OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2016
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
OUR VIEW
E
ach week we recognize those people and organizations
in the community deserving of public praise for the good
things they do to make the North Coast a better place to
live, and also those who should be called out for their actions.
SHOUTOUTS
This week’s Shoutouts go to:
• Volunteer organizations which conducted free, open-to-
the-public Thanksgiving Day dinner events for those in need.
Riverfolk, the nonprofit recipient of the Safeway Turkey Bucks
program, hosted a Thanksgiving Dinner at the Astoria Armory,
which donated the facility for the event. In Warrenton, Thankful
Hearts, a group of local families who have come together to
cook and serve the community, conducted A Community Day of
Thanks dinner at the Warrenton Community Center.
• The Cannery Pier Hotel, which was recently honored by
Trivago.com with an award as one of America’s best proper-
ties based entirely on guest reviews. The travel website’s awards
recognize the 10 best hotels in America in four different cate-
gories. The Cannery Pier Hotel was ranked No. 6 of the best
5-star hotels in the country. The list was published in mid-No-
vember by Trivago.com and its digital magazine Room5. The
Langham Hotel in Chicago is the best 5-Star hotel, according to
guests’ online reviews. In the 4-star category, The Oxford Hotel
in Bend was ranked No. 8, and was the only other Oregon hotel
to receive recognition in any of the categories.
• Columbia Memorial Hospital nurse Kendra Gohl, who
was honored with a Nurse of the Year Award by the March of
Dimes. It marked the second consecutive year a CMH nurse
received the honor. Gohl, a certified infection preventionist, was
named the 2016 Small Hospital Nurse of the Year in Oregon and
Southwest Washington during an award ceremony earlier this
month in Portland. In 2015, Laura Brown was named Nurse of
the Year for Women’s Health.
• Clatsop County Surveyor Vance Swenson, who was
named Surveyor of the Year for 2016 by the Oregon Association
of County Engineers and Surveyors, a state-
wide professional group. Swenson was also
picked to join the group’s board of directors.
The professional organization promotes eth-
ical practices in both public works profes-
sions and provides for the exchange of ideas
between county engineers and surveyors from
around the state. Swenson joined the county
Public Works Department in 2003 was named
Vance
county surveyor in 2011. The county surveyor
Swenson
maintains all survey records for the county,
and works with private surveyors and the public to provide
access to survey data.
• The annual Laundry Love event, which was conducted at
the Seaside Laundromat. The event was sponsored by At the
Water’s Gate and helped families in need by paying for two
loads of laundry, per family, with no strings attached. Winter
clothing donations were also given to those in need. Shirley
Smith-Yates, one of the organizers of the event, said it “was the
largest one we have ever had. The participants started showing
up an hour early and we ended up using all our funding within
two hours. We had 25-30 families represented at Laundry Love
and we gave away mounds of clothes.”
• Dutch Bros. Coffee, which recently conducted its “Buck
for Kids Day” that raised $1,566 to benefit the Astoria Food for
Kids Program. The Society of St. Vincent de Paul–St. Mary Star
of the Sea Conference has operated the program in the Astoria
School District for children in grades K-8 during the past four
years. The program provides weekend backpacks to help stop
hunger for local students, with a typical backpack containing
a breakfast, lunch and snacks for each day of the weekend for
children in the program. Last school year the program provided
1,411 food backpacks and it is anticipated that 1,500 will be sent
home this school year.
CALLOUTS
This week’s Callouts go to:
• Shoppers who don’t think of shopping local first now that
the holiday shopping season is officially underway. While it’s
understandable to shop out of town when an item can’t be found
locally, and it’s convenient to shop online, shopping out of town
or at dot com behemoths like Amazon doesn’t contribute to the
health of our local economy or our coastal communities.
Suggestions?
Do you have a Shoutout or Callout you think we should know
about? Let us know at news@dailyastorian.com and we’ll make
sure to take a look.
SOUTHERN EXPOSURE
Ursula K. Le Guin’s
prophetic vision
L
ast year The New Yorker
zeroed in on the natural haz-
ards of our coast in Kathryn
Schulz’s “The earthquake that will
devastate the Pacific Northwest.”
Maybe it is appropriate that the
magazine, in their Oct. 17 issue,
now focuses not on a force of
nature, but a voice for humanity.
“The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin”
by Lisa Phillips offers an intimate
portrayal of one of the only living
authors — with
Philip Roth —
in the Library of
America series.
Le Guin first
enchanted read-
ers in the 1960s
and never stopped. Among the most
honored of America’s authors, she
lives in Portland and Cannon Beach.
“We believe she is one of Amer-
ica’s finest authors and a bold and
honest voice in the entire field of lit-
erature,” Cannon Beach Book Co.’s
co-owner Maureen Dooley-Sroufe
said this week.
A request for Ursula K. LeGuin’s
writing results in a “walking tour”
of the store.
“We start in science-fiction/
fantasy, head over to children’s
books, on to poetry, then to essays
and finally Pacific Northwest
Regional books,” Dooley-Sroufe
said. “Ursula K. Le Guin is the only
author whose books we feature
in this way — it reflects the great
diversity and breadth of her work.
