mike mcreynolds

You Need to Start to Notice All the Art . ! When was the last time you stopped looking at your phone or laptop and saw the art that is inside and outside LBCC? What do you mean you haven’t seen any art? It’s literally everywhere you look.  How did all this art get in and around Chinook Hall, Benton Center, and our Main Linn-Benton College campuses? Well that is a good question. You cannot really know by reading the tags mounted next to the art installations. The names of the people on the tags who created the paintings, statues, or sculptures don’t tell the whole story.  Let’s look at three art installations. First we’ll look at artist Kris Mitchell’s White Oak “Learning Tree” in the lobby of the Benton Center. Next came the main LBCC campus’s north entrance art sculpture that was completed while the building of Chinook Hall. Finally,  Albany master artist Bill Shumway, LBCC staff members Marc Rose and Renee McKitterick, members of the Benton Center Arts Committee tell th...

Inside the Darkside         “You don’t understand the power of the Darkside.” Darth Vader couldn't have said it any better. Open since April 1, 2005, Darkside Cinema is the only independently owned and operated movie theater in Corvallis. They play first run, indie, international, and documentary films.  Some of you will remember their previous arthouse movie theater on Jackson Avenue: Avalon Cinema, open from 1997 to 2007.  Paul Turner, owner of the Darkside, said he handed his contractor all his concepts of what he wanted the cinema to look like – drawn on napkins! The contractor then used those to put the official blueprints together. Then came the process of getting all the permits together. Once that was done, that’s when the real work began.  The finished product is something Paul, Joey Bauer, Kellan Holte, and Caitlin Stow are proud to say, “That is where we work!”  The atmosphere is classic with posters of cinema like Ci...

  Photo courtesy of LBCC You can call me Dio. That was how LBCC writing instructor Dio Morales introduced herself on the first day of her Creative Writing-Nonfiction class. She had students move the tables into a semi-circle so they could all see each other as they got to know who else was signed up to take this class.  The students were slow to speak, but she kept prompting  them with questions. Soon one person started talking. Then another, then they were all talking. So, here they were in week eight and she had a hard time getting them to stop talking. That is the effect Professor Morales had on her class. Tell a little bit about yourself and how you got started writing creatively? I've been a full-time faculty here at LBCC for five years now. I'm a creative non-fiction writer in my spare time and I write personal essays. I had my first essay collection published in 2018 and it was very exciting to get that in print and it was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, whi...