Writing & Reading at Centrum

Elvis Has Left the Building

For the past four years Rebecca Brown has guided the Port Townsend Writers' Conference tirelessly. With a passionate understanding of what writers need in order to make breakthroughs in their work, she designed new programming, made needed changes, and was a gracious, welcoming presence to a new generation of writers at Centrum.

New writers flocked to Fort Worden from all over the country to learn and have conversations in a wide variety of forms, including fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and cross-genre writing.

Centrum Artistic Directors select faculty and design and shape Centrum’s year-round artistic experiences. Terms are kept deliberately short to allow for continuous change and renewal of programmatic areas.

Rebecca is one of the most welcoming, caring, and outward-looking people we've ever had the pleasure of working with. The tremendous work that she did for the faculty, staff, and participants behind the scenes was akin to that of a mama bear, caring for everyone in the same passionate way.

In the same way, she transformed Centrum's gatherings to include voices of divergent cultural aethetics and cultural grounding. She brought everyone together as a big house, which sparked conversations and literary practices that could not have happened any other way.

Because of Rebecca's role as Artistic Director, she was not able to teach workshops. That ends this October 9-12 as Rebecca joins poet Ilya Kaminsky in an intensive and celebratory weekend gathering that will offer residential workshops in fiction and poetry in a supportive, inspirational environment--and a chance to work with Rebecca intimately back at the Fort Worden campus. 

You'll find yourself in the companionship of a small, tightly knit group of writers, share communal meals with Rebecca and Ilya, and be able to soak yourself in the literary life with lots of conversation, while getting much individual attention to your work.

The two workshops will be separate—Rebecca will lead a workshop for fiction writers designed to lead you to new stories and new work, while Ilya will lead a similar workshop for poets—but you'll be able to interact with participants in the other genre over meals and evening gatherings.

For more information, including registration information, please follow this link. 

Thank you, Rebecca, for everything that you have done, and everything you are, and the tremendous legacy you leave behind at Centrum.

Readings and Lectures...Now Free

We're in the midst of an exciting week here at the Port Townsend Writers' Conference. One of the most popular components of the Conference is the public Readings and Lectures series. Each night during the Conference (and most afternoons), our faculty read and engage in a stimulating dialogue on writing and the world that engages it.

Thanks to the Washington Council for the Humanities, all public readings and lectures are free. Please join us at these events--a full schedule is available on our Readings and Lectures information page.

Two Conference Workshop Spaces Open

Once space in the Selah Saterstrom nonfiction workshop and one space Kim Addonizio poetry workshop have opened up. If you are planning on making the Conference part of your summer writing plans and would like to register for either of these workshops, let us know at 360.385.3102, x131.

If you are already registered, we'll see you at the Fort on Sunday!

Conference Coming Up!

The thirty-sixth annual Port Townsend Writers' Conference is now fewer than two weeks away! We've just printed the workshop booklet, participants are finalizing travel plans, and more people are registered than for any other Conference in history.

For those of you looking to combine an amazing residential retreat with morning workshop time, there is one spot left, in the Chris Abani fiction workshop. If you are interested in snagging either of this spot while it is available, please call Registrar Hali Johnson at 360.385.3102, x114 or program manager Jordan Hartt at 360.385.3102, x131. See you soon!

New Issues of the Crab Creek Review and Willow Springs

The latest issues of the Crab Creek Review and Willow Springs have hit bookstore shelves; urban mail slots; post office boxes; lonely concrete doorsteps; and rural mailboxes complete with dusty gravel road, swaying willows, and distant red barn all over the region the last couple of days.   

Guided by editors Natasha Moni, Lana Ayers, and Kerry Banazek, Crab Creek features a beautiful new story by Kathleen Alcalá entitled "The Accidental Zoo", held in an embrace of new poems by Marvin Bell, Peter Munro, and many others. Another highlight for this reader was Steven J. Stewart's new translation of a Margarito Cuéllar poem.

