Ronald Garth Talney
(1936-2019)
Oregaon

Ron Talney was born in 1936 in Canada, and imigrated to the United States at an early age. He lived most of his life in Oregon, and preceeding his death he was a resident of Lake Oswego, Oregon. Talney is the author of three collections of poetry, The Anxious Ground (Press-22, 1974), The Quietness That Is Our Name (Bohematash Press, 1978), and most recently, The Broken World (Stone City Press, 2006). He relayed to us in a personal communication: "I first published poems about 40 years ago and have been at it ever since."

Talney, after his retirement, took on pro bono work for the local ACLU chapter. During his years of active private practice he focused on trial work, and spent the last years of working life with legal aid in Salem, Oregon, where he supervised the senior law program and was coodinator of the volunteer lawyer program. He also did pro bono political asylum representation in the Rio Grande Valley, South Florida and Portland, election observation in El Salvador and Arizona, human rights assessment in Haiti, and consulted for the National Legal Services Corporation.

Talney graduated from Portland State University (1960) and Northwestern School of Law of Lewis and Clark College (1966). He was admitted to the Oregon State Bar in 1966. He has two living children, one of them, a defense work in the State of Washington. [Source: Personal communications with Ron Talney] [Words That Make Us Friends--commentary]

Obituary