Portland State Magazine Spring 2018

A missionary life IN HER first book, The Gospel of Trees: A Memoir , just released by Simon & Schuster, award-winning writer Apricot Irving MA ’04 observes that most memoirs about missionaries are either hagiographies or exposés. But the missionary parents who brought Irving and her siblings to Haiti when she was 6 years old were neither saints nor marauders. Her family’s story—and the country’s—are far more complicated than that, and unraveling the complexities is what inspired her to put on paper the conflicting feelings of her childhood. In her unflinching narrative, Irving grapples with coming to terms with a difficult coming of age. Grad’s impassioned play performed A POWERFUL, one-woman play, The Second Coming of Joan of Arc , by Carolyn Gage ’82, MA ’84 came to Lincoln Hall for one night in January. This was the first time a play by Gage (pictured left), an award-winning and esteemed playwright, has been performed on campus. She is the author of 75 plays, musicals and one-woman shows, and specializes in portraying nontraditional roles for women, particularly famous lesbians. In The Second Coming, Joan is a lesbian runaway who returns from the dead to give a modern, impassioned perspective of her life. For more than 20 years, Gage played Joan. For the performance at PSU, she directed Boston actor Julia Reddy (pictured right), and they held a Q&A after the show. S.O. The New Scarlet Letters: Sex Offenders, Their Treatment and Our Challenge By Marilyn Callahan MSW ’71 and Tim Buckely, Glass Spider Publishing, 2018 Sorsere Poems by Tom Fisher (English faculty), The Cultural Society, 2017 The Amish Quilter By Mindy Starns Clark and Leslie Gould MA ’09, Harvest House Publishers, 2018 Engaging Adversaries: Peacemaking and Diplomacy in the Human Interest By Mel Gurtov (political science emeritus faculty), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018 Heartbeat Interrupted By Donelle Knudsen ’71, Seiders House, 2017 Written For You CD by Naomi LaViolette, MM ’01 self-released, 2017 Thick as Thieves By Ken Lizzi ’92, Alternate Universe Press, 2017 River Rat By Doc Macomber ’84, Floating Word Press, 2018 The Riddle of Malnutrition: The Long Arc of Biomedical and Public Health Interventions in Uganda By Jennifer Tappan (history faculty), Ohio University Press, 2017 The Book of Albanian Sayings: Cultural Proverbs By Flamur Vehapi MA ’13, CreateSpace, 2017 Red Clocks By Leni Zumas (English faculty); Little, Brown and Company; 2018 NEW WORKS 9