Donors, Sponsors, & Volunteers

July 2007 Letter from the Director

As I write, about 150 participants in the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference and the Goddard MFA Writing Program are deep in critique, creation, and conversation with an extraordinary array of poets and prose writers from across North America, who work beyond the bounds of well-behaved American literature. A rigorous and rich schedule of readings and lectures fills mornings, afternoons and evenings all week long. And everyone is basking in the beauty of Fort Worden in July.

Coming Up: It is the mid-point of our summer season; Jazz, Blues, and Chamber Music are still to come. And we are also looking ahead to a richer calendar of fall, winter, and spring workshops and events than ever before. In October we have scheduled an advanced revision workshop for fiction writers with Pam Houston. In November, Mike Marshall will be heading a master class on, “Choro: The Sweet Lament of Brazilian Music.”  Also in November, Dirk Powell will be back at Centrum for “Southern Mountain Traditions: String Band Tunes, Country Songs, and Shape Notes.” And, in January, Orville Johnson, Steve James, and Mike Dowling will be leading a Bottleneck Weekend. Intimate and extraordinary public performances will be part of each of these gatherings.

You can read stories about and interviews with several of the artists involved in these new ventures in the next issue of Experience magazine, which should be arriving in your mailbox at the end of the month.

Fort Planning: If you have been receiving these quarterly letters from me for a while, you know how deeply Centrum has been engaged in planning for the future of Fort Worden as a center for lifelong learning. The last phase of this process is officially underway, with the recent posting of a “Request for Qualifications,” seeking individuals or teams to lead detailed final planning efforts. (For details visit our Fort Worden web section.)  As part of this effort, Centrum, Fort Worden, and the Quimper Foundation have begun convening a series of meaty conversations with Fort partners about how we can work with one another to develop and sustain a “partnership economy” that will promote and support Fort Worden as an internationally significant learning center.

Deepening Our Commitment to Young Artists

In the last issue of Experience I wrote that artists teach us that “embracing change can be the most meaningful way to honor tradition.” This understanding plays out in myriad ways at Centrum. Most recently, we have re-invented our programs for elementary, middle school, and high school students by remembering what has always been most transformative for then: deep interactions with practicing artists who are taking risks with their own work and will push students to think very differently about art making.

Visual artist Martha Worthley, our new manager for youth programs, is working to deepen our commitment to youth by deepening our connections to provocative emerging and established artists across disciplines. She is selecting a core group of artists who will serve as faculty for all 2008 youth programs. These artists will also be given residency opportunities to further their own projects and to interact and collaborate in community with other artists at Fort Worden. By extending their connection to Centrum over an entire season, they will have more chance for creative engagement with the physical site and the local community.

For 35 years Centrum has worked with artists across a spectrum of creative endeavor to inspire and challenge young artists. We are deepening that tradition. Our November 2006 gathering of youth arts leaders from across Washington underscored the critical importance of identifying, working with, serving, and learning from artists whose work recasts and opens up new cultural conversations. Linking our artist-in-residence program with student residential programming will provide an array of new opportunities for learning and creation.

We do not provide arts education; we provide education, community, and creative time for artists—professional, emerging, aspiring, or experimenting. When we talk about Centrum experiences changing lives we are, more often than not, talking about individuals whose decision to be artists were made as the result of their time at Fort Worden.

We wish to give special thanks to the painter Mary Ann Peters, a former student, teacher, and artist-in-residence at Centrum, and the newest member of the Centrum advisory board, for working closely with Martha on this program. Several years ago, Mary Ann, along with writer Matthew Stadler and Anne Focke—one of the nation’s greatest advocates for individual artists—proposed an initiative for Centrum that looked a lot like what is emerging for 2008. Embracing change can be the most meaningful way to honor tradition.

Centrum’s programs for Washington State youth are supported through generous funding from the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, with monies secured by the ongoing advocacy of our legislative delegation. Kudos to Terry Bergeson and Gayle Pauley at OSPI and to Lynn Kessler, Jim Hargrove, and Kevin Van der Wege in the Washington State Legislature.