For fellow Oregon writers, I’m happy along a wonderful grant opportunity for mid-career artists: The James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation has announced the 2025 application guidelines for the Spark Award for Oregon Artists. The Spark Award currently provides $25,000 in grant support to 60 mid-career working artists per year across various disciplines. Awards …
Catalogue Zine is an “environmentalist literary and arts magazine that seeks to encourage nuance in the climate conversation through art and to inspire climate action.” They are now open for submissions for their third issue: Please ensure your submission relates to the overall concepts of our zine (climate advocacy) and the current issue theme (currently …
Thanks to everyone who joined our book launch yesterday. For those who couldn’t be there, here is the recording — in which we share a few short readings and three writing prompts from the book. Hope you enjoy it! PS: Here’s the book Animal Writes.
Midge Raymond reviewed this iconic book back in 2012, with a unique take: I recently revisited Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle—the original edition published by a socialist newspaper in 1905, not the shorter version published by Doubleday, Page (after Macmillan ultimately rejected it) in 1906. It wasn’t surprising to see what had been left out of the …
As we reach the halfway point of 2025 we have another exciting group of books to share. Enjoy! The Secret of Whylder Wood By Elaine Ramsey Park Woods and Whylder Wood have long been safe havens for the creatures living there. But peace has bred complacency, and now a dark threat festers deep in the …
by Allison Carruth The University of Chicago Press, 2025 Reviewed by JoeAnn Hart Think of clouds. Light, airy, floating around in our atmosphere. Therefore, the words “cloud computing” make it seem as if was light and airy too. But no. That name was just a monumental feat of green-washing. Calling computer processing the “cloud” conceals …
A novel by Nini Berndt Tin House, June 2025 Desire is the driving force of any story. What do the characters want? In There Are Reasons For This, Nina Berndt’s thought-provoking debut novel, many of the characters are numb to desire because the world around them is so depressing. And no wonder. The novel is …
Birmingham City University is sponsoring a special writing contest inspired by vegan author Benjamin Zephaniah. This year’s theme is inspired by Benjamin Zephaniah’s poem ‘Nature Trail’, encouraging budding writers to submit poems about the environment, the spaces where they spend their time, the impact of nature on their everyday life, and the importance of looking after …
I was once told that a weed is simply a plant out of place. Indeed, one person’s weed may be another person’s precious resource. In Love Them to Death: Turning Invasive Plants into Local Economic Opportunities, editor Wendy L. Applequist has assembled a diverse mix of essays documenting the many ways that “invasive” species are …
Imagine a lion who decides one day that he will no longer survive off eating animals. This is the premise of Erasmus Joseph Lion by Marvin Rollick, one of a number of new books out in the world. Please have a look! Erasmus Joseph Lion by Marvin Rollick Erasmus Joseph Lion, the proud and powerful …
Even before beginning the research for her book My Dog Always Eats First: Homeless People & Their Animals, Leslie Irvine had been thinking about what it means for a human to care for an animal. A decade before beginning the book, she’d encountered a man, with his dog, asking for money along a median on a …