Founded in 1984, the independent Crab Creek Review is one of the Pacific Northwest's iconic literary journals, providing a forum for both emerging and established voices.

Since its inception in 1977, Willow Springs has helped introduce such voices as Stuart Dybeck, Tobias Wolff, Sam Hamill, and many others.

Willow Springs's sixty-second issue contains conversations between current or former magazine editors with Tess Gallagher--"she was generous enough to invite us to her home where she served us homemade date-bran muffins and raspberries that she had picked the day before. We ate and talked over coffee in a room with walls of windows, surrounded by trees"--and David Shields. Poems by Tony Hoagland, Jeannine Hall Gailey, and Melissa Kwasny, and a troubling, unforgettable essay of witness by Stacia Saint Owens entitled "Temporary Classroom" help the issue seem to vibrate in the reader's hands.

Willow Springs editor Sam Ligon will be on hand during the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, teaching an afternoon workshop in the short-short story and joining a panel discussion about literary journals.

For those of you getting ready for the Conference, we'll see you in three weeks! One spot remains in the Kathleen Alcalá workshop; the rest of the Conference is full. For more information, contact Registrar Hali Johnson at 360.385.3102, x114.

Border Talk: An Interview With Copper Canyon Poet Benjamin Alire Sáenz

A note from interviewer Farid Matuk: 

Former roofer, onion picker, janitor, theologian and Catholic priest, Benjamin Alire Sáenz [pictured] is now a prize winning essayist, novelist, poet, and activist passionately in love with El Paso and its people. I was drawn to his most recent collection of poems, "Elegies in Blue" (Cinco Puntos Press), because it is fundamentally a work about creating communities across boundaries of race, class, region, sexuality, and even history itself–a daring proposition at a time when our sense of a national community is being created at the expense of a hated “other”– an evil doer, a foreigner, a Muslim. For the past several months Sáenz and I have maintained a conversation about poetry and the varied communities in his hometown of El Paso. What follows are excerpts from that correspondence.

Farid Matuk: In your essay, “Notes from The City In Which I Live,” you write, “I am a writer. Somehow, by some great miracle, I have become a possessor of the word. I have learned, that through words, you can gain a small piece of the world.” Did education give you the word, did your family push you to search for it, or did the word find you?

Benjamin Alire Sáenz: I was born in 1954. My parents were not educated and our circumstances were humble, to say the least. Not one house I ever entered while I was growing up had libraries or books. Everyone worked hard, lived from paycheck to paycheck, had too many kids, too many debts, drove cars that were always breaking down. Needless to say, I do not have the same background as a W.H. Auden or a T.S. Eliot. This is not to say that I was not surrounded by civil and intelligent people. The community that taught me language–English and Spanish and Border Talk–that community gave me the word. It pains me to say this but the educational system in this country does not give people “the word.” We cannot use words if we do not know how to think–and that is the one thing that a standardized test cannot measure. And while education can and does open doors, it cannot give you a center from which to critique the dominant discourses and cultures around you.

FM: Where do you ground your work–who do you imagine as your audience or audiences?

One Space Available in Poet Gary Lilley's Workshop

One spot only has opened up in the Gary Lilley poetry workshop, and is the only available space in the sold-out Port Townsend Writers' Conference. To register for this workshop, or to add your name to the mailing list for our other workshops, please call the Centrum registrar at 360.385.3102, x114. 

Gary Lilley is the author of four books: Black Poem, Alpha Zulu, The Reprehensibles, and The Subsequent Blues. Lilley has been a poet-in-residence at WritersCorps, Young Chicago Authors, and The Poetry Center of Chicago, and received the DC Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. He teaches Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College.

A note from Gary:

"This poetry workshop will be fueled by the premise that truths are more important than facts, and that poems represent the blurring of real experience with those that are completely created. Actual occurrences are the frames, or the skeletons of poems, but a pulse, a layered muscularity, and the presence of fluids, the sparks of the imagined, if you will, give poems the power to walk us down the street into the discovery within situations that we personally have not seen. Too often we are told to write what we know, facts, instead of what we can believe, truths. This workshop will explore tactile and concrete details, syntax and diction, as well as other tools to use in making your poems come alive. It is expected that draft poems will be created daily. This workshop is appropriate for beginning and experienced poets."

