The final episode of Fishtrap Fireside’s 9th season comes to you online beginning Friday, April 1 with readings from Fishtrap friends Ralph Swinehart and Ashley Tackett, plus special guest, Fishtrap’s 2022 Writer-in-Residence, E.M. (Ellen) Lewis. Anyone anywhere can take in Fireside online at Fishtrap.org and on Fishtrap’s YouTube Channel.
Fishtrap Fireside is a monthly reading series designed to feature diverse voices from local Wallowa County writers. Each month offers a fresh look at what people of the West are thinking about and writing down.
The April Fishtrap Fireside is sponsored by Stewart Jones Designs, a custom jewelry designer working in Wallowa county since 1999.
More on the featured readers for April below:
Ashley Tackett is a designer, developer, educator, and is fundamentally a country gal at heart. Beauty, connection, and growth are her guiding stars to a very engaging life. After a two-year stint living alongside snakes, steelhead, and turkey in Imnaha, Oregon, Ashley is presently carving out a life under the bright, warm sun of Mexico.
Ralph Swinehart moved to Wallowa County in 1972 as part of the back to the land movement and has spent the last 50 years developing his small farm and built his own barn, solar home, and numerous outbuildings. His friend Rick calls his long storage shed the MTA, for Monument to Accumulation. He restored his first car, a 1928 Model A phaeton, while he was in high school and still drives it regularly. It has attracted several other Model A’s and T’s, which enjoy living in the MTA with it. Ralph recently sold his sheep after raising them for 46 years, and is still a part time civil engineer, but he is working on becoming a full time luddite.
E.M. Lewis is an award-winning playwright, teacher, and opera librettist. Her work has been produced around the world, and published by Samuel French. Lewis received the Steinberg Award for How the Light Gets In and Song of Extinction, and the Primus Prize for Heads from the American Theater Critics Association, the Ted Schmitt Award from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a playwriting fellowship from New Jersey State Arts Commission, the 2016 Oregon Literary Fellowship in Drama, and an Edgerton Award for Magellanica. Other plays include Apple Season (National New Play Network rolling world premiere), The Gun Show (Edinburgh Fringe Festival), Infinite Black Suitcase, True Story, Apple Hunters!, Dorothy’s Dictionary (winner of the Portland Civic Theater Guild New Play Award), and You Can See All the Stars (Kennedy Center commission for the American College Theater Festival). Operas include Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Fallen Giant with composer Evan Meier (American Lyric Theater), and Town Hall with composer Theo Popov (Maryland Opera Studio and Willamette University). Lewis is currently enjoying a three-year Mellon Foundation National Playwright Residency at Artists Repertory Theater (ART). Lewis is a member of LineStorm Playwrights, ASCAP, and the Dramatists Guild. She lives in the Willamette Valley in Oregon, on her family’s farm. www.emlewisplaywright.com
