Fishtrap Fireside – December 6

December’s Fishtrap Fireside features a special Wallowa Country collaboration between a painter and  a poet.

Friday, December 6, 2024 – 7:00pm
107 W. Main St. – Enterprise
Free Admission

December’s Fishtrap Fireside showcases an artistic collaboration between poet Dustin Lyons and painter Leah Svendsen. They recently published a book together titled Passage, a collection of paintings and poems that draw a line between the wild and rugged landscapes of Oregon’s Wallowa Country and the creative inner worlds of two artists. December’s Fireside also features award-winning author Gregg Kleiner and Eastern Oregon University professor, Nancy Knowles. It takes place on Friday, December 6 at Fishtrap’s event space on Main Street in Enterprise. Fireside also streams online at Fishtrap.org. 

Dustin Lyons / Leah Svendsen

Born and raised in a small timbertown in Southwest Washington state, Dustin Lyons graduated from the University of Washington with a BA in English Literature in 2001. Following this, he spent a decade living out of a backpack, from Alaska to Arizona, and from Eurasia to Central America. In 2011 he moved to Ashland, OR to study shoemaking and start his business, Alkahest Leather. He eventually found his home in Wallowa County where he builds shoes, roams the hills, and puts pen to paper.

Leah Svendsen was born in “the county” and grew up in the trees along Hurricane Creek. Prior to returning home in 2003, she received her BA in Art with a concentration in Painting from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She learned encaustic painting in 2012 and fell in love with the medium. The opportunity presented itself for a retail space on main street in Joseph in 2021. All the pieces aligned and she left her marketing career to pursue entrepreneurship supported by her creativity. She opened Element, a shop, gallery and studio where she sells her artwork, represents other local artists, and shares her passion of encaustic painting through teaching.

Gregg Kleiner

The son of school teachers, Gregg Kleiner grew up outside the small, rural Oregon towns of Langlois, Lookingglass, and Silverton. For summer vacations, his parents took their five kids on extended backpacking trips, which instilled in him a love of the outdoors, wilderness, and mountains – especially the Wallowas. At age 16, he spent a year as an American Field Service exchange student in the mountains of northern Thailand, where he lived for a month at a Buddhist monastery. In 2003, he served as the Fishtrap Writer-In-Residence, living at the head of the lake with Lori Salus and their two children and teaching at local schools. He and Lori now call Wallowa County home. Kleiner is the author of the novel, Where River Turns to Sky, which was a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize and the Oregon Book Award. His first book for kids (and their grownups), Please Don’t Paint Our Planet Pink!, asks what might happen if we could SEE CO2 puffing up into the Earth’s atmosphere. He has worked as a wildlife biologist, journalist, visiting professor, communications professional, dairy goat farmer, and is currently the project coordinator for the Joseph Branch Trail-With-Rail.