Blog

In today's blog post, Scott Slovic, co-editor of Numbers and Nerves, writes about his encounter with an Allen Ginsberg poem at a museum in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Among the most ecologocially vulnerable places on the planet, Bangladesh also bears the devastating scars of its 1971 civil war, the scale and brutality of which is hard for the human mind to fathom. How can poetry make emotional sense of vast statistics? Read on. 

 The Oregon Historical Quarterly features the scholarship of OSU Press author Michael Helquist with two contributions in its Special Summer Issue on Birth. Helquist analyzes the 1916 visit to Portland by birth control advocate Margaret Sanger and he collaborates with Portland graphic artist Khris Soden to present a graphic comic account of the occasion. Titled “Family Limitation,” the collaboration is the first time the journal has published a history comic. Helquist and Soden wrote the comic narrative, and Soden drew the four pages of comic panels.

I returned to Kauaʻi from my three-week stint at Midway Atoll.  In the end, the Survey Team had counted nests representing more than a million albatross, not including at least another million untallied non-nesters. A week after I got home I was invited to a small social function on a bluff where a few mōlī nested. At the event, the property manager introduced me to his daughter Talia. She read me like a book.

If you’ve ever studied a second language, you’ve probably heard, “If you don’t use it, you lose it.” While some people may feel unaffected that they no longer remember the language they learned in secondary school, entire cultures suffer when the last speaker of that language dies and the language is lost. There is a great importance behind understanding cultures and their practices. This includes how the culture connects with the environment around them. Today Patricia Whereat-Phillips discusses her introduction to research focused on indigenous languages and how she became interested in ethnobotany. In her new book, Ethnobotany of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, Whereat-Phillips documents the ethnobotany of western Oregon indigenous peoples.

The Pacific coast provides beach goers with amazing sites to see. From the cliffs high above, to the tide pools down below, there is something for everyone to enjoy. However, what many people overlook is the hidden world of plants, insects, and parasites. Luckily for us, we have our very own guide! Today we join George Poinar Jr. as he takes his grandchildren down to the beach on an adventure to meet some of the plants and creatures depicted in his new book, A Naturalist’s Guide to the Hidden World of Pacific Northwest Dunes.

There are few experiences in life that are worse than isolation. We all need to have a connection to others and the things that we love. A sense of community is vital to our wellbeing and the best kinds of communities are the ones that we have a passionate connection to. Books can bring us together and allow us to travel through time and space, escaping whatever brings us pain and uncertainty. In his new book, A Week in Yellowstone’s Thorofare, Michael Yochim takes readers on a journey through his personal experiences exploring Yellowstone National Park’s Thorofare. Today, Yochim shares a passage from his Acknowledgements section in which he describes his own experiences with isolation and community while writing A Week in Yellowstone’s Thorofare.

Characters come to life in many ways. Whether they represent aspects of who the author wants to be, or are composed of traits the author sees in others, characters are made up of what the author knows. Today, Judy Li describes her experiences conducting research in eastern Oregon and the joy of having her characters as new friends. Li explains how the characters and world of her new book, Ricky’s Atlas, the sequel to Ellie’s Log, came to life.

According to Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, there are eight different types of intelligence. To say that one of them is more important than the others, or that one should define us all, would be a disservice to those whose strengths don’t lie in that singular intelligence. While not everyone can identify with “naturalistic intelligence,” there are many things we can learn from someone who does. Today, author Kem Luther explains how he came to explore his naturalistic intelligence and how he has applied it to his new book Boundary Layer.

The Oregon Historical Society has named author Michael Helquist the recipient of the 2016 Joel Palmer Award for the best article published in the previous year. Helquist’s article, “”Criminal Operations”: The First Fifty Years of Abortion Trials in Portland, Oregon,” appeared in the Spring 2015 issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly. The annual prize carries with it a $300 award which will be presented during the annual meeting of OHS on May 21.