Saturday, October 28, 5:30-7 PM: Author Event: Oregon Poet Charles Goodrich reads from his first novel, “Weave Me a Crooked Basket,” with Oregon Book Award Poet Clemens Starck
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Reviews for Weave Me a Crooked Basket:
“You can tell that Charles Goodrich is both a gifted writer and an attentive gardener, giving us a heartening story that is grounded in the way that land and people can heal each other. He has cultivated characters so memorable that I missed them as soon as I read the last page.”
—Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the New York Times bestseller Braiding Sweet Grass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants
“Goodrich masterfully weaves an intricate and deeply satisfying story. It’s a beautiful book in its rich language and profoundly honest voice—funny and smart in its observations. Weave Me a Crooked Basket is a thrilling read and a much-needed antidote to our time, reminding us we can fully embrace the power of the human spirit.”
—Keith Scribner, author of Old Newgate Road, winner of the 2020 Connecticut Book Award
“I haven’t read a novel in a long time that felt this hopeful, this authentic in feeling, in landscape, in the complexities of the lives of its people—ordinary people who are not only farmers and gardeners but artists and biologists and immigrants, wives and husbands, sisters and brothers. It’s a marvelous book, written with immense compassion and honesty, insight and detail. I loved it.”
—Molly Gloss, author of The Jump-Off Creek and The Hearts of Horses
“Weave Me a Crooked Basket is the good news we've been waiting for: community matters, love heals, care and attention are the greatest of gifts, art is wonderfully re-arranging, the rich soil, well-tended, holds us all, and the work, despite our griefs, goes on. Charles Goodrich has written an exceptionally beautiful, life-giving novel.”
—Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die and The Mountain and the Fathers
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Biographical Note:
Charles Goodrich is the author of The Practice of Home and four widely read books of poetry: Watering the Rhubarb, A Scripture of Crows, Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden, and Insects of South Corvallis. He is also coeditor of two anthologies: F orest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest and In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens. His poems and essays have appeared in Orion, High Country News, The Sun, The Ecopoetry Anthology, Poetry of Presence and many other journals and anthologies. Garrison Keillor has featured Goodrich's poetry more than a dozen times on The Writers' Almanac.
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Biographical Note:
Clemens Starck was born in 1937. A Princeton dropout and former merchant seaman, he has supported his literary and intellectual interests for more than fifty years by working with his hands, mainly as a carpenter and construction foreman. He is the author of six books of poetry, including STUDYING RUSSIAN ON COMPANY TIME, OLD DOGS, NEW TRICKS, and CATHEDRALS & PARKING LOTS: COLLECTED POEMS, and has performed his poems widely throughout the West. In 1998, Starck was the Witter Bynner Fellow at Willamette University and received both the Wiliam Stafford Memorial Poetry Award and the Oregon Book Award in Poetry for his collection, Journeyman's Wages (Story Line Press, 1995). A widower, he has three grown children and lives on forty-some acres in the foothills of the Coast Range in western Oregon.
