Jones

ENTERPRISE — Fishtrap Fireside celebrates Women’s History Month with featured readings from Wallowa County writers Debbie Carson, Talia Filipek and Toni Marie Jones. The virtual literary event will be released on Friday, March 4, at www.fishtrap.org and on Fishtrap’s YouTube channel.

The monthly literary gathering typically includes three writers reading from their works. The stream may be watched at any time after it’s released. The March episode of Fishtrap Fireside is sponsored by Alder Slope Nursery.

Carson, a native of Philadelphia, also lived as a child in then-rural Connecticut, where surrounding dairy farms gave way to insurance company campuses. She acquired an art degree and held a variety of jobs before heading West. While living in Eugene, she joined Hoedads Reforestation Co-op, making lifelong friends, while earning very little planting trees. She fared better working as a U.S. Forest Service temp, but eventually returned to college. Now retired from school librarianship and teaching art, she has two adult children, an itchy foot and a love for being on the water.

Filipek lives in Enterprise, ogling at the mountains with a cup of cocoa in one hand and a baby in the other arm. Growing up, she visited here with her Eastern Oregon-based family many summers to camp and explore, and then returned as a young adult to work for the USFS as a ranger in the Eagle Cap Wilderness and the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area. Her professional career has taken her to Corvallis, Culver, Estacada, Bend and tall buildings for work in design, editorial, photography, outdoor ed and social sciences. Though she loves variety in her adventures, she always knew that near the Wallowas would be her base camp one day.

Jones is a Wallowa County native whose Irish immigrant great-great-grandparents homesteaded on the Zumwalt Prairie in 1880. Her direct Indian lineage includes Cayuse, Assiniboine, Northern Cree and Muskego Cree. Two of her third great-grandfathers were interpreters for the Nez Perce and the Cayuse during the 1855 Treaty negotiations. She holds a liberal studies degree with an anthropology minor specializing in Oregon Indians. After a career working for the Oregon University System as a secretary, program manager and then graphic artist, and another working as a marketing director and consultant for nonprofit air ambulance companies, she is happily retired and grateful to have more time for writing and making. Jones is the co-editor of the Frenchtown Historical Foundation newsletter, a publication focusing on the Native American, French-Canadian and Metis families’ history of the area. Her work has appeared in two Fishtrap Outpost chapbooks, and she is a member of the Write Women and Sheep Creek Word Herders, local writing groups headed up by author and rancher Janie Tippett.