Writing at Centrum

Don't Talk to Poets

Poet Carolyn Forché and fiction writer Micheline Aharonian Marcom will be leading writing workshops May 7-10, 2009, about writing in witness. Here, we present part of an interview with Carolyn by Bill Moyers about her book "The Country Between Us." You'll see why we titled this post the way we did when you reach the end of this interview.

Moyers: "The Country Between Us." What is the country?

Forché: It's complicated because that book emerged while I was working as a human rights activist in Central America and in the United States and those poems turned out to be very different from the poems I had previously written. They were still first-person lyric narrative free-verse poems, but I didn't realize how much I'd been changed by my experiences in El Salvador until those poems reflected that change.

Mark Doty Wins 2008 National Book Award for Poetry

Last night, Mark Doty won the 2008 National Book Award for Poetry for "Fire to Fire." An interview with Mark and an excerpt from the book appears on the site for the National Book Foundation, www.nationalbook.org/nba2008.html, which will also post a video of the ceremony later tonight!

Mark Doty to Lead Chapbook Workshop

During the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, July 12-19, 2009, Mark Doty will be leading a workshop for poets who are ready to assemble a group of related poems into a chapbook manuscript.
 
Questions that Mark will pose include, In what ways can poems be “related”? What gives a collection a sense of coherence, and what keeps that unity from becoming dull?

"Participants in this group will share their chapbook manuscripts with one another and with the workshop leader two weeks before the conference, so that we’ll have time to carefully consider each person’s work," Mark says. "Then, we'll discuss these chapbooks-in-progress in our workshop meetings."  

Mark Doty is one of the world's finest poets. “If it were mine to invent the poet to complete the century of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, I would create Mark Doty just as he is, a maker of big, risky, fearless poems in which ordinary human experience becomes music,” Philip Levine wrote.

Mark is the author of eight books of poems, among them "Fire to Fire," "School of the Arts," "Source," and "My Alexandria." He has also published four volumes of nonfiction prose: "Still Life with Oysters and Lemon," "Heaven's Coast," "Firebird," and "Dog Years," which was a New York Times bestseller in 2007.

Doty lives in New York City and in Houston, Texas, where he is John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the graduate program at the University of Houston.

Registration for this workshop is available by following this link, or by calling Centrum at 360.385.3102, x114.

An Interview Between Chris Abani and Cristina García

Originally published in Bomb magazine                                                            

CHRIS ABANI: In this new book [A Handbook For Luck], fate (or luck in this case) plays an important role in how the individuals in the narrative live out their lives. And yet this is not fatalistic. There is a fair amount of free will, even the employment of magic. Would you say that the three lives (alternately) play out the ideas of what is probable, possible, and inevitable?

CRISTINA GARCIA: I think there’s a tremendous amount of tension between what’s probable, possible, and inevitable in this book. A density of suspense. Each of the characters, in his or her own way, battle the powerful undertow of what’s expected of them from their families and the larger society: Enrique in terms of his filial duty to his crazy magician father; Marta as a poor, uneducated woman from the slums of San Salvador; and Leila, as the privileged daughter of upper crust, pre-revolutionary Tehran. These expectations mark them, allow them a measure of florid suffering, but they also present myriad, twisted opportunities for change. I guess this just is another way of saying that that I believe their fates, perhaps all our fates, remain somewhat flexible. Yet luck, coincidence, happenstance play a huge role. One wrong move might ruin potential bliss; a right one, invite it in for a spell. But nothing is taken for granted, or lasts very long. The contract is renewed every day.

2009 Writing Workshops

Registration for Centrum's 2009 workshops is currently several months ahead of 2008's pace, in which workshops sold out out in a matter of months. 

Because of the growing community of writers, editors, readers, and translators who find, in the inspirational location of Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, new ways into work, we have expanded literary offerings to happen year-round, not just during the summer months.

The long weekend of May 7-10, poet Carolyn Forché and novelist Micheline Aharonian Marcom will lead a special workshop focusing on writing in witness to global trends. How do we, as writers, bear witness to the events of our time--or past times--through literary craft?

The 2009 Port Townsend Writers' Conference will take place the week of July 12-19, and will feature Chris Abani, Peter Orner, Mark Doty, Robert Wrigley, Kim Barnes, Tony Cohan, Denise Chávez, Liliana Valenzuela, and Adrian Castro leading workshops in fiction, nonfiction, and cross-genre prose in writing about family.

