Writing at Centrum

Limited Offerings Remain for Summer Writers' Conference

All prose workshops for the Port Townsend Writers' Conference are now full, but waiting lists have been started. Registration openings remain for Adrian Castro's poetry workshop and Liliana Valenzuela's  workshop.

What is also popular right now are the afternoon workshop options. For prices varying between $50 and $275, one can attend these afternoon workshop offerings in special topics of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, literature, cross-genre, and translation.

For more information, including registration information, write jordan(at)centrum(dot) org or call 360.385.3102, x131.

Front Porch Gift

Great day to come to the Centrum office. (Happy Earth Day, btw.) Birds chirping, sun cresting over Whidbey Island, and a box full of copies of the latest issue of ZYZZYVA as a gift from Howard Junker. We'll be giving them out as gifts to those participants here for Carolyn Forché's "Literature of Witness" workshop.

ZYZZYVA, a journal of west-coast writers and artists, is one of the most highly regarded literary journals in the country. (But, really, if you didn't already know that, you're probably only reading this blog by accident.)

Literary journals are the life of our literary culture. Every summer, we showcase the work of ZYZZYVA, the Bellingham Review, Willow Springs, the Crab Creek Review, and others at the Conference. This year, Willow Springs editor Sam Ligon and Crab Creek poetry editor Lana Ayers will be giving talks and workshops. 

(I pulled out some of the books from the box to show what the cover looks like, above. Here's more of a closeup.) The issue (#85), explores what Howard refers to as "textimage," words and images in which "text and image collide and collude on the page".

In other Centrum news, the summer Port Townsend Writers' Conference is still pushing at the seams of capacity. One space only remains in the Tony Cohan nonfiction workshop, and all other workshops are sold out, except for a handful of spaces remaining in the Adrian Castro poetry workshop and the Liliana Valenzuela translation workshop.

W.S. Merwin Wins Pulitzer Prize

Copper Canyon Press poet W.S. Merwin has won the Pulitzer Prize for his book of poems, "The Shadow of Sirius."

In a career spanning five decades, W.S. Merwin, poet, translator, and environmental activist, has become one of the most widely read — and imitated — poets in America. The son of a Presbyterian minister, for whom he began writing hymns at the age of five, Merwin went to Europe as a young man and developed a love of languages that led to work as a literary translator.

Over the years, his poetic voice has moved from the more formal and medieval—influenced somewhat by Robert Graves and the medieval poetry he was then translating — to a more distinctly American voice, following his two years in Boston where he got to know Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, and Donald Hall, all of whom were breaking out of the rhetoric of the 1950s.

W.S. Merwin’s recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held beliefs. He is not only profoundly anti-imperialist, pacifist, and environmentalist, but also possessed by an intimate feeling for landscape and language and the ways in which land and language interflow. His latest poems are densely imagistic and full of an intimate awareness of the natural world.

Hard America: Sam Ligon’s “Drift and Swerve”

In Sam Ligon’s collection of short stories, “Drift and Swerve”, just out from Autumn House Press, the characters, for the most part, have first names only. Instead of last names, they have pasts that drive them, while their futures drift and swerve like the title of the collection as they pilot toward each bend in the American life.

With this collection, Ligon (pictured), one of the most popular writing teachers the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference has ever had, creates a new kind of current, a new exploration of the complexities of the American experience. One might make comparisons to such writers as Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, and the writers of the post-post-modern mid-nineteen-eighties. But that would be a mistake—these stories are even more feverish, with characters driven by wilder, more unspoken and unknown needs. 

Jess Walter says it well. The stories are propelled forward by Ligon’s “vigorous, perfect prose,” he writes. “Darkly funny and surprisingly moving, these tales of collision and escape feature unforgettable characters, like Nikki, who careens through the book’s hard America with a ferocious, incurable case of hope.”

In this collection of fourteen stories, something new is happening.  In these stories, through these characters, Ligon turns new light on the American experience and gives voice to the often invisible lives of the Wal-Mart poor.

