiction at Columbia University, where she was a Teaching Fellow. She also teaches at the New England Literature Program on Sebago Lake in Maine, an experiential writing and literature program run by the University of Michigan. It is like LARPing if people LARPed Henry David Thoreau's Walden. At the Sitka Center, she will be working on a collection of stories where the mysteries of the natural world weigh heavily on the people trying to make sense of them.
Diane Cook
Kurt Fausch
Kurt Fausch teaches and conducts research on streams, stream fish, and their connections with riparian ecosystems at Colorado State University, where he has worked for nearly 30 years. His collaborative research has taken him worldwide, and especially to Hokkaido in northern Japan where he worked with colleagues over a 15-year period. These experiences were chronicled in the documentary film RiverWebs, directed and produced by Jeremy Monroe of Freshwaters Illustrated, based in Corvallis, OR. The film has been broadcast to >100 million homes nationwide on PBS. He has received several prestigious awards for his research and outreach, including the first International Fisheries Science Price from the World Council of Fisheries Societies (2008). Kurt is currently writing a book for a popular audience to follow on these works, with the goal of engaging the public in understanding the interconnections between streams and rivers and their landscapes, and the importance of conserving these ecosystems.
Kurt Fausch
Patricia Wheeler
Patricia Wheeler is a painter who works in mixed media. Her work is content based and usually contains some form of text. Using an abstract vocabulary she looks for intersections between unrelated elements within a painting. She has exhibited in New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Santa Fe, Oregon, Florida and Maine. She has taught in: Maine at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art; Oregon at the Oregon College of Art & Craft, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology; Wisconsin at the Peninsula Art School, Door County, etc. She lives and works in Deer Isle, Maine, with her husband, J. Fred Woell, metalsmith & sculptor. She has been selected for numerous artist residencies both in Maine and on the west coast. Pat graduated from Rutgers University with high honors in studio art. In 2010 she was again invited as a resident in the drawing/painting department at OCAC in Portland, Oregon to learn silkscreen processes with printmaker Thomas Sprenkle.
Patricia Wheeler
Rita Robillard
Rita Robillard received her MFA and BA degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and attended Cooper Union in New York. Her artwork ranges from traditional painting and printmaking to new-genre installations. Robillard's work has been included in museum and gallery exhibitions, in Santiago, Chile at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Her Fire Lookout Tower video was shown On Contemporary Issues in Art, New York. Her work is included in over twenty public collections including the Portland Art Museum; Yale University Library; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The National Academy of Art, China. Learn more about Rita online or in person at the Augen, Desoto Gallery, Portland, OR.
Cottonwoods, Scroll, by Rita Robillard
Susan D'Amato
Susan D'Amato is an artist interested the visual and conceptual relationships between the human body and universal forms. Her large-scale charcoal drawings depict specific intimate features of the human body as metaphor to contemplate our identity, vulnerability and mortality. Susan received her MFA in Drawing/Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her BFA in Painting, with concentrations in Drawing and Anthropology from the University of Connecticut. She is the recipient of numerous national and international awards and has exhibited her work extensively in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad.
Chasm, charcoal drawing, by Susan D'Amato