September 17-20, poet Quincy Troupe will be leading the "Jazz and the Word" workshop focusing on how to use the language of jazz as a mechanism for accessing new ways to tell stories.

Registration for all workshops is available by following the above links, or by calling the Centrum Registrar at 360.385.3102, x114.

Letter from Havana

By David Romtvedt

"Missionaries"

In June I was in Havana as part of a four piece band that included my friends Mona and Ryc, and my daughter Caito.  We were traveling under the auspices of Cuba AyUUda, a First Unitarian Church of Portland program meant to build mutual understanding between Cubans and Americans.  The problem with going to Cuba to build understanding is that the United States government has for nearly fifty years conducted a blockade against Cuba that includes forbidding travel to that country by US citizens.  So if you’re American you can’t go to Cuba to do anything. 

But there are loopholes.  The U.S. Treasury department authorizes certain travel “licenses.”  Americans can go to Cuba to attend international conferences, do academic research, or carry out cultural, educational, and religious projects.  Or they used to be able to.  The administration of George W. Bush canceled almost all licenses except those granted to church groups engaged in full time evangelical missionary work.

Tony Cohan to Lead Creative Nonfiction Workshop

The lineup for Centrum's summer creative nonfiction workshops in 2009 will feature Kim Barnes, Denise Chávez, and Tony Cohan (pictured) leading workshops in generating, crafting, and shaping your creative nonfiction. Information on each of their workshops is available here, and registration is available here, as well as by calling the Centrum registrar at 360.385.3102, x114.

Tony Cohan, who for a number of years was an insider in the Los Angeles music industry, is the author of the memoirs “On Mexican Time,” "Mexican Days," and “Native State” (a Los Angeles Times Notable Book of the Year). He is also the author of the novels “Opium,” and “Canary." His articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Condé Nast Traveler, among many other magazines. He divides his time between Mexico and California.

Telling the Stories of Our Shared Humanity

[Chris Abani onstage as part of the TED talks]

Poet and novelist Chris Abani will be in residence at the Port Townsend Writers' Conference July 12-19, 2009. In addition to leading a week-long workshop in fiction, Abani will give a free public craft lecture on July 13, at 4 pm at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater, and give a free public reading on July 18, at 7:30 pm.

Abani's workshop will be one of two fiction workshops during the Conference. The other is being led by Peter Orner. More information, including registration information, is available by following these links.

Poetry Workshops

Four different poetry workshops will be happening at Centrum in 2009. Registration for all of them has opened; space is filling rapidly.

Carolyn Forché will be in residence at Centrum the weekend of May 7-10. She'll be leading a poetry workshop that is geared specifically toward writing in witness, toward crafting and revising poems that deal with both global and personal upheaval—from transmigration, armed conflict, racial conflict, and environmental degradation to personal experiences of maltreatment and exploitation. How do we write about events that are sometimes too painful to even think about, much less write about? This will be one of the main questions that will guide this workshop. Registration is available here.

Mark Doty, Robert Wrigley, and Adrian Castro will all be in residence during the July 12-19 Port Townsend Writers' Conference.

Mark Doty's workshop is a master class for poets who are currently collecting their poems into a chapbook.

Robert Wrigley's workshop is a generative class designed to help poets find new ways of accessing and thinking about their work. This workshop is already over half full.

Adrian Castro's workshop will focus on the elements of "place" that appear in poems, and how to speak to this idea of place through language(s).

Registration for all workshops is available by following this link.

The Woman and the War Baby

Novelist and human-rights advocate Bill Ransom--and the founder of the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, in 1973--has released a new collection of poems, "The Woman and the War Baby," published by Blue Begonia Press.

Divided into six sections, or "orientations," the book is a journey in the tradition of Li Po, Tu Fu, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder. In this collection, the opening poems soaked in the rain, rosehips, and cafes of the Pacific Northwest; and the fourth and fifth sections of the book move their focus to the Central America of the nineteen-eighties and the human cost of the U.S.-fueled wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. In the sixth section, the poems begin to carry titles of "Back Home," "After the War," and "Eavesdropping on America," before culminating back in the Pacific Northwest.

About this collection, poet Michael Daley writes: "Owls know but do not tell. Thistles and wild rose keep words to themselves though they pray for miracles. Bill Ransom gives us the magical dream of an image afloat in the fact of space, while time itself is a steady line: A loose log rolls in the surf outside. If writer and reader can be said to create a new thing through a work of art, 'The Woman and The War Baby' veers to such transformations."