BiblioVault - Books about Oregon Coast

Another Eve

Shame and Desire on the Oregon Coast

Elissa Minor

Oregon State University Press, 2026

When she walks away from the Mormon church and a twenty-five-year marriage, Elissa Minor abandons the only life she’s ever known to embrace her identity as a queer woman. In this intimate memoir, she explores shame, desire, beauty, and acceptance. Minor realizes that her desire isn’t the problem but the solution. Finding solace outside of the church in the wilderness that surrounds her, she eventually begins to understand what it really means to be pure and worthy.

On the rugged terrain of the northern Oregon coast, Minor discovers passion and harmony in the grip of nature and in the arms of a lover who will become her wife. In the salty sea air, she learns that her own queerness—though less-charted territory—is like her love of backwoods hiking and that to accept her sexuality, she must take full pleasure in the wild that encompasses her. Poignant and powerful, Another Eve re-examines past truths and celebrates honoring oneself and living authentically. For Minor, the end of her transformation is only the beginning.

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Persistent Callings

Seasons of Work and Identity on the Oregon Coast

Joseph E. Taylor

Oregon State University Press, 2019

The Nestucca Valley is a small watershed, tucked away in one corner of a county in far western Oregon. There are no incorporated towns, and cows outnumber humans. It has long been a place without a written history, yet its past offers many surprising twists on received wisdom about rural economies. In crisp prose and succinct chapters, Persistent Callings carries readers from aboriginal times to the present, illustrating the wisdom of seasonal labor, the complex relationships between work and identity, and the resilience of rural economics across more than a century of almost continual change.

Life in this watershed, known to locals as “South County,” has always been demanding. Farming, fishing, and logging were difficult occupations, but work had deeper meanings. Challenges arrived in many forms, including climate shifts, market crashes, regulatory changes, and industry consolidations. Residents’ ability to innovate was their greatest resource, and their persistence helps us to recognize the callings they pursued.

During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, disruptions came more quickly, and they coincided with infusions of capital that dramatically altered the structure of employment, with devastating results for the valley’s hardest working residents. Unemployment and poverty skyrocketed while health and life expectancy dropped to alarming levels. Moreover, the arrival of retirees and rise of environmental amenities actually exacerbated some ecological problems. Little in this history plays out as expected, and much of it will make readers reconsider how they think about the social, economic, and environmental contours of rural life in the American West.

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Storm Beat

A Journalist Reports from the Oregon Coast

Lori Tobias

Oregon State University Press, 2020

Journalist Lori Tobias arrived on the Oregon Coast in 2000. After freelancing from Newport for several years, she signed on to the Oregonian as a stringer covering the coast from Florence to Astoria; later she would be hired as a staff writer responsible for the entirety of Oregon’s coast—one person for more than three hundred miles. This meant long hours, being called out for storms in the middle of the night (and in dangerous conditions), driving hundreds of miles in a day if stories called for it.

The Oregon Coast is a rugged, beautiful region. Separated from the state’s population centers by the Coast Range, it is a land of small towns reliant primarily on fishing and tourism, known for its dramatic landscapes and dramatic storms. Many of the stories Tobias covered were tragedies: car crashes, falls, drownings, capsizings. And those are just the accidents; Tobias covered plenty of violent crimes as well. But her stories also include more lighthearted moments, including her own experiences learning to live on and cover the coast. Tobias’s story is as much her own as it is the coast’s; she takes the reader through familiar beats of life (regular trips back east as her parents age), the decline of journalism in the twenty-first century, and the unexpected (and not entirely glamorous) experiences of a working reporter—such as a bout of vertigo after rappelling from a helicopter onto a ship. Ultimately, Tobias tells a compelling story of a region that many visit but few truly know.

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The View From Cascade Head

Lessons for the Biosphere from the Oregon Coast

Bruce A. Byers

Oregon State University Press, 2020

Cascade Head, on the Oregon Coast between Lincoln City and Neskowin, has stunning ocean views, abundant recreational opportunities, and a rich history of ecological research and conservation. Its landscape and seascape support a multitude of species, some of which are threatened, such as the Oregon silverspot butterfly, spotted owl, and coho salmon. In The View from Cascade Head, Bruce Byers tells the fascinating story of this special place and the people who have worked to protect it. Drawing from his lifelong relationship with the Oregon Coast and recent experience living and working at Cascade Head, Byers weaves together personal observations, ecological science, and the history and philosophy of nature conservation in a series of interconnected essays.

Cascade Head is Oregon’s only biosphere reserve, part of the international network of biosphere reserves coordinated by UNESCO. Biosphere reserves around the world are laboratories for understanding how humans affect ecosystems and models for how we can heal the human-nature relationship.

The View from Cascade Head illustrates three main lessons: the actions and efforts of committed individuals can make a difference; ecological mysteries still abound despite decades of scientific research; and our worldviews—how we think about our place in nature—shape our individual and collective effect on the ecosystems we inhabit. Byers helps us understand how these lessons apply everywhere and can lead us toward a more sustainable relationship with our home planet.

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