Community Calendar

Monday August 3rd 7:00 to 8:00 pm
The Road to Parenthood is a heartfelt, honest story about one family’s unexpected path to becoming a multicultural, multiracial household. After several miscarriages and unsuccessful attempts with in vitro fertilization, Barbara found that the road to becoming a mother looked very different from what she had imagined. Drawing on her experiences as a white mom raising a son born in Vietnam and twin daughters born in Ethiopia, she shares the joys, the grief, and the hard-earned lessons of building a family that doesn’t “match” in the ways people expect. This book is for parents, educators, and anyone who loves true stories of perseverance, identity, and belonging—and for readers who want to better understand families that don’t look like their own.
Join Barbara Robertson, local educator and author of The Road to Parenthood, for an evening of story, reflection, and conversation about what it really means to create family across loss, race, culture, and country. She will talk about her journey through miscarriages and in vitro fertilization, how that grief shaped her path to international and transracial adoption, and the challenges and resilience that have defined her family. The talk will explore perseverance, identity, and what she wishes more people understood about kids and parents in families like hers—and how communities, schools, and neighbors can better support families that don’t fit the traditional mold. There will be time for questions and open discussion.

Wednesday August 12th 7:00 to 8:00pm

Melissa Eleftherion (she/they) is a writer, a librarian & a visual artist. Born & raised in Brooklyn, they are the author of four poetry collections: field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018), gutter rainbows (Querencia Press, 2024), Suture (Cooper Dillon, 2026) & Malocchia (White Stag, 2026) & 12 chapbooks from various presses. Melissa lives in Northern California, where she served as Poet Laureate for the City of Ukiah, manages the Ukiah Branch Library & curates the LOBA Reading Series.

Lisa E Baldwin, poet, editor, and publisher, lives in the Lower Applegate Valley. She founded N8tive Run Press during Covid lockdown in 2020. N8tive Run has recently become a community-building tool lifting rural voices in two anthologies, The Gathered Poems from Poetry for the People 2025, and Poetry for the Planet 2026:Voices from the Rogue Watershed. Baldwin has published two poetry books, Truths and Consequences (2021) and Jerome Prairie Creation Myths (2023).

Tuesday, August 18 • 7:00–8:00 PM

Join us for an evening with local author Max Doty, award-winning screenwriter, game writer, and novelist, as he celebrates the launch of his chilling new horror novel.

What if your dream home was alive—and hungry?

Seeking a fresh start, Claire and her family leave a declining San Francisco for the promise of suburban tranquility. But their beautiful new house harbors a terrifying secret. Flowers wither overnight. Eggs are found empty. Beloved possessions vanish without a trace. Soon Claire discovers the impossible truth: the house is consuming anything that was once alive—and only its owners remember what has been lost.

As the home’s appetite grows and Claire becomes entangled in its dark power, she realizes that some hungers can never be satisfied.

Blending psychological dread, dark humor, and relentless suspense, Max Doty’s latest novel is a wildly original take on domestic horror. Meet the author, hear about the inspiration behind the book, and celebrate the launch of what promises to be one of the season’s most unforgettable reads.

Free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase and signing.

Monday August 24th 7:00 to 8:00 pm

The revived Knights of the Ku Klux Klan flourished in Oregon in the early 1920s. With more than sixty chapters established in both large and small communities like Portland, Medford, Astoria, and La Grande, the Klan’s power escalated in the region. Klan salesmen, working on commission, successfully enlisted Oregonians with a message of religious prejudice and racism. At the Klan’s peak, Portland was home to the sixth largest chapter in the country and there were more members per capita in Oregon than in any other state except one.

In Peddlers of Hate, journalist Steve Law draws on published and unpublished sources, new research, and interviews with leading scholars to provide a comprehensive account of how Oregon became one of the Klan’s strongest outposts. Representing the Klan as merely a fraternal lodge, Klan recruiters were trained to vilify Catholics, immigrants, Blacks, and Jews. They gained wide support, toppling an incumbent governor and congressman, persuading voters to ban Catholic schools, and winning control of the legislature and several local governments. From stories of “escaped nuns” to fiery crosses at mass Klan rallies at Salem’s state fairgrounds and Portland’s Mount Tabor Park, Law examines this divisive and forgotten time in Oregon’s history. He shows how it was finally greed, hypocrisy, and corruption that spurred the hate group’s demise–providing historical lessons that will resonate today.

Peddlers of Hate is the first comprehensive statewide history of the Ku Klux Klan in Oregon by retired Oregon journalist Steve Law.

“Peddlers of Hate provides a penetrating look into the 1920s Ku Klux Klan in the Beaver State. Meticulously researched and written in a lively style, the book places Oregon’s once-powerful KKK into its proper national context. Steve Law thoroughly explores in detail major personalities and events that marked the Oregon Klan’s rapid rise and its subsequent decline.” —Jeffrey Max LaLande, author of The Jackson County Rebellion: A Populist Uprising in Depression-Era Oregon

Steve Law is a retired Oregon newspaper reporter and editor.

