Writing & Reading at Centrum

Chris Abani's Search for a National Literature

The following article was originally published in the spring issue of Centrum's Experience magazine. Chris Abani's workshop is sold out, at this point, but he will be giving a reading from new work at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater on Friday, July 18, at 7:30 pm. The reading is free. Follow this link for more information about the 2008 Port Townsend Writers' Conference.

"If you want to get at the molten heart of contemporary fiction, Chris Abani is the starting point."
       —Dave Eggers

Here is a legend—a true one—that surrounds Nigerian-born author Chris Abani. In late 1985, after the publication of his first novel at the age of sixteen, a political thriller entitled “Masters of the Board,” he was arrested for trying to overthrow the Nigerian government.

This novel, although written at such an early age, wasn’t even Abani’s first publication. At the age of ten he’d won a writing competition for eighteen-year-olds, rolling down the aisle “like a little round basketball” to claim his prize.

“The shock on people’s faces brought home to me the impact that writing could have,” Abani says. “In the Nigeria of the time, it was considered that one shouldn’t write until their education was finished, usually in their late twenties or early thirties. But here was this child who wanted to write.”

Born at the beginning of the Nigerian civil war, Abani fled with his family during the conflict and didn’t return to the country until 1970, at the age of five. Known abroad as the Biafran War, the Nigerian civil war featured genocide against the Igbo language group—and other eastern Nigerian language groups—by the state of Nigeria. Millions of Igbo were killed.

After the war, the family moved back to land that had been held by the Igbo rebels, and Chris Abani grew up among “the detritus of war: burned-out tanks squatting in the middle of soccer fields, live grenades getting passed around in school, people hanging themselves because of what they had done.”

The government discouraged the teaching of the civil war in the schools, not wanting the eastern Nigerian youth to re-foment the revolution. Abani only learned the recent history of his own country from a Pakistani teacher, who, as part of a unit on the Jewish Holocaust, taught the Igbo genocide, as well.

Growing up surrounded by war, and drawn as he was to thrillers and comic books—“plus, I couldn’t play soccer well,” he says—Abani wrote his youthful spy thriller, in which neo-Nazis take over Nigeria to institute a Fourth Reich. In addition to international locations, the novel featured several national government buildings and locations.

Centrum's Facebook Page

Whether you are a workshop participant, performance attendee, donor, volunteer, resident, or interested observer, we hope you will take a moment to visit our new Facebook page.

Facebook allows each of you to connect with us and extend your experience at Centrum. Upload your photos and videos. Talk about your past or upcoming workshops, review performances and readings. In large measure, 'our' page is 'your' page.

So take a look, and let us know what you think. We're exploring whether or not to create specific social networking sites for each of our major program areas. What do you think? (Now you have your first discussion topic on Facebook.)

The Magical Realism of Kathleen Alcala

Only three spaces remain in Mexican-American magical realist writer Kathleen Alcalá's fiction workshop. 

Kathleen Alcalá is the author of a short story collection, Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist, and three novels: Spirits of the Ordinary, The Flower in the Skull, and Treasures in Heaven. Her collection of essays, The Desert Remembers My Name is now available from the University of Arizona Press.

Her work has received the Western States Book Award, the Governor's Writers Award, a Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Award, and a Washington State Book Award. She also recently served on the board of Richard Hugo House.

Kathleen will be teaching at the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, from July 13 to July 20, 2008. Registration is available here, as well as by calling Centrum at 360.385.3102, x114. 

Special Afternoon Writing Workshops Announced!

We have set our schedule for the special afternoon writing workshops during the Port Townsend Writers' Conference! Each workshop will take place from 2 to 3:30. Location will be announced during the Conference. Workshops are free for those participants registered for a core morning workshop. For those not registered in the morning, workshops can be taken individually for fifty dollars or all six days for one hundred and ninety-five dollars. Please note that these will all be happening at the same time, so you'll have to pick which ones to go to!

Monday
Nature Writing with Barbara Bloom
Poetic Line Breaks with Peter Pereira
Writing Literature for Young Readers with Ellie Mathews
Writing Children's Literature with Deb Lund
Writing Beyond Borders with Wendy Call

Tuesday
Haiku and Haibun writing with Jeannine Hall Gailey
Writing Beyond Borders with Wendy Call
Writing as Collaboration with Stephanie Lenox and Heather Hummel
Special Nonfiction Workshop with Selah Saterstrom
The Short-Short Story with Sam Ligon
Writing Children's Literature with Deb Lund

Wednesday
Nature Writing with Barbara Bloom
Poetic Line Breaks with Peter Pereira
Writing Feature Magazine Articles with Patricia Morrison Coate
Writing The Lyric Essay with Brenda Miller
Writing Literature for Young Readers with Ellie Mathews
Writing Children's Literature with Deb Lund

Thursday
Writing the Lyric Essay with Brenda Miller
Haiku and Haibun Writing with Jeannine Hall Gailey
Memoir Writing with Brandon Schrand
Writing Children's Literature with Deb Lund
Putting Together a Chapbook with Lana Ayers
Writing the Newspaper Column with Kathie Meyer
Writing the Novel with Sam Ligon

Friday
Nature Writing with Barbara Bloom
Writing Children's Literature with Deb Lund
plus...
The Ins and Outs of Literary Journal, with the editors of the Bellingham Review, Tidepools, Crab Creek Review, Willow Springs and the online Blood Orange Review.

