First Draft Writers’ Series
Third Thursday of each month, always FREE
Check out the list of esteemed writers who have headlined First Draft since 2013.
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Ursula LeGuin reading at First Draft.
The First Draft Writers’ Series brings authors and poets of note to the Pendleton stage to share new work. On the third Thursday of each month people who love the written word gather at the PCA’s Pearson Auditorium to hear our featured authors as well as three to five minute open mic readings by local emerging writers.
“Truly, [First Draft] was one of the best adventures of my writing career, right up there with winning the PNBA awards and being interviewed by Studs Turkel.” – Craig Lesley
Open Mic
NEXT: Join us for a reading with Louise Dunlap
Thursday, January 16, 2025
7:00 p.m. ZOOM ONLY
Having trouble with the link? text or call Roberta and she can email to you!
The First Draft Writers Series kicks off the new year with a Zoom-only reading with a Northern California author, teacher, and elder whose most recent book looks at the history of the Napa Valley. Louise Dunlap will log on to join guests Thursday, January 16th at 7:00 PM. The event is free and open to the public.
Dunlap is sixth generation Californian, twelfth generation on Turtle Island. After teaching in the Boston area for over forty years, she now lives a mile from her birthplace on land of the Lisjan Ohlone (now Oakland, CA). Her recent book Inherited Silence: Listening to the Land, Healing the Colonizer Mind tells the story of her family’s early settlement in California’s now-famous Napa Valley during the region’s violent colonization. Throughout childhood, Louise spent time and lived briefly on land that her family had held since 1857 at the southeast edge of the valley. There she’d learned to love steep hillsides, year-round creeks, majestic oak trees, and wildflowers–without knowing that this beautiful place was unceded homeland of the Mishewal (Wappo).
It took years and the help of many mentors to learn the painful history of the region and her ancestors, who had been land speculators, policymakers, lawyers, and champions of Manifest Destiny. When she wondered where their mindset had come from, the path led back across the country to Massachusetts and the Mayflower, making Inherited Silence a national story that was challenging to write in a way that could lead to healing. The learning did not end with the book’s publication in 2022 but continues in public talks and workshops with settler groups now seeking to end the silences, make repair, and heal the “the colonizer mind.”
Louise attended Berkeley public schools without ever learning about the Ohlone people who had cared for her childhood home. In the 1950s and 60s, she studied botany and literature at UC Berkeley, teaching writing for the first time during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and learning from other students returning from Civil Rights struggles in the South. Although her dissertation focused on a 14th Century English poem, The Pearl, about grief and healing, the times called her to teach not literature but writing, especially writing for social change. Starting at UMass Boston, the city’s new (and first) public university, she has taught in a wide range of venues, eventually creating grad school writing programs in urban and environmental policy and planning at MIT, Tufts University, and similar departments throughout the country. She also offered workshops in peace, labor, and social justice groups both around the US and in South Africa. She served on the Cambridge Peace Commission and was active with tenant and anti-apartheid groups. She wrote on Indigenous solidarity issues for the AFSC’s newsletter, PeaceWork and helped coordinate peace walks with The New England Peace Pagoda, notably the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage in 1998-9. Her work has been included in several pedagogical anthologies and in Yes! Magazine and OnBeing. In 2008 she published Undoing the Silence, a book on writing for social change that is still in use.
Now back in Northern California, she hosts two small writing groups, follows a vibrant range of Land Return projects in her region, and is proud to pay shuumi (a voluntary land tax) to the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. She practices Buddhism with the community of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh where she is an ordained member of The Order of Interbeing.
The Zoom link for the January 16 event can be found at PendletonArts..org and more information about Dunlap’s work can be found at LouiseDunlap.net.
Coming Soon:
January Louise Dunlap, Zoom Only February: Rachel Barton Rachel Barton is a poet, writing coach, and founding editor of Willawaw Journal. She also serves as an associate editor for Cloudbank Books. Her collection, This is the Lightness, was published by The Poetry Box in 2022. Her newest collection, Jacob’s Ladder, was published by Main Street Rag 2024. Barton’s recent publications include SALT, SLEET, Cirque, and the Oregon English Journal. She is at home in the PNW, but also has roots in Alaska, West Virginia, and Indiana. For more information about the author, go to rachelbartonwriter.com.
worked for 30 years. Winter is author of poetry collections, broadsides and performance projects. Her poems have been translated into several languages. Winter’s recent book,
noble scratch, roughly spoken, features visual artist Brad Winter.