Following an unprecedented delay, on August 15 Gov. Tina Kotek named Bend poet, non-fiction writer and writing instructor Ellen Waterston to be Oregon’s 11th poet laureate, filling a position that had sat vacant for months.
A prolific writer and strong advocate for the literary arts in rural Oregon, Waterston is the fourth woman to receive the statewide honor, and she is the only the second person living east of the Cascades, and one of few outside the Portland area, ever to hold the job.
“What a surprise!” Waterston says of the appointment. “Really and truly.” Speaking by telephone from her home in Bend, she says she’s been stunned by the opportunity the unexpected post is offering. “They have given me an entire state to travel over the next two years, waving the poetry banner.”
Extrapolating from the banner concept, Waterston imagines using her office to create actual, physical banners to hand out. “Wouldn’t it be cool if all the pickups were flying flags that said ‘Poetry’?” Perhaps more realistically, she is already booked to read one of her poems at a previously planned gala Saturday, August 24, at the High Desert Museum in Bend. Meanwhile, she says, her calendar is rapidly filling with other engagements.
Last week’s announcement closely followed a July 25 Eugene Weekly cover story whose headline read, “Roses Are Red, Violets are Blue. Governor Tina Kotek, Name Our New Poet Laureate, Will You?”
In the story, reporter Savannah Brown noted that Oregon had been without an official poet laureate since May, when Portland spoken-word poet Anis Mojgani’s second two-year term in the appointed office expired. After asking the public for nominations in late 2023, the Oregon Cultural Trust screened 71 possible candidates and referred two names to the Governor’s Office in February. What followed was months of silence.
This rankled some poets around the state. “I just find it shocking that there’s this delay,” Eugene poet Cecelia Hagen told Brown. “It’s very disappointing.”
Oregon named its first poet laureate in 1923, giving the job to an internationally known poet, Edwin Markham. Subsequent poets laureate have included Ethel Romig Fuller, poetry editor for 25 years at The Oregonian newspaper; William Stafford, who had previously served as national poet laureate; and, later, his son Kim Stafford.
The part-time position pays $15,000 a year, with a $10,000 travel budget for the two-year term. According to the Oregon Cultural Trust, the poet laureate travels the state and “fosters the art of poetry, encourages literacy and learning, addresses central issues relating to humanities and heritage, and reflects on public life in Oregon.”
Every other poet laureate announcement in the past 50 years has been made between March and May, Brown noted in her story. The Governor’s Office offered no explanation for the unusual delay this time, but said by law the governor has a full year to appoint a new poet laureate following a vacancy.
Waterston, who grew up in Massachusetts, got her bachelor’s degree in 1968 in film and photography from Harvard University before marrying a range manager and becoming, as she says, a ranch wife in Montana and, later, Eastern Oregon. The marriage failed after two decades, but her love for the high desert country lasted.
She is the author of four poetry collections, one of which is a verse novel, as well as several non-fiction books, including Then There Was No Mountain, a memoir of her years as a ranch wife. She turned her verse novel, Vía Láctea: A Woman of a Certain Age Walks the Camino, into the libretto for a full-length opera — Vía Láctea: A New Opera in English — that was composed by Keizer musician Rebecca Oswald and produced in 2016 by OperaBend with the Central Oregon Symphony. Soprano Emily Pulley sang the lead role. A performance by Eugene Opera was scheduled for its 2017-2018 season but was canceled amid the opera’s financial troubles.
Waterston is on the faculty of the low residency MFA program at Oregon State University–Cascades in Bend, from which she has an honorary Ph.D. for her support of the literary arts in Eastern Oregon.
Her 2020 book, Walking the High Desert: Encounters with Rural America along the Oregon Desert Trail, drew this blurb from Seattle author Timothy Egan: “There is no better guide to Oregon’s high desert than Ellen Waterston. Her sense of place, her lyrical love of this sometimes hard to love place, her balanced yet passionate dissection of the issues roiling the big land of junipers and open sky is a wonderful match for her subject. While the West is full of poets who love the land, few of them are as intellectually nimble as Waterston.”
Waterston is the founder and president of the Waterston Desert Writing Prize, which is awarded annually to a nonfiction book proposal about the high desert, and is the founder of the Writing Ranch in Bend. Her brother, Sam Waterston, is an actor best known for his role as prosecutor Jack McCoy in the Law & Order television franchise.
And one more thing: Minutes after our interview ended, she fired off a quick email. “One thing I failed to mention,” she wrote, “is my gratitude to Governor Tina Kotek for this opportunity.”