PENDLETON — Chris Anderson will read from his new work, a book of poems titled “Love Calls Us Here,” as the featured author at the First Draft Writers Series on Thursday, Nov. 21, at Pendleton Center for the Arts.

While the event is usually offered in hybrid form, with audiences invited to join in person or online, this event will be a Zoom-only presentation starting at 7 p.m. Find the link at pendletonarts.org.

“I love listening to the authors via Zoom,” said Roberta Lavadour, arts center director. “I can pick up some handwork in my studio and really listen deeply. It’s a nice way to be present and really take in the power of someone’s words.”

In Anderson’s poems, he describes two grace-filled women: a bartender and a nurse. The work seeks to describe those moments when “divine love meets us in the real world and nowhere else,” many of them drawn from his experience as a Catholic deacon, he said.

Anderson is a Catholic deacon, a poet and a retired English professor living in Corvallis. He grew up in Spokane, Washington, and went to college at Gonzaga University in Spokane, then to graduate school at the University of Washington in Seattle.

After receiving his PhD in 1983, and teaching for four years at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, he taught for 34 years at Oregon State University in Corvallis. He retired in 2020.

Since he was ordained in 1997, he’s served as a deacon at St. Mary’s in Corvallis, and continues to serve at St. Mary’s in retirement. He also lead retreats and does spiritual direction, and continues to write.

He’s written 15 books, including academic books, textbooks, books of personal essays, and three books of poetry. In 2016 Eerdman’s published a book he put together from pieces of homilies, “Light When It Comes: Trusting Joy, Facing Darkness, and Seeing God in Everything.”

“God is present in our lives ‘between the lines of persons and things,’ Abbot Jeremy Driscoll says,” Anderson said. “Our lives are poems. The mystery is in the moment, and we just have to get out of the way. Only then can we can glimpse at last what Abbot Jeremy calls ‘the hidden radiance we long to see.’”

For more information about First Draft, call 541-278-9201.