Writing & Reading at Centrum

Literary Journal Panel Slated for Friday, July 18

For those of you registered for the 2008 Port Townsend Writers' Conference, mark your calendars for Friday, July 18!

Brenda Miller of the Bellingham Review, Sam Ligon of Willow Springs, Natasha Moni and Lana Ayers of the Crab Creek Review, Janet Lucas of Tidepools, and Stephanie Lenox of the online Blood Orange Review will be leading a panel about the most current challenges and opportunities facing literary journals--which are often the rivers that sustain creative writing communities.

Brenda Miller (pictured left), spends the academic year as associate professor of English at Western Washington University in Bellingham, where she is the editor-in-chief of the Bellingham Review. Her collection of essays, Season of the Body, was a finalist for the PEN American Center Book Award and she has received a number of Pushcart Prizes for her work. Her essays have appeared in such periodicals as the Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and the Sun.

Sam Ligon (right), editor-in-chief of Willow Springs, received his MA from the University of New Hampshire, and his MFA from New School University. His novel, Safe in Heaven Dead, was published by HarperCollins in 2003, and his short fiction has appeared in many literary journals. He is a recipient of a 2005 Artists Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship.

Natasha Moni, the editor-in-chief of the Crab Creek Review, has published in multiple literary journals. She and fellow editor Lana Ayers will speak about the challenges and opportunities for independent literary journals--journals not connected with a public or private university or other funding source--as well as ideas for getting started, finding grants, and developing the infrastructure to guide independent literary journals.

Janet Lucas, editor-in-chief of Peninsula College's literary journal will offer insights to putting together literary journals without the assitance of graduate or upper-division students. Because Peninsula College is a two-year institution, Tidepools with the assistance and passion of students who are just beginning their academic careers.

Stephanie Lenox, the 2007 winner of the Slapering Hol chapbook contest for her collection of poems, The Heart that Lies Outside the Body, received her MFA degree from the University of Idaho in 2004. She will talk about opportunities strategies for starting, maintaining, and pushing to excellence online publishing.

In Memoriam: Poet Jason Shinder

I would like to mention something about the passing of Jason Shinder. Jason recently passed on after a long battle with cancer. His contribution to the art of writing and the arts in general was vast, purposeful, and I believe will prove lasting, whether it is through his own books, his teaching, or his development of the YMCA National Writer's Voice. I did not know Jason well, but in two or three brief meetings he made me feel as if I had known him a good long time. In his indirect way he taught me things about writing and living deliberately. I have continued to learn from him as I read his poems and his anthologies created as guides for young writers and lovers of the art of poetry.

His life was dedicated to the arts. My first experience with Jason was watching him open up a night of dancing at an MFA residency with utterly compelling moves. This display of quiet excellence echoed itself throughout my time as a student at Bennington. I never had Jason as a teacher, but I was able to witness how, in his quiet way Jason continually worked for art as an artist and teacher. He carried his student’s poems everywhere and worked them over obsessively. I watched him stop in mid-conversation in the student cafe and pull out a student packet, mark it with some notes, stuff it back in his bag and continue his conversation.

He read a series of poems one evening that chronicled his mother’s battle with a terminal illness. The poems were raw, tender, and moving. My final direct interaction with Jason was at a summer residency when he randomly sat down next to me during dinner. I asked him how he was doing. He casually remarked that things were going well, and that he was just trying to write as well as he could. This small bit of conversation became a mantra of teaching advice for me over the next few years. There is so much out there. There is so much to do. We can write poems to make people laugh, chronicle illness, compete with Dante, but no matter what, at the core, we strive to just write as well as we can.

He will be missed.

Searching for the Heart of Africa

[Chris Abani gives a talk at the TED conference in Monterrey, Calif.]

In this video, novelist Chris Abani talks about the search to create an African narrative. This summer, Abani will be giving a reading and a lecture as part of the Port Townsend Writers' Conference. The lecture will take place Monday, July 14 at 4 pm at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater, and the reading will take place Friday evening, July 18, at 7:30 pm, also at the Wheeler. All readings and lectures are free.

Upcoming at the Summer Conference

2008 marks a new partnership at Fort Worden! The David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction--learn more about the Langum Charitable Trust here--will be awarded at the Wheeler Theater on July 18, at 4 pm in conjunction with the Port Townsend Writers' Conference.

The prize is offered annually to the work that is the best deemed book in American historical fiction. The prize and the $1,000 stipend will awarded to New Zealand writer Kurt Andersen for his historical novel "Heyday".

Set in 1848, the novel begins in New York City and explores the relationship of a traveling Englishman and an American actress and clandestine prostitute. Andersen immerses the reader in rich quotidian details of life in New York City and California.

Following the award ceremony, which is free and open to the public, a reception will be held in the Fort Worden Commons.

Port Townsend Writers' Conference Now At Capacity

The core morning workshops and the special afternoon workshops, as well as the Residency-Only option at the Port Townsend Writers' Conference are now all at capacity. However, we have started a waiting list for all options. To put your name on this list, please call our Registrar at 360.385.3102, x114.

In the meantime, there are a number of ways to experience literary programming at Centrum this year.

• Our 2008 Readings and Lectures Series the week of July 13-July 19 is part of the week-long summer Conference, and is open to the public. All readings and lectures are free. 
• And for those of you looking for an intimate workshop experience, Rebecca Brown and Ilya Kaminsky will be leading an autumn weekend intensive the weekend of October 9-12. Space is limited for this--and all--literary workshops, but registration is available now.

Richard Kenney Poetry Reading April 27

Poet Richard Kenney will be giving a reading this Sunday at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater. The reading will start at 1:30 pm, with a book-signing and reception to follow.

Kenney, who teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Master of Fine Arts programs at the University of Washington, writes poems as informed by science as they are by Celtic and classical literatures. He was a faculty member at the Port Townsend Writers' Conference during nineteen-eighties, teaching and writing alongside such writers as James Welch, Marvin Bell, and Tobias Wolff.

Influenced by the geological work of John McPhee, as well as by such poets as Keats, Hopkins, Yeats, Auden, Frost, and Larkin, Kenney writes about human evolution and language origins, the cognitive basis of poetic forms, magical reasoning, and the Darwinian lives of subliterary species such as jokes, riddles, proverbs, charms, spells, nursery rhymes, and weather-saws.

Kenney’s books include "The Evolution of the Flightless Bird", "Orrery", and "The Invention of the Zero". His most recent book, "The One-Strand River", is a collection of poems from 1994 to 2007.

In this book, from which he will be reading on Sunday, Kenney tells tales of loves, births, and politics—in lively, quicksilver language that surprises at every turn. He often strikes a note that is rare in contemporary poetry—the satirical attack, with an eye on the news of the day—and ponders the “one-strand river” that is the sea, with its one encircling shore and its tidal pull on both the landscape and the human heart.

For a number of years Kenney led the UW creative-writing summer seminar in Rome. His work has appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, among many others.

The afternoon reading is free, and is presented as part of a new partnership between Centrum and Peninsula College’s Foothills Writers' Series.

Waiting List Available for Writers' Conference

Although all of the core morning workshops at the 2008 Port Townsend Writers' Conference have filled, a few spots may open up over the next couple of months. To put your name on the waiting list, simply call the Centrum registrar at 360.385.3102, x114.

Waiting lists for all workshops have been started, including those for Chris Abani, Kim Addonizio, Kathleen Alcala, Brian Evenson (pictured), Lesley Hazleton, Gary Lilley, and Selah Saterstrom.

Waiting lists are also available for the Residency Only option.