Monday September 14th 7:00 to 8:00 pm
Local author and President of the Friends of Cathedral Trees Sanctuary, Dr. Diana Cunningham spent a decade researching and writing The Natural American Way of Death, after her mother died of Alzheimer’s Disease in 2012. Cunningham began to “connect the dots” from her mother’s disease, her cause of death, and the crematory vapors containing unsafe levels of mercury from dental fillings and body stores. Her research developed into finding compassionate solutions to the problems revealed in Jessica Mitford’s bestselling book in 1962. Now, this 21st century groundbreaking book provides the reader with an uplifting and comprehensive manual in navigating your natural deathcare plans with over 60 color photos, rare interviews of movers and shakers in the American movement, and how to create and document your deathcare decisions. After co-leading an OLLI Class at SOU in 2020, Dr Cunningham realized that natural deathcare 1) needed to be made affordable, 2) deathcare choices needed to be restored from ancient traditions with the offering of a native tree or wildflower graveside planting as part of a larger restoration, and 3) people had a right to know about the connections between mercury emissions of the conventional industry, Alzheimer’s, and other public health epidemics. Find out why there’s a nationwide revolution begun 30 years ago that’s sweeping the country and how our own local project developed into the first restoration non-profit cemetery that’s now licensed and located right here in our region’s best kept secret, Mt. Ashland’s Colestin Valley. Learn about why certified natural burials are the only mercury-responsible choice in deathcare, and how your decision affects our planet and our local public health for at least 225 years into the future. Get inspired to move forward with your own beautiful plan, whether you are aged 18 or 80!”

Explore democracy, civic engagement, and social change through thought-provoking books and discussions. This club delves into historical and contemporary works that highlight the power of participation in a democratic society. Join us to read, reflect, and connect with others passionate about making a difference. All are welcome!

We will read:
It Can't Happen Here – Lewis Sinclair (March 19)
Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World – Anne Applebaum (April 16)
The new Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness – Michelle Alexander (May 21)

Wednesday September 23rd 7:00 to 8:00 pm

A gripping tale of murder and pursuit set against the shifting Sierra Nevada during the Gold Rush, where ambition, violence, and destiny collide.

“What Came West is astonishing. Unraveling the mythology of the Western with a genius for insight and description, Weil tells the story anew: a beautiful, ruminative, bloody, terrifying and brilliant book about a chapter in the life of one man and in the life of our country. Unmissable.” –Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less

Sierra Nevada, 1840s, just before the Gold Rush ignites. Silas Hall has never belonged anywhere except the wild. Bullied as a child and uneasy even within his own family, he finds brief solace in love and fatherhood before the pull of the frontier overwhelms him. One day he heads west, chasing a life that might finally make sense.

What follows is a swift, pulse-pounding journey into the mountains, where Silas becomes one of the first white settlers to cross into the Sierra Nevada. He forges a precarious peace with the Indigenous people who live there–until the Gold Rush crashes in with violent force. As thousands flood the region, the balance shatters, and Silas commits murder, a desperate act that alters the course of every life around him, including his own.

Taut and propulsive, What Came West is told in two parallel voices–one a tense, third-person account of Silas on the run, and the other a confessional letter from Silas to the son he left behind–and confronts many different forms of American inheritance, in all its danger, emotional voltage, and mythic momentum. Weil’s masterpiece is a fierce, heart-driven portrait of an outsider racing toward belonging and barreling headlong into consequence.

Thursday October 1st 7:00 to 8:00 pm

Enter a forest of poems about patience, grace, and wonder. About discovering the code of abiding life already within us. When We Become Trees cultivates the tension of becoming: rooting down while reaching up and trying to see heaven on earth—trying to find the divine even among the rocks around us. This is a book for those who, like trees, are willing to grow “ring-slow but steady.”

Anna Elkins is a poet and painter. She earned a BA in art and English, an MFA in poetry, and a Fulbright Fellowship to write in Germany. She has written, painted, and taught on six continents, exhibiting paintings and publishing books along the way, including her poetry collection, Hope of Stones, which won an Oregon Book Award. Anna now lives in a small town on a big river with her husband and many trees. For more, visit: annaelkins.com.

Painter and writer Jacalyn McNamara has worked as a freelance journalist, college writing teacher, and manager of California’s oldest art center, always attending to the poetry and music woven through the world. Her poems move through the personal, cultural, historical, and mythological, exploring thin places where spirits slip through and territories that are unstable or paradoxical. Her work has appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Midwest Poetry Review, Jefferson Journal, and elsewhere. Most recently, she has been writing poems to accompany artist Betty LaDuke’s Turtle Wisdom exhibit.

Monday October 12th, 7:00 to 8:00 pm

Part adventure narrative, part philosophical inquiry, and part love letter to climbing and natural spaces, Erratica is a radiant exploration of what happens when a human body meets the earth with full attention.

After Brian Laidlaw climbed El Capitan, Yosemite’s iconic stone monolith, he found himself facing a repeated question: “So, what was it like up there?” It isn’t enough, he knows, to just to describe the sensation of the rock beneath his hands and feet—a climb is so much more than physical movement.

This seemingly simple question initiates Brian’s poetic quest for the perfect metaphor, traveling from the erratics of his youth in California to the towers of his current home in Moab, Utah. He traces lines up moon-washed faces in Indian Creek and edits his body language under boulders in Joe’s Valley. He lives parallel lives and dies parallel deaths on free solos in Colorado, and eventually, back in his childhood stomping grounds in the Sierra Nevada, he writes and revises routes of his own.

Along the way, he beckons us into a community bound as much by narrative as by rope. They exchange gear, chalk, and advice as they test each foothold and fissure. Kindred strangers knit into traveling bands of belayers, swapping snacks and cautionary tales. Here, any passing climber holds the ability to shift “spontaneously into the best coach I’ve ever known.”

Exhilarating and lyrical, approachable yet profound, Erratica invites us to share a rope with this community of climbers, to measure our humanity against the expanse of stone.