Screenshot: Robin Cody Article, Chinook Observer Online

Sometimes, you just don’t make the cut.  Even though you meet the deadline, there’s something more crucial, more important that nudges you right out of the running.

So, it was with my news story about award-winning author Robin Cody coming to the Peninsula next week!  It didn’t get into yesterday’s paper, but it is on the online version and I’m assured it will be in next week.  And, the announcement of his talk is in Community Calendar — take a look!

Voyage of a Summer Sun

Robin lives in Estecada, Oregon — moved there from St. Helens when he was five years old and has been there more than fifty years.  Like many authors, he’s had a ‘checkered career’ — teacher, army officer, university administrator, baseball umpire, basketball referee, long-distance bicyclist, and school bus driver.  Throughout it all, he never strayed far from the Columbia River.

In 1984, he became a free-lance writer. It was while he was doing a project for the Bonneville Power Authority that he made a solo canoe voyage from the headwaters of the Columbia to its mouth.  He describes the 82-day voyage as “life-changing” and one of discovery.  The book that it spawned, Voyage of A Summer Sun, was published in 1992 by Sasquatch Press.  In 1995 it won the Oregon Book Award for literary non-fiction, and the 1996 Northwest Booksellers Association Book.

Robin was one of the first authors to do a book-signing for us at the Bookvendor in 1992, shortly after Voyage of the Summer Sun came out.  I don’t know if it was then or later that Lucille and Sam Pierce, old friends of the Codys, had us to a dinner party given in Robin’s honor.  And now, after all these years, he and Donna are coming to Oysterville to open the Spring 2018 Schoolhouse Lecture Series.  This group of talks, like last fall’s series, will be focused on the river.  I can’t imagine a more fitting person to start them off.

Oysterville Schoolhouse

Oh.  And did I say that Robin is a consummate story-teller?  Don’t miss him.  Thursday, February 1st, 10 a.m. at the Oysterville Schoolhouse.  And at 1:00 that afternoon — he will be signing three of his books at Adelaide’s!  See you both places!