Stay home, save lives, and let’s read There, There by Tommy Orange
As Spring has officially arrived, we are incredibly grateful to see the new life budding all around us. While we welcome a return to some sense of ‘normal’, we each have a responsibility to halt the spread of the coronavirus and save the lives of our neighbors and people in our community and beyond. Please join us in following Governor Brown’s request of all Oregonians: Stay Home. Save Lives.
To enrich your time at home, we have a new book that we guarantee will help inspire your imagination and keep you riveted to its pages: Tommy Orange's novel, There, There. A stunning, many-voiced narrative that follows the lives of twelve characters from Native communities, There, There explores themes of reservation versus urban experience and the creative tension between traditional and contemporary adaptive cultural lifeways.
A few weeks ago, we had the pleasure of hearing Tommy Orange speak at an Everybody Reads Literary Arts event in Portland. He shared a term with the audience, “aesthetic arrest,” one that he uses in his novel to describe a moment when immersion in beauty causes everything else to stop. We know moments like these – a blooming quince at this time of spring, an entrancing piece of music.
Standing on the brink of Willamette Falls is like this. The recent closure of most of the papermaking has brought silence to years of activity. It’s given us time to pause and immerse ourselves in the inescapable beauty and reverence that is Willamette Falls.
With much of the industrial activity at the Falls pausing at the same time that our society pauses due to COVID-19, we are allowed time to reflect on this historical moment. What do we see? For over 470 million years the Pacific Lamprey have been making their way up the Falls, yet in the recent industrial era those runs have declined. Since time immemorial, Indigenous people have gathered here, but what do we see today? Whose voices do we hear? And what opportunities for healing lie ahead within the Falls’ landscape and beyond?
As we envision the future of the Falls for our grandchildren and our grandchildren’s grandchildren, these are the questions we are asking as, together, we create a reinvigorated Falls that is a gathering place for all people.
We hope that our weekly book recommendations offer us a way to gather together and be in community with one another. We encourage you to order a copy of There, There from Oregon City’s White Rabbit Gifts at Blank Ink Coffee. They will deliver within a ten-mile radius and you can place your order at: whiterabbitinformation@gmail.com.
Share your moments of “aesthetic arrest” or simply a favorite passage or quote with us on Facebook. We’d love to hear from you!
Please continue to take care of yourselves, your family, your community. We need each other.
STAY HOME. SAVE LIVES.
Warmly,
Andrew and Alexis
