Welcome to the next installment of
the Roundhouse Reading Series, generously funded by Union County Cultural Coalition, Cook Memorial
Library, Libraries of Eastern Oregon, and local donors, such as yourselves. Thank
you for making this possible! According to our usual plan, we’ll have an open
mic following Scott Elliott’s reading. I hope you’ve signed up!
Just as a reminder, May’s Third Wednesday reading
will feature Rob Schlegel of Walla Walla reading from his new poetry
collection, January Machine (Four Way Books, 2014).
This week! Scott Elliott is one of two Pacific Northwest
writers visiting La Grande whose work addresses environmental issues, and it
has been stimulating to read their works side by side. Jennifer Boyden will
read at Ars Poetica tomorrow night at 7:30 in Pierce Library on the EOU campus.
Tonight! The Roundhouse Reading Series is pleased to host Scott
Elliott, whose novel Temple Grove
(University of Washington Press, 2013) I’m currently reading.
Scott is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Whitman
College in Walla Walla and has previously published Coiled in the Heart (Bluehen/Penguin Putnam, 2003), selected by Booksense
76 and One-Book-One-Community, and a collection of short stories, Return Arrangements, which was named a
finalist in the 2009 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and Mary
McCarthy Prize competitions. He was born in Kentucky and grew up there and in
Alaska and on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. He earned a BA from
Vanderbilt, an MFA from Columbia, and a PhD from the University of Houston.
Scott’s most recent novel, Temple Grove, takes place on the Olympic Peninsula and features
three main characters. Trace, a native Makah woman, works at an
aquarium and is the mother of Paul and wife of Tom, Paul’s stepfather. In the
present time of the novel, Paul is 18 and has spent his life hiking and camping
in the Olympic Forest. The third character is Bill Newton, Paul’s biological
father, a logger from a family of loggers, who returns to the Olympic Peninsula
after years in Alaska. The plot is spurred by a chance meeting between Trace
and Bill and also by Paul’s decision to become an ecoterrorist, damaging
logging equipment and spiking the trees of the Temple Grove in order to protect
them.
Kim Barnes, author of In
the Kingdom of Men who also did a reading in La Grande recently, notes that
“Elliott writes from
that place where the old myths and the new stories collide. In Temple
Grove, he reminds us of what it means to be lost to everyone and everything
we have ever loved...and to be found again. It is a story of longing, cruelty,
forgiveness, and redemption, shot through with intimate descriptions of a land
on the cusp of ruin that will break your heart with their beauty."
I am enjoying reading Temple
Grove and wish to praise the depiction of the Pacific Northwest. I feel as
if I have walked in the Olympic Forest, although I have not. The forestry
issues remind me of my years spent in Humboldt County, CA, where loggers and
environmentalists still vie for trees as a resource and ecosystems as a legacy.
I am also enjoying the depiction of the inner lives of the main characters,
particularly the complexity of their motivations and the uncertainty with which
they make decisions, which feels true to my own experience. At the midpoint of
the novel, the storytelling has hooked me; I have passed “the point of no
return” and am having trouble putting the book down to do my real work. The
last commendation I wish to make regards the imagery. I especially like the
image of breaching, as in whales breaching, which seems a metaphor for all the
ways in which the characters survive: they find hope in surfacing and taking
the next breath.
Without further ado, please welcome Scott Elliott!
Works Cited
Book Cover Temple Grove. "Biography." Scott Elliott. n.d. Web. 16 April 2014. <http://www.scottelliott.net/index.htm>.
Elliott, Scott. Temple Grove. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2013. Print.
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