WHITE SALMON — White Salmon Valley Community Library is hosting local author tina ontiveros for a book reading on Friday, May 29th at 6:30 p.m. ontiveros will discuss her memoir “Rough House.”
ontiveros is a writer, teacher, and bookseller based in the Pacific Northwest. She was raised below the federal poverty line, living mostly with her single mother at the edge of the Oregon desert, but often with her constantly migrating dad in small timber towns around the region. ontiveros lives at the bottom of Mt. Hood and teaches writing and literature at Columbia Gorge Community College. She is the first person in her family to go to college, completing her education while raising her children. She earned her BA in Literature at Marylhurst University, then her MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Goddard College. ontiveros worked for over 10 years at Oregon’s oldest bookstore.
“Rough House” follows her early life, born into timber on both sides of the family. Her mother spent summers driving logging trucks for her family’s operation, and her father was the son of an itinerant logger, raised in a variety of lumber towns, as ontiveros herself would be.
A story of growing up in turmoil, the book recounts a childhood divided between a charming, mercurial and abusive father in the forest of the Pacific Northwest and a mother struggling with small-town poverty. It is also a story of generational trauma, especially for the women — a story of violent men and societal restrictions, of children not always chosen and frequently raised alone.
ontiveros’s father Loyd looms large. Reflecting on his death and long absence from her life, she writes, “I had this ridiculous hope that I would get to enjoy a functional relationship with my father, on my own terms, now that I was an adult.” In searingly honest, straightforward prose, “Rough House” is her attempt to carve out this relationship, to understand her father and her family from an adult perspective.
While some elements of ontiveros’s story are universal, other are indelibly grounded in the logging camps of the Pacific Northwest at the end of the twentieth century, as the lumber industry shifted and contracted. Tracing her childhood through the working class towns and forests of Washington and Oregon, ontiveros explores themes of love and loss, parents and children, and her own journey to a different kind of adulthood.
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