“She is a part-time resident of
Cannon Beach, and we delight in
knowing that she may be writing,
relaxing or strolling to the beach
right now,” Dooley-Sroufe added.
Watt Childress, co-owner of
Jupiter’s Rare & Used Books,
praised Le Guin in an interview
with the Cannon Beach Gazette.
Le Guin’s work, Childress said,
“rises to the level of epic myth
that burrows deeply into our con-
sciousness. … She speaks from a
place and a position that commands
respect.”
Le Guin’s books are magical, not
necessarily cheerful hocus-pocus,
but with cloudy edges teased into
being by a prankish wizard.
In “Unlocking the Air,” the
author warns: “There is no ‘after’ in
‘happily ever after.’”
But “after” is what Le Guin pur-
sues, our ability to reinvent, recre-
ate ourselves: “We can tell the story
over, we can tell the story till we get
it right.”
Imagining the future
In The New Yorker’s profile,
Phillips draws a biographical arc
describing a young Le Guin as an
outsider uncomfortable with the cul-
tural cliques of the 1950s and ’60s,
“never at home with establishments
of any kind.”
As a young writer, Le Guin
acutely felt the closed society of
both literary and male-dominated
elites, each to stymy her and then
shape her own genre-defining path.
A frustrating period of rejections
gave way to a venture into a new
genre.
“I just didn’t know what to do
with my stuff until I stumbled into
science fiction and fantasy,” Le
Guin tells Phillips. “And then, of
course, they knew what to do with
it.”
The author’s success was imme-
diate. Science fiction opened Le
Guin up to writing not only about
aliens, but from “alien” points of
Jack Liu/Submitted Photo
Ursula Le Guin in November 2013 at the University of Oregon Campus.
A passionate voice
Submitted Photo
One of Le Guin’s most popular
sci-fi novels.
view: “composing the political man-
ifesto of an ant, wondering what
it would be like if humans had the
seasonal sexuality of birds, imagin-
ing love in a society in which a mar-
riage involves four people.”
The author, through her charac-
ters was questioning and redefining
the modern gender experience.
At home in Oregon
Le Guin slings wicked puns, to
wit, her short story title “Ether, OR:
For the Narrative Americans.”
The story, like a significant part
of her work, pays homage to the
state where her great-grandfather
arrived from California in 1873.
And who could be more of an
archetypal Oregonian superhero
than George Orr, the man who can
stop an earthquake, in “The Lathe
of Heaven”?
When on the coast, Le Guin
tells The New Yorker, she “does
the stupid, ordinary stuff that has
to be done that you can’t let go.”
That also includes participation in
local literary activities, including
the 2013 program “Get Lit at the
Beach.”
For a glimpse behind the front
door, visit Le Guin’s blog, where
she provides rants, cat photos,
poetry, even rules of the game
“Fibble,” where “the only words
allowed are words that (so far as
anybody there knows) do not exist.”
“Doing fine but not doing
very much,” Le Guin posted in
September.
A late October health update (Le
Guin suffers from a congenital heart
murmur that landed her in the hos-
pital): “Can’t hang from branches
yet, but am real good at moving slo
o o w w l y …”
We don’t often think of cour-
age as a literary trait — Le Guin
reminds us otherwise.
“The measure of a civiliza-
tion may be the individual’s abil-
ity to speak the truth,” Le Guin
proclaimed in the 1976 essay “Lan-
guage of the Night.”
Le Guin encourages us to be
masters of our own destiny, like
Orr, whose dreams can alter reality.
Le Guin celebrates the power
of imagination and the individual’s
freedom to express it.
“Don’t worry about control!
Freedom is what you’re working
toward!” she writes.
The unconscious mind is “the
wellspring of health, imagination,
creativity,” to be expressed freely
and without restraint.
The author’s voice resonated
in a passionate speech at the 2014
National Book Awards: “Right
now, I think we need writers who
know the difference between pro-
duction of a market commod-
ity and the practice of an art,” Le
Guin said. “We’ll need writers who
can remember freedom — poets,
visionaries — realists of a larger
reality.”
In an age of self-censorship and
media-bashing from right and left,
Le Guin provides inspiration for the
creative voice in all of us.
“We believe she is one of Amer-
ica’s finest authors and a bold and
honest voice in the entire field of
literature,” Dooley-Sroufe said.
“Her support of authors, readers
and the art of creative writing is
legendary.”
Sometimes politics jump from
abstraction to “larger reality” in a
jolting manner. Le Guin, like her
characters, seems to possess the
power to conjure a reality eerily
similar to our own.
I wonder if I’m the only one
reflecting on this chilling opening
to Le Guin’s “Dispossessed”:
“There was a wall,” Le Guin
writes. “It did not look important.
… But the idea was real. It was
important. For seven generations
there had been nothing in the world
more important than that wall.
Like all walls it was ambiguous,
two-faced. What was inside it and
what was outside it depended upon
which side of it you were on.”
In the most highly charged polit-
ical atmosphere in history, Le Guin
offers a steady vision into our
world — internal and external —
as timely as when she first put pen
to page.
R.J. Marx is The Daily Astori-
an’s South County reporter and edi-
tor of the Seaside Signal and Can-
non Beach Gazette.