North coast writer Victoria Stoppiello will be reading at FisherPoets Gathering this weekend in Astoria. Friday night at Ten Fifteen Theater she will read essays from her book, “This Side of Sand Island” which was designed by local graphic artist Ryan Pedersen.
On Saturday night between 5 and 6 p.m. at Astoria Brewing, she’s collaborating with Jon Lee, a musician whom she met at FPG a couple years ago. Kindred spirits: his Chinese ancestors worked the “slime line” in the canneries, her Finnish forebears fished & picked cranberries, and, yes, logged. Here’s a quick summary from Jon of what they’ll present.
Jon wrote, “It will be an integrated theme of what impacts salmon. Victoria ends her set with a reading about trying to get John Day timber folks to see the connection between trees upstream and salmon downstream. I start my set with “One Log Load”, which describes over cutting and the decline of the steelhead run. My next song is “Roll On Columbia “ which Scott McAllister will interrupt twice in protest, during the Bonneville verse and during the Grand Coulee verse to describe the impact of dams on salmon. I’ll end with “ Slime Line” which describes how the decline of the run cost Chinese jobs. Scott follows with his Columbia River poem and our Celilo song. The theme throughout is people and salmon. I think it all works together.”
The 23rd annual Fisher Poets Gathering – A weekend of celebration of the commercial fishing industry in song, poetry and stories.http://www.fisherpoets.org/2020-evening-reading-schedule.html
