Culture Features

Kim Cooper Findling is about to pack up and drive from her home in Bend to North Bend, Oregon. This is where she grew up and this is also where she would be reading from her new memoir the following day. She has no idea what familiar faces she might see, given that she'd been away from the southwestern Oregon town for several years now.
And on this particular day, sipping a coffee in a favorite Bend café, she doesn't seem too nervous about any of this. Her book, Chance of Sun: An Oregon Memoir, was released this summer and contains the story of her life growing up, hiking, camping, drinking and generally just living in this state. It's an Oregon story, for sure, but it also contains some deeply personal and sometimes shocking details, so it would be understandable if Findling would be worried about family and old friends reading this book – her second to come out this year.

A month or so ago, a woman came into our office asking if she could have some old copies of the Source. We get this request quite frequently from loyal readers who've been out of town and perhaps want to catch up on the issues they missed. But she wanted more than just a few copies.
“Are you moving?” one of our staffers asked, guessing the second most typical reason someone would be looking for old copies of our paper en masse.
“No, I'm making a dress out of newspaper. It's going to be awesome,” she said as she left the building.
We were confused, but only until a few days later when we received word about the second-annual Rubbish Renewed Eco Fashion Show, a benefit for the Rimrock Expeditionary Alternative Learning Middle School (REALMS), taking place on Thursday, December 8 at the Century Center. This show, which got off to a successful start last year, encourages the community to create fashionable outfits from used items. Newspaper certainly qualifies as a used item, and falls perfectly into the theme of Rubbish Renewed. Suddenly, her statement made a lot more sense.

When Chelsea Woodmansee's name was announced as the winner of Central Oregon's Last Comic Standing on Friday night, she may have been one of the most surprised people in the building. That didn't stop her, however, from bounding onto the Old Stone Church stage to join runner up Samantha Albert and third-place finisher Stan Whitton in a celebratory hug.
Having never performed stand-up comedy before entering the contest (which she did at the last moment), the 28-year-old office administrator managed to out joke more than 20 other comics, including her own brother, over the course of the month-plus-long contest. And as a reward, she took home more than $2,200 in cash, as well as offers to take the stage with local improve groups and appear at comedy showcases.

Oregon isn't the first state that comes to mind when referencing the American Civil War.
But in his new book, Hidden History of the Civil War Oregon, first-time author Randol B. Fletcher exposes a number of interesting ties that link the Beaver State to America's bloodiest war, and does so in a style that's accessible to all.
Surprisingly, John Wilkes Booth, Virgil Earp of O.K. Corral fame, and Ulysses S. Grant are all tied to Oregon through the Civil War. But perhaps of greater interest are Fletcher's tales of the every-man soldiers who valiantly fought in the Civil War and later came to Oregon for many of the same reasons Oregon transplants come to find themselves in the state today – the search for a better life. A recurring theme throughout the 144-page book (a collection of short essays, really) is the common desire of many Civil War vets to move west, or more specifically, to Oregon, in search of a peaceful place to settle, raise a family, start a new business or simply spend the twilight years of their lives.

“The neighbors all had walls and curtains to hide the things they did but we, we were exposed.” – excerpt from We.