Fishtrap Fireside – March 4

Debbie Carson was born in Philadelphia, where the science museum’s Giant Heart’s pulsating walls and cobwebs in its darker corners fascinated and terrified her. It took her until age five to finally muster up the nerve to walk through it by herself. That same year, her family moved to then-rural Connecticut, where surrounding dairy farms gave way to insurance company campuses. She is still thankful the brook behind her house remained, providing a refuge for her for years. In the recession of ’73, her art degree netted her work as short order cook, an MIT temp, and as transferrer of dead fish from old bottles to new at Harvard’s Ichthyology Department. Clearly, it was time to head west. In Eugene, when an old friend asked, “Want to visit treeplanting camp?” she joined Hoedads Reforestation Co-op, making life-long friends, while earning just about zilch planting trees. She fared better working as a USFS temp, but eventually returned to college. Debbie, now retired from school librarianship and teaching art, has two adult children, an itchy foot, and a love for being on the water.

Talia Filipek resides in Enterprise, ogling at the mountains with a cup of cocoa in one hand and a baby in the other arm. Growing up, Talia visited here with her Eastern Oregon-based family many summers to camp and explore, and then returned as a young adult to work for the USFS as a ranger in the ECW & HCNRA. Her professional career has taken her to Corvallis, Culver, Estacada, Bend and tall buildings for work in design, editorial, photography, outdoor ed and social sciences. Though she loves variety in her adventures, she always knew that near the Wallowas would be her basecamp one day. By trade, Talia captures the delight of humanity, love, untold stories and local products with her camera. But it’s in the rare, quick quiet times that she puts pen to paper in an attempt to decipher that which she wonders and imagines. Lately, waking from dreaming to write down a musing, feed her baby and return to sleep.  Beyond park ranger blogging and college literary zines, her writing has often been a practice of personal reflection, so this reading at Fishtrap Fireside will be a world premiere of some inner workings. Learn more at taliajean.com

A Wallowa County Native, Toni Marie Jones is of both European and Native American Heritage. Her Irish immigrant great-great grandparents homesteaded on what is now called the Zumwalt Prairie in 1880. Her direct Indian lineage includes Cayuse, Assiniboine, Northern Cree, and Muskego Cree. Two of her third great grandfathers were interpreters for the Nez Perce and the Cayuse during the 1855 Treaty negotiations. She has five great grandfathers who were Chief Trader’s for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Two were posted at Fort Nez Perce. She’s a mother of two wonderful adults, a fiber and beadwork artist, and a wildflower enthusiast to the fullest. Toni Marie holds a Liberal Studies degree with an Anthropology minor specializing in Oregon Indians. After a career working for the Oregon University System as a secretary, program manager, and then graphic artist, and another working as a marketing director and consultant for non-profit air ambulance companies, she is happily retired and grateful to have more time for writing and making. Jones is the co-editor of the Frenchtown Historical Foundation newsletter, a publication focusing on the Native American, French-Canadian, and Metis families’ history of the area. Her work has appeared in two Fishtrap Outpost chapbooks, and she is a member of the Write Women and Sheep Creek Word Herders, local writing groups headed up by author and ranch woman extraordinaire, Janie Tippett.