Ellen Waterston

I’m not talking about the nonhuman animate things we name, such as pets, even plants, but rather the inanimate things, like houses, boats, cars or even vacuum cleaners. I grew up in houses named Up Yonder and Verte Feuille, learned to sail in the Me Too. Since moving to Oregon, houses have been christened Dorothy’s, […]

I’m on the Baja where I lead an annual writing retreat. I started this column before I headed out of town and am now picking up where I left off, or trying to. It’s not easy. Instead of the wall of my office, from where I’m sitting I have an uninterrupted view of the Pacific. […]

What could be more fun than a book you can’t put down. Thanks to a friend’s recommendation, right now for me that book is “The Correspondent” by Virgina Evans. So not to spoil it, I will only say it is an epistolary novel. The plot thickens through the exchange of letters between the characters. The […]

A few years ago I headed to Oregon’s Summer Lake Wildlife Area to meet friends for our annual spring bird-a-thon. Armed with binoculars, the Merlin Bird ID app and bird books, we good humoredly tried to outdo each other’s species count. Come nightfall, I took in the staggering beauty of the Milky Way that claimed […]

Remember when you received your first copy of AARP Magazine? It felt like a cold hand reaching up from the grave. Looking the other way, you picked it up like a dead mouse, a page pinched between forefinger and thumb, and threw it in the trash. Fast forward a decade or two and, admit it, […]

At a recent event, I chatted with a consultant whose area of focus and expertise intrigued me. Long a practitioner of martial arts, he now travels the country to instruct organizations, from corporations to churches, to employ verbal martial arts techniques to create more fruitful communications outcomes between adversarial groups. From what I gathered, an […]

For a number of years, I’ve led an autumn nature writing workshop at different locations in the high desert. They’ve been held at ranches in Crook County, including the Rafter Q, where I used to live and ranch, and at the historic GI Ranch next door, where the springs that create the headwaters of the […]

I recently came across the word “landholder,” an indigenous term for tree. How magical! An expression that speaks in the tongue of the thing itself. How can we reshape our daily language to reflect that notion, to get us out of our word silos? It strikes me that maintaining the diversity of language guards the […]