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 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.

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.

Register for Port Townsend Writers' Conference

If your summer plans include the week-long Port Townsend Writers' Conference, now is the time to register! Our core morning workshops are currently full, but afternoon workshops and freewrites are available.  If the full workshop is what you're interested in, we can place you on a wait list, as space may become available over the next couple of months.
 

If you don't plan on registering for an afternoon workshop, but would like to spend a week at a writing retreat in an inspirational, supportive environment, you can also register for the Residency Only option and attend the readings and lectures for free while taking your own work to the next level.  Please note that there is only one space available for this option.

Registration is available by following this link, as well as by calling the Centrum Registrar at 360.385.3102, x114

Bad Girls Riding in Cars

A former psychologist and political journalist with deep roots in both Judaism and Catholicism, Lesley Hazleton is, as she writes in the introduction to her biography of Mary, "a Jew who once seriously considered becoming a rabbi, a former convent schoolgirl who daydreamed about being a nun, an agnostic with a deep sense of religious mystery though no affinity for organized religion."

Born in England, Hazleton reported from Israel for Time magazine, specializing in religious, social and cultural issues, and has since written feature articles on Middle East politics for, among others, The New York Times, Esquire, Vanity Fair, The Nation, and Harper's.

Her most recent book is "Jezebel: the Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen." Previous books include three acclaimed volumes of Middle East reportage: "Israeli Women," "Where Mountains Roar," and the award-winning "Jerusalem, Jerusalem" -- all widely praised for their blend of insight, in-depth reporting, and fine writing. In her own bad-girl past, she wrote about riding around in cars.

Hazleton will be leading a core morning workshop in nonfiction writing at the 2008 Port Townsend Writers' Conference, with an emphasis less on perfecting work in hand than on playing with ideas and approaches to move participants forward in their work. "I think of a workshop as a safe place to experiment, and fall flat on your face to get up and start again with a big grin," Hazleton says. "I'll be focusing on three things: trusting your own voice, re-creating the moment on the page, and playing with the possibilities of creative nonfiction."

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. 

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.

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. 

Chris Abani, Kim Addonizio, and Lesley Hazelton Slated for Centrum

We're thrilled to announce the first three faculty hirings for the 2008 Port Townsend Writers' Conference, taking place at Fort Worden State Park July 13 to July 20: poet and novelist Chris Abani, poet and novelist Kim Addonizio; and nonfiction writer Lesley Hazelton.

The prose of Chris Abani, who was once a political prisoner in Nigeria, includes the novels The Virgin of Flames, GraceLand, and Masters of the Board, as well as the novellas Becoming Abigail and Song For Night. His poetry collections include Hands Washing Water, Dog Woman, Daphne's Lot, and Kalakuta Republic. Abani teaches at the University of California, Riverside, and has won multiple awards for his work.

Kim Addonizio is the author of four books of poetry: The Philosopher's Club, Jimmy & Rita, Tell Me, and What Is This Thing Called Love, which was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award. She also has a collection of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure. Her first novel, Little Beauties, was published in 2005. Her new novel, My Dreams Out in the Street, was released in July.

A former psychologist and political journalist with deep roots in both Judaism and Catholicism, Lesley Hazelton reported from Israel for Time magazine, specializing in religious and social and cultural issues. She has since written feature articles on Middle East politics for, among others, the New York Times, Esquire, Vanity Fair, The Nation, and Harper's. Her most recent book is Jezebel: the Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen. Previous books include three volumes of Middle East reportage: Israeli Women, Where Mountains Roar, and Jerusalem, Jerusalem.

In advance of the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, the next Writers' events at Centrum will include the Advanced Revision Workshop with Pam Houston, November 1-4, 2007 and a weekend writers' workshop February 21-24, 2008.