Hello! My name is Jennifer Anderson. I’ve been fortunate to teach English & creative writing at LC State for the past seventeen years. Since 2019, I’ve also served as the faculty advisor for the Publishing Arts program and Talking River Review. I’m so proud of the TRR team and the excellent work they do every semester in developing each issue from scratch.
I was born and raised in Idaho. In fact, I’m an LCSC alumnus, graduating in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in English. In 2005, I received my MFA in creative writing (with an emphasis in creative nonfiction) from the University of Idaho.
In my spare time, I enjoy bass fishing up the Snake River, gardening, bicycling with my husband, and playing with my one-year-old pitty-husky rescue, Delilah. This spring, Delilah and I are enrolled in AKC Canine Good Citizen classes. Though I’ve been an avid dog-lover and owner my entire life (over the past twenty-six years, my husband and I have adopted five shelter dogs), I’m learning so much about how to be a better dog communicator and companion.
Of course, I’m also passionate about reading and writing; right now, I’m particularly interested in trying my hand at flash essays comprised of 500-words or fewer. Below, I’ve included a piece I wrote for the LC Valley Field Guide, a cross-disciplinary project inspired by Cascadia Field Guide, which several LC State classes collaborated on last fall, and which featured work by over 100 students and several faculty members. In July of 2025, after receiving my first-ever colonoscopy at age forty-nine, I was diagnosed with colon cancer, and I wrote this in August right before I had a sigmoidectomy. Fortunately, my surgery was a success, and everything is now looking great. If you are forty-five or older (as is now recommended), get a colonoscopy!
Black Feathers
Every evening, from April to July, dozens of crows gathered in the honey locust and red chokecherry trees surrounding my house. I listened to their chatter, their cooing, clicking, and cawing. Some snacked on chokecherries; others preened. The topmost branches rustled and swayed with each new arrival, and I found myself whispering, “Here they come,” as I watched the choir assemble.
Never before this—not once in twenty years—had they stopped at our house, though they’ve been roosting in our neighbors’ giant maples for a long time now. But in early April, around my husband’s fiftieth birthday, they began congregating in the dying honey locusts we know must come down, in the cherry trees we planted in 2005 for shade. They never stayed for more than a half hour, and they never missed a day. Our trees suddenly became the place for this pre-roosting aggregation, a rest stop before the sixty or so of them flew across the street for the night.
I left them gifts—peanuts, dog food, sunflower seeds—because I’d read they might leave tokens in return. They never took what I offered and left behind only the rare black feather, sticking up out of the ground as if an exclamation mark or an arrow pointing here! Then, on July 9th, the same day I was diagnosed with cancer, dusk came and went without a sound.
Now several months have passed, and the crows have not returned. Sometimes a handful still roosts in my neighbors’ maples, but no more than that. True, the chokecherries dried up when the days turned hot. It’s likely the flock found another food source, and they convene somewhere else for the night. Once, on our evening walk, my husband and I found them in the cemetery two blocks away, clustered on the twisted limbs of a snag, their calls swallowing up all other neighborhood noise. Crows can recognize human faces. Did they know me as I stood beneath them, and what did they say?
Some cultures believe visits from crows indicate a transformation, a change on the horizon, and they will keep coming, day after day, until their message is received. Some consider them omens of death. Others believe finding their feathers brings protection and good luck. I’ve never been a spiritual person. Even as a young girl in church, I questioned the existence of God.
And yet.
When faced with so many unknowns, I find myself listening for the tidings of crows at dusk. I keep searching my garden for feathers.