“Drift and Swerve” is Sam Ligon’s second book, following on the heels of his 2003 novel “Safe in Heaven Dead,” Stories have appeared in such journals as the Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, Manoa, Gulf Coast, and many others.

Ligon teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland Northwest Center for Writers in Spokane, Washington, and is the editor for the literary journal Willow Springs. The title story of this collection was included as a recommended story in the 2008 O. Henry Prize Stories.

The men in these stories are millworkers, gas station clerks, cops. Or, to paraphrase a line from “Animal Hater”: “maybe they are brokers or insurance salesmen.” These are men and women clinging to the stretch-marked underbelly of the American continent. They drink and listen to popular music, move from city to city, but always the same city. Search for connection in sex, in alcohol, in the speed of their vehicles.

“Animal Hater”, told in the second person, pinpoints this search for connection. “You crouch low, waiting, trying on faces of greeting, of comfort and reassurance, praying you’ll find the face of recognition.”

Indeed, the second story of the collection, the title story, “Drift and Swerve”, features, instead of names, characters who are denoted by their relationships: father, mother, brother, sister. An all-American family in a hard America. It’s through the dialogue of these characters with one another that they name one another—Boyd; Emily Sue—and in these stories it becomes names and physical contact that connect us as humans—tentative, fleeting connection, often through names that are cutting, and physical contact that is painful, but connection.

Only One Spot Left for Prose!

Only one space remains for prose writers at the 2008 Port Townsend Writers' Conference. All workshops have filled, with the exception of the Tony Cohan creative nonfiction workshop, which only has one space available.

For poets, Adrian Castro still has space available, but slots are beginning to go quickly. And for translators, space remains in the Liliana Valenzuela translation workshop. 

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

Afternoon Workshop Schedule for 2009 Port Townsend Writer's Conference

We're happy to announce our afternoon workshops for the 2009 summer Port Townsend Writers' Conference. These are available for free to everyone registered for a core morning workshop and at a special price for those who only want to study in the afternoons. They happen from 2 pm to 3:30 pm each afternoon from July 13 to July 18.

Monday July 13

Lana Ayers

“The List Poem as Expression of Obsession and Ecstasy”

Anthropologists have discovered that cultures which developed written language in short order began cataloging or making lists. It is human nature to want to keep the names of all the birds we see or tell our beloved all ways we love them. In this session we’ll explore various poets’ approaches to list poems—including the work of Christopher Smart, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Pablo Neruda, Joy Harjo, Lucille Clifton and Wallace Stevens—and delve in to generating one of our own. 


Wendy Call 

“Twelve Ways to Improve Your Nonfiction Prose”

We’ll discuss a dozen suggestions for improving the literary and narrative quality of your nonfiction prose, with examples from some of our best-loved nonfiction word-workers.


Deborah Poe 

“Writing with Scientific Thought”

As prose and poetry writers, we will reflect on how one can use science to inspire creative writing. By looking at writing samples from such writers as Arthur Sze, Czeslaw Milosz, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, Andrea Barrett, and Rikki Ducornet, we’ll consider how established writers use scientific ideas in their own work.  Though our focus is not an introduction of scientific terms per se, we will use scientific thought as launching pads for creative writing, generating work during the workshop. The workshop is designed to provide new channels to access new work.

Sam Ligon

“The Short-Short Story”

In "Remembrance of Things Past", Proust talks about the tyranny of rhyme forcing poets into some of their greatest lines. But prose writers have less experience with formal constraints, like rhyme, to put pressure on lines, and as a means to consider form in general. In this class we’ll examine the form of the short-short story, how it often works (and doesn’t), as well as how formal constraint can change the way we approach line and story. Because there’s so little space in a short-short, evocative outlines, shadows, implication, and suggestion hover at the edges. Short-shorts tend to rely on surprise, a hard, tight turn at the end. They can feel elliptical or fragmented, and are not always concerned with depth and complexity of character as much as with emotional gravity within a moment. Lydia Davis calls the short-short “a nervous form of story.” Charles Baxter says the short-short needs “surprise, a quick turning of the wrist toward texture, something suddenly broken or quickly repaired.” Mark Strand says, “Its end is erasure.”