Former KBOO Station Manager Victoria Stoppiello discusses her collection of essays, This Side of Sand Island: Reflections on Fish, Finns and Finding out about Family on the Lower Columbia with host Kathleen Stephenson.
Victoria originally wrote the essays for the coastal newspaper the Chinook Observer. In the 1990's Victoria and her husband Anthony moved into the house where her fisherman father was born in Ilwaco, Washington. They lived there for thirteen years. Her essays deal with a variety of topics related to that area and to Victoria and her family including fishing, environment and Finns. Victoria writes in the preface to This Side of Sand Island, "There is a sense of loss that runs through many of these essays - loss of commercial fishing as a viable occupation, loss of family connections due to divorce and a failure to ask enough questions, and a loss that should matter to all of us, the huge decline of the tremendous salmon runs that made Iwaco the premier salmon fishing port on the west coast and attracted Finnish immigrants like my grandparents."
Born and raised in the lower Columbia region, Victoria Pitkanen Stoppiello lived in Berkeley, Boulder and Portland before moving to the Northwest coast in 1985. Since 1996 shse has been an essayist, news and feature writer for the Chinook Observer and other publications including the UpperLeft Edge and Solar Today. She currently lives near the North Fork of the Nehalem River in northwest Oregon.
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