Eugene Weekly : Calendar : 01.12.06

Organizations around Eugene and Springfield are marking Martin Luther King Jr. Day with celebrations. At Temple Beth Israel Preschool, kids and adults can catch performances by Rich Glauber, Roger Fountain, the EDGE Dancers and more, and take part in craft activities. Five Springfield organizations coordinated the Martin Luther King Jr. Contest and Celebration, taking place at Springfield Middle School, where Springfield High School students will deliver keynote speeches and winners of a student essay, poetry and art contests will be announced. At Northwest Christian College, the Lane County 20th Anniversary Celebration of the Life and Work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. features bestselling author Stedman Graham speaking on "Unfinished Business: America's Commitment to Social Justice." Earlier in the week, Willamette High School has a Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration on Thursday, Jan. 12, and this Friday's Pacifica Forum topic is "Remembering Martin Luther King Jr." See Calendar.

The Windfall Reading Series at the Downtown Library welcomes George Estreich and Gina Ochsner this week. Ochsner is an award-winning short story writer whose work has been published in The New Yorker and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, to name just two. Her second story collection, People I Wanted to Be, received glowing reviews, including one from Booklist which said, "In these remarkable stories, which draw from folklore and myths, Ochsner's flawed, wholly sympathetic characters miraculously stumble into small moments, shaped with a delicious sense of the absurd, which connect them to a world that's magical, merciful, and infinite." Estreich, a poet, is the author of Textbook Illustrations of the Human Body, about which fellow poet Michael McFee said, "This is the best first book I've read in years." See Tuesday Calendar.

The second annual OpenLens Film Festival takes place this weekend at DIVA downtown, with screenings, workshops and more, including jury-selected and prizewinning films by regional artists. The festival opens Friday night with the Northwest premiere of In the Land of Milk and Honey, a film by director Susan Emschwiller, who will conduct a screenwriting workshop on Saturday afternoon. Other events include the Best of Explosion 2005!, a celebration of student work from the UO Department of Art, and the OpenLens Short Film and Video Festival, a showcase of work by local and regional filmmakers. On Sunday, DIVA's Henry Weintraub hosts a seminar, "30 Days in Hell: The Making of Devil's Rejects," on the intense production schedule for a horror movie (featuring the scary clown at right) by Rob Zombie. For more information, go to www.proscenia.net/openlens

In the past 21 years, Northwest authors Jay Lake, Ken Brady, Nina Kiriki Hoffman and Eric Witchey and David Goldman, Bruce Holland Rogers, Stephen Stanley, Leon West and J. Steven York have all won the international L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest, a competition for writers of speculative fiction. The award-winning stories — chosen by top authors in the science fiction and fantasy fields — are published in a series of Writers of the Future anthologies. On Saturday afternoon, these nine writers will gather at Tsunami Books to discuss their stories and sign copies of the anthologies. A smaller group — Stanley, Goldman, Lake and Ken Scholes — will do a signing earlier in the day at Barnes & Noble. See Saturday Calendar.