Diana Coogle
Jefferson Journal ContributorFor more than twenty years as a JPR commentator, Diana Coogle wrote about living in the Siskiyou Mountains without electricity. Three years ago she built a new house on the same mountainside and now lives with a washing machine, refrigerator, and other common electrical devices (though she still heats with wood). Convenience, she says, is not such a bad word, after all, and there is still plenty to write about. She recently wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on Old English poetry and is currently working on a paintings-and-essays book with Applegate artist Barbara Kostal. Her first book of collected commentaries (Fire from the Dragon’s Tongue, followed by Living with All My Senses: 25 Years of Life on the Mountain and An Explosion of Stars) was an Oregon Book Award finalist. Her latest book, co-authored with Janeen Sathre, is Favorite Hikes of the Applegate: A Trail Guide with Stories and Histories.
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We’re all doing a lot of remembering, these days, of how it used to be, before coronavirus, before masks and social distancing. -
When I was visiting my son on Vashon Island, in the Puget Sound, he told me one evening that we were going on an adventure (unspecified) and that I should…
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Somewhere along the 100 miles of the Alta Via 2 trail that I hiked, with my friend Mike Kohn, in Italy’s Dolomite Mountains last September, someone asked…
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A few years ago, when I was still living in my little mountain house without electricity, I found a picture of Christmas present cakes in Bon Appétit —…
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The hiking season is here!I guess any season is hiking season in the Applegate area of Southern Oregon, but when the snow melts on the higher elevation…
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Like the Syrah grape leaves that wrap a wheel of Rogue River Blue cheese, our taste buds, leaf-shaped on the tongue, wrap around the cheese as we put it…
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There are those who love Christmas. I am one of them. I love the Christmas tree with its special ornaments, the evergreen-scented wreaths, the bells, the…
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While backpacking in the Trinity Alps Wilderness, my hiking partner and I came to a broad river crossing with thigh-deep water. With hardly a second…
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I was walking through town the other day, humming the tune from the Little Drummer Boy and ticking off in my head the exciting list of things I had to do…
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On one solitary, late-spring walk through a village in the south of France in 1964, I came upon a tall yellow brick wall around some private estate. Over…
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I know that some people move every few years, but I don’t know how they do it. How do they face that disruption of an old life, that chaos between living…
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Computers are useful for keeping track of schedules, but I like beautiful, nature-photograph desk calendars. Last year’s was by Ansel Adams. Week after…
