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Author and University of Oregon journalism professor Lauren Kessler has written five works of narrative nonfiction. Among them is the Oregon Book Award-winning Stubborn Twig, which was chosen as the book for all Oregonians to read in honor of the state’s 2009 sesquicentennial. In the short essay below, Kessler discusses her own, personal Oregon experience.

I am a first-generation Oregon pioneer. I came across the Oregon Trail—or rather, the late twentieth-century version of the Oregon Trail (Interstate 80) in a late twentieth-century Conestoga wagon (a Dodge van) packed with all my worldly goods. These goods did not include hand-made quilts, pewter flatware, and porcelain-faced dolls but rather a crate of records, a beanbag chair, a $90 Singer portable sewing machine that had taken me two months to buy on layaway, and a dog-eared copy of the I Ching. (“It furthers one to cross the great water,” it told me. And so I did: the Mississippi.) Instead of a cow tethered behind the wagon, I had my black and white cat, Tenderberry, unhappily ensconced in a cardboard carton by the wheel well.

Still, I had much in common with the pioneers who came before me. I came west, as they did, for adventure, for opportunity, for a new life in a new land. I came to shed some of who I was and discover who I might be. I came for the big sky, the tall trees, and the clean air. I came, like my predecessors, with high hopes, big plans, and empty pockets. I came west because west is where you came. I came to Oregon because I had seen “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” and read Sometimes a Great Notion and because, at Northwestern University, I had a friend named Tom Truesdell.

Tom was, as it seemed all brilliant students were in those days, a sociology and film studies double major. He was one of the hippest people I knew and, at a school with more than its share of poseurs, one of the least pretentious. He knew every Bergman movie by heart (in translation… but still), could name all of Mies van de Rohe’s important buildings, and had seen the Grateful Dead when Pig Pen was still alive. And, the thing is, he was humble about it. Low key.

Tom told me he was born and raised in Eugene, Oregon, a town I had never heard of in a state I vaguely understood was somewhere north of California. So he was, like… a hick? (Or so it seemed to me, a New Yorker going to school in Chicago.) And yet, he was in the cultural vanguard. How could that be? The more I got to know Tom, the more I wanted to be surrounded by people just like him: smart but modest about it, astute but relaxed, genuine, both open-minded and open-hearted. Maybe I should venture out to this Eugene, Oregon, place, I thought to myself. Perhaps that’s how they grew ‘em out there, like Tom.

It turned out I was right.

(In the video below, Kessler discusses her career as an Oregon storyteller.)

Kessler’s most recent book, Dancing with Rose: Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer’s, earned a 2008 Oregon Book Award.