Oregon Book Award Authors at Fishtrap

Mark your calendars for Friday, September 8 as Fishtrap and Literary Arts present a special reading by three of the 2017 Oregon Book Award authors.

Joyce Cherry Cresswell is the winner of the Ken Kesey Award in fiction for her debut novel, A Great Length of Time (Mountain View Press) Joyce fell in love with words as a child. Her crooked path includes working as a trial lawyer and non-profit executive director before retiring to write full time in 2010. She has published in Oregon Humanities Magazine and The Oregonian.

Book description: As a nurse on a Civil War hospital ship, Dr. Rose Barnett hopes someone will apprentice her in the modern art of surgery, but she has more to learn than how to amputate the ruined limbs of Union soldiers. Based on a true story, A Great Length of Time offers a fresh look at the Civil War and the tangled roots of America’s most persistent contradictions.

Bill Lascher is a 2017 finalist in general nonfiction for his book Eveof a Hundred Midnights (William Morrow). He is a Portland-based freelance journalist whose work appears in such outlets as Atlas Obscura, Pacific Standard, The Guardian, The Oregonian and the Portland Monthly. When not writing, he can be found in a darkroom developing his love of film photography or at the flippers of a pinball machine.

Book description: In 2004, Bill Lascher’s grandmother gave him a World War II-era typewriter that once belonged to her cousin, but the real gift was the story behind it. Eve of a Hundred Midnights recounts that story of two newlywed journalists who together endured bombs in wartime China and were chased by Japanese forces across the Pacific.

Eliot Treichel is the winner of the 2017 Readers Choice Award for hisbook, A Series of Small Maneuvers (Ooligan Press). He is also the author of the story collection Close Is Fine, which received the Wisconsin Library Association Literary Award. Originally from the Northern Wisconsin, he’s lived in Oregon since 2001. He currently teaches writing at Lane Community College in Eugene.

Book description: After Emma inadvertently causes an accident that claims her father’s life on a wilderness canoe trip, she struggles to reconcile her sense of identity with memories of their strained relationship.