Oregon journalist Susan Palmer has twice won the “Silk Purse Award” from the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association, among other regional and national honors. Her first novel, The Tabernacle Bar, “hums alternately with the wry empathy of Barbara Kingsolver and the lyricism of Leslie Marmon Silko,” according to Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. A hiker, birder, embroiderer and lover of long two-lane highways, she is also a licensed ham radio operator who once bounced her voice off the moon.