Name: Appelo Archives Center & Logging Museum
Address: 1056 SR 4, Rosburg, WA, 98638, US
Telephone: 360-484-7103

Spring Author Series

Free Pulla Bread

Nick Nikkila

Author #1. Thursday May 9th 1;oop

Richard (Nick) Nikkila was an on again/off again resident of Deep River as a youth living with his Finnish paternal grandmother, Tillie Nikkila on her Deep River Farm. He treasured those times, and they contained his favorite childhood memories.

Returning to Deep River after his retirement in 2006, he and his wife, Dee, purchased and built their home in the Deep River valley which they refer to as the “Finnish Line.” During a previous FinnFest which was entitled, “Mumu and Me,” (Mumu being grandmother in Finnish) he and others were asked to write about their Finnish grandmothers.

A favorable reaction to his recollection about this grandmother prompted him to start writing additional recollections of life as a Deep River kid in the 50’s and early 60’s. Named “A Collection of Recollections,” it soon grew to over 40 stories viewed through a lens tinted with humor.

As the first chairman of the fledgling Appelo Archives, Nick was well aware of the funding needs of the organizations. With that in mind, he donated his booklet of recollections and any proceeds it might earn, to the Appelo Archives. It has been a consistent sales item ever since.

A Collection of Recollections

Hal Calbom

Debby Neely

Authors #2 & 3 Thursday May 16th 1;oop & 1:45p

Hal Calbom

Calbom is a third-generation resident of southwest Washington. He grew up in Longview and graduated from RA Long High School, where he was ASB President and an All - SWW basketball player.

Hal works today as a writer, educator and filmmaker. He writes and photographs the monthly “People + Place” feature for Columbia River Reader, and is the author of “Empire of Trees: America’s Planned City and the Last Frontier.” Hal has worked most of his career in Seattle, where as an anchor and producer at KING TV, the NBC affiliate, he won five Emmy Awards for writing and production.

For the last three decades he has produced written, broadcast and web-based media specializing in public
affairs and business education.“Empire of Trees” has sold over 2500 copies and was gifted to every graduating high school
senior in Longview’s Centennial year.

Debby Neely

Neely has worked as a teacher and instructional designer besides her work as a wood carver and poet. Originally from the midwest, she came to southwest Washington and began a successful career teaching computer-aided design, but was soon bitten by the desire to work with wood, printmaking and eventually poetry.

Debby specializes in images of the natural world, more specifically of birds and of fish. Her decision to pair haiku with her images represents a long time desire to supplement a sense of the moment with her evocations on paper.

Her “Words and Wood: Pacific Northwest Woodcuts and Haiku” was published by Columbia River Reader Press in 2023 and is now in its second printing. “Words and Woods” has proved a popular gift and keepsake item for people in love with the Pacific Northwest and its environment and is a CRRPress Best Seller.

Robert Pyle

Author #3. Thursday May 30th 1;oop

Robert Pyle

Since 1982, Pyle has been an independent scholar, writer, and biologist, concentrating on writing as his primary professional activity. He writes essay, poetry, and fiction from his home along a tributary of the Lower Columbia River in Southwest Washington, where he has lived since 1978. He has published 24 books and hundreds of essays, papers, poems, stories, and anthology chapters.

Pyle's seminal work, Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land describes the devastation caused by unrestrained logging as well as the remaining beauties of his adopted home in the Willapa Hills. His book Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide grew out of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a major component (along with Pyle's other books) for the 2020 feature film The Dark Divide starring David Cross as Pyle and Debra Messing as his wife Thea Linnaea Pyle. The Thunder Tree: Lessons from An Urban Wildland chronicles the intersection of his Aurora, Colorado, boyhood nature explorations and Colorado's long tradition of water rights battles with the importance of everyone's special places, especially children's. Both Wintergreen and The Thunder Tree exemplify Pyle's love of damaged lands.

His travel narrative Chasing Monarchs: Migrating with the Butterflies of Passage traces his discovery of previously unsuspected monarch butterfly migration patterns. Mariposa Road: The First Butterfly Big Year follows up as another far-ranging butterfly road trip narrative, as it chronicles Pyle's coast-to-coast adventures and misadventures while documenting as many butterflies as possible in one year (similar to a birder's big year). Pyle co-edited and annotated Nabokov’s Butterflies, which collects the novelist's butterfly writings from throughout his literary and scientific opus.

Walking the High Ridge: Life as Field Trip reflects on Pyle's development as a writer and on his sources, influences, and beliefs. Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place follows the lives of the creatures populating his adopted village month by month through the seasons.

A chapbook of poems and stories, Letting the Flies Out, preceded Pyle's first full-length book of poems, Evolution of the Genus Iris. His second book of poems, Chinook and Chanterelle, features cover art by his wife, the late artist and naturalist Thea Linnaea Pyle. Pyle's third longer collection, The Tidewater Reach: Field Guide to the Lower Columbia River in Poems and Pictures, is a collaboration with photographer Judy VanderMaten.

Other books include The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies, The Butterfly Watcher's Handbook, The Butterflies of Cascadia, and The Butterflies of the Pacific Northwest

Magdalena Mountain: A Novel, Pyle's first published book of fiction, weaves a converging tale of disparate personalities brought into the high country of Colorado mountain wilderness by their various quests for the all-black Magdalena alpine butterfly. The book seeks to blend methods of narrative natural history writing with pure fiction by alternating chapters on Magdalena's life in the high rocks with those of the human characters.

Pyle's essays have been collected in three books: The Tangled Bank, his columns from fifty-two consecutive issues of Orion and Orion Afield magazines; Through a Green Lens: Fifty Years of Writing for Nature; and Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays (September 2020).

Butterfly Launches from Spar Pole, a collaboration of Pyle with Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic and Ray Prestegard, is an eleven-track audio album of acoustic song-poems inspired by the natural world.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

Local Museum and Archives Center Dedicated to Preserving and Presenting the History of the Naselle-Grays River Valley Area of Southwest Washington.