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Sample Press Release

Seeing green? It's not just the fields - it's homes in the Walla Walla valley 
 
Feel like your green thumb is a bit weak at the knuckle? Head out to the Green and Solar Home Tour on Saturday, June 27, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and get ideas to whip that digit into shape! The tour, which is coordinated by the Sustainable Living Center, features six area homes and one commercial building with environmentally friendly designs and ideas, such as a bermed-earth insulated home, a green-renovated historic Walla Walla house, and even a yurt! Homeowners will be available to help you learn more about green building, including ideas both large and small of ways to make living a little better for the environment--and yourself!  

In addition to green-building techniques, this year's homes feature energy-saving ideas such as solar panels, hay-bale insulation, composting toilets, native-plant landscaping, radiant-heat flooring, and home-siting for optimum solar efficiency, as well as green-remodeling techniques and materials such as wool-carpeting, eco-friendly paint, high-efficiency lighting, and much, much more! 

Pre-registration is encouraged, and check-in is required beginning at 9 a.m. on Saturday, June 27, at the Walla Walla Community College Water & Environmental Center. At 9:30, gather for tour instructions, and then tour the Water & Environmental Center before heading out to the six area homes. Carpools will begin departing at 10 a.m. 

This is the second year of the Green and Solar Home Tour, which is coordinated by the Sustainable Living Center and funded by a Washington State Department of Ecology grant. The Sustainable Living Center, located at 349 NE Myra Road in College Place, provides resources, community events and workshops on a variety of green-living topics, such as organic gardening, green building, natural resource conservation, energy efficiency, local food, and much more. 

The tour is free, although tax-deductible donations are accepted at any of the tour locations.  For more information or to pre-register, contact.... 

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Make headlines catchy! Here are some sample headlines I've written while working as a copy editor:

A Plague on Both the Spouses
Contact Gardening
Sufferin' Suffixes
Subprime poetry crisis
Documentation Styles I've Known <strike>and Loved</strike>
Estro, Ego, Ergo
Comic Sans: How Foul a Font

Excerpt from newspaper feature article

An artist's abstraction: Former area resident returns to Valley with show at Red Door
by Chelsey Waters for the Union-Bulletin

Energy can be neither created nor destroyed.

Even if you flunked physics, you remember the law of conservation of energy - simplified, of course, but still true.

But it's also true in the world of art. Art - and abstract in particular - is simply potential energy, lying in wait for an eye to fall on it to turn it into kinetic energy, the energy of movement. And even though the molecules of paint on canvas may be static, what they portray is as dynamic as the eye of the viewer allows it to be.

To illustrate this, take a walk down to the Red Door Arte Salon on West Alder Street. It's filled with the work of a local artist and includes an abstract called "Red Space," a work so seamless you might not notice that it's actually a collection of four canvases, and so large that it gets a wall to itself. At the bottom, ominous, cumulus-like reds blacken, undulating, rising toward a hot, volcanic explosion of texture.

But is that really what the canvases represent? Perhaps not, but the beauty of the abstract is not what it shows or tells, but what it elicits from the imagination.

The artist is Jean Christofori Howton, a former Valley resident who now spends her time divided between Hat Rock, Ore., and the little town of Muids in Normandy, France. Howton's former classmate and the gallery's co-owner Lila Locati couldn't be more pleased.


Art Interpretation
Inside the gallery, Locati and a visitor pause in front of a work titled "Before Storm."

"This could be the ocean," Locati says, gesturing to the strong blues and whites swirling near the center.

"Or Stargate," the visitor says. Inspiration can come from left field sometimes. They're silent for a moment, then move on to discuss "Waterspill." Locati sees a bed, one languid arm draped down the side; the visitor sees the spray from a waterfall. Neither can be wrong. The abstract, by definition, is not subject to objectivity, rules or representations; instead it uses colors and movements to show ineffable qualities. And it doesn't matter which way a good abstract hangs: rotate it 90 degrees, and you'll see an entirely different - but still wonderous, ponderous - perspective.


Originality and expression
Howton, also a representational artist, doesn't use a traditional easel. Instead, she lays her canvases down on the floor and stands over them while she creates. She also uses gauze, string, cheesecloth, or other textiles to texture the art, which, in turn, creates the movement the viewer sees.

Part of Howton's originality comes from the way she works. "I try to keep away from the trendy way artists tend to group together," she says. "When artists group up, they do a lot of the same things. It's important to keep a certain amount of your own creative energy."

That creative energy is channeled into the uneasy, perhaps ominous movements: the water falling in "Waterspill," or the mist dissipating in the valley of an Asian mountain range in "Oriental Lace."


Serendipity decades in the making
Unlike Locati, who discovered art in college when all the other classes had already filled, Howton was an artist early on.

"All I remember as a child is art," she says. That took her to study at Washington State University, and she stayed in the Pacific Northwest - LaGrande, Pendleton, Hermiston - as she raised a family.

A few years ago, Howton met Pierre Haine, her companion and business manager. He who helps her get her art into shows in faraway places such as France, including Paris, Avignon, and Rouen; Kieve and Slavutich in Ukraine; and Vancouver, B.C. In the United States, she has shown her work in Portland, New York, Seattle and Las Vegas.

In fact, bringing her art to Walla Walla - a mere hour from her home - was a somewhat serendipitous event.

Howton and Locati attended grade school together. Neither knew the other well, but they had a mutual friend, who knew Locati wanted to bring a well-known artist to the...

Sample nonfiction story

Excerpt from “Doc,” a nonfiction essay about rafting the Middle Fork of the Salmon River
As the last raft slides into the water, Charlie takes the rope from my hands and lines the boat down to our spot, freeing the ramp for others. We're by no means the only group launching today; there will be four or five others, outfitters and private parties alike.

There is sometimes an animosity between private parties, such as ours, and commercial outfitters, as Doc once was. Only four launches per day are allowed on the Middle Fork, and private parties can often violate river etiquette: taking up too much time on the ramp and too much space on the river, leaving too much trash in campsites, drinking too much beer and wearing too little clothing in the communal hot springs. In spite of our experience—several of us having guided commercially—because our boats aren't marked with an outfitter's name and logo, we're tarred with the private brush, and so we work extra hard to be courteous to the commercial guides.

It's hot, and the launch work has made us sticky. Charlie and I wade into the rocky water, sending the minnows darting for cover. We slip our bodies under the water, which is cool, and clear, and beautiful. Charlie jokes that it's sacrificing ourselves to the river gods in return for good weather and a downstream wind, but I think it's baptism.