Saturday
Writing Historical Figures with Lesley Hazleton
Writing With Maps with Kathleen Alcala

Writers' Conference Poetry Workshops Now Full

The poetry workshops at the Port Townsend Writers' Conference are now full, and space is shrinking rapidly in the remaining fiction and nonfiction workshops. Chris Abani's fiction workshop has only one space left, as well, with only a handful of spaces left in the nonfiction workshops of Selah Saterstrom and Lesley Hazleton.

For poets, there are still many options for enjoying a week of retreat and renewal during the Conference!

• Sign up for the "Residency Only" option. You pay room and board, and then use your time to read and write, and can attend all readings and lectures for free.
• Sign up for the "Afternoon Workshops" option. This gets you into all the afternoon workshops, including workshops with Copper Canyon poet Peter Pereira and Jeannine Hall Gailey.
• Sign up for the Brian Evenson "Start Here" workshop, which is a foundational course in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction techniques. This class is appropriate for all writers--from beginners to those who are looking for new ways of thinking about their work and finding new ways of telling stories.
• Or, to tailor a reading and writing experience that best fits your needs, call program manager Jordan Hartt at 360.385.3102, x131, and we will figure out how to maximize your time during the week!

Conference space at this point is 96% full, so make sure to reserve your space or put your name down on the waiting list!

Re-thinking Two-Dimensional Stereotypes

Port Townsend Writers' Conference faculty member Lesley Hazleton will lead a special afternoon workshop on Saturday, July 19, in how to bring historical figures to life in your writing.

"Imagining the past is what most writers do," Lesley says. "Whether in fiction or non-fiction, we re-create the past and shape it to reveal new meaning. But what happens when all we seem to have are two-dimensional stereotypes, as in Mary the virgin or Jezebel the harlot? How do we bring legends back to multi-dimensional life? Think of a historical or mythical figure who intrigues you as we explore the interface between research and imagination, the personal and the factual. Brief in-class writing is part of the deal." 

Registration for the afternoon workshops is available by following this link. In addition, Hazleton will be leading a week-long core workshop in writing creative nonfiction.

WANTED: Bloggers

When we redesigned this site last year, we had a vision that at some point, we could invite community members to post/write for the site, sharing their passion with other members of the Centrum community.

That time is NOW!

If you are passionate about writing and would like to share your knowledge and a sense of discovery with others, we want YOU. Please contact Keven Elliff at keven at centrum dot org for more information.

The Doctor Is In: Poetry Options at the 2008 Port Townsend Writers' Conference

Like the prose workshops, workshops space in the poetry offerings at the 2008 Port Townsend Writers' Conference have been going fast! The Kim Addonizio workshop is already full, and there are only two spaces left in the Gary Lilley workshop.

In order to give participants more poetry workshops, we have added two special afternoon workshops, one with poet Peter Pereira, and one with poet Jeannine Hall Gailey.

Peter Pereira, who is a family physician in Seattle, has released two books with Copper Canyon Press: Saying the World, and What's Written on the Body. His poems have appeared in such magazines as Prairie Schooner and the Virginia Quarterly Review, and appeared in the 2007 Best American Poetry anthology.

Pereira will be leading afternoon workshops Monday, July 14 and Wednesday, July 16 on "Line Ends/Line Breaks" in which he discusses the many ways to end and/or break a line, and how to use each to its maximal effect in a poem. Each workshop will end with a brief exercise for participants to practice what they have learned.

Tuesday, July 15 and Thursday, July 17, Jeannine Hall Gailey will lead workshops on writing haiku and haibun forms of poems.

All of these afternoon workshops are free for those who are registered for a core morning workshop, and at a special rate for those who just want to take these workshops.

Brenda Miller to Lead Workshops in the Lyric Essay

During the 2008 Port Townsend Writers' Conference, creative nonfiction writer Brenda Miller will be leading workshops in the lyric essay.

Miller spends the academic year as associate professor of English at Western Washington University in Bellingham. 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.

Miller is also widely acclaimed as a popular teacher of writing. The textbook that she co-authored with fellow WWU writing professor Suzanne Paola, Telling it Slant, is used in classrooms all over the world. At the Conference, she will lead workshops in the lyric essay on both Wednesday, July 16 and Thursday, July 17, and will be part of a panel presentation on Friday, July 18.

We are very excited and grateful to have her at the Conference this year! To register for her workshops or for any of the Conference workshops, please follow this link.