OTIS, OR – This summer, Sitka Center is offering a series of free events featuring invited
speakers on issues of culture, creativity and community. The last Mingle and Muse of 2019 series will be on
Monday, August 12th, with a presentation and book reading by award-winning investigative journalist and
author Rebecca Clarren of Portland, OR on the topic: Fiction, Nonfiction and the American West.
For twenty years, Clarren has been writing about tribal members, rural communities, immigrants, and the
environment for a variety of national magazines. Her journalism, for which she has won the Hillman Prize and
an Alicia Patterson fellowship, has been published in The Nation, High Country News, Orion, Mother Jones
and Salon.com. Clarren’s 2018 novel, Kickdown, tells the story of two sisters’ struggle to save their family’s
cattle ranch in rural Colorado, and was shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction;
the Washington Post called it, “an impressive debut.”
Mingling starts at 4:30 pm, presentation starts at 5pm in the Boyden Studio and Maveety Courtyard, Sitka
Center for Art and Ecology, 56605 Sitka Drive, Otis OR 97368.
This Mingle and Muse is made possible in part by sponsor Mills Ace Hardware (Lincoln City, Or.) and
Siltstone Winery (Dayton, Or.).
Committed to expanding the relationships between art, nature and humanity, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology is renowned
for its workshop and residency programs. Exploration of the coastal environment has remained a key component to the Sitka
Center’s vitality. Located at Cascade Head, with views of the Pacific Ocean, the Sitka Center offers a place where artists, writers,
environmental scientists and musicians of all abilities and backgrounds come to nourish and inspire their creativity. For more
details visit www.sitkacenter.org.