Writing at Centrum

Kim Barnes Interview

There's a great new interview with novelist and memoir-writer Kim Barnes up at Brevity magazine.

Barnes’ novel "A Country Called Home" was published by Knopf in 2008. She is also is the author of the novel "Finding Caruso" and two memoirs: "In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country," winner of the PEN-Jerard Award and finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize, and "Hungry for the World." She is co-editor, with Mary Clearman Blew, of "Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers", and, with Claire Davis, of "Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty."

Her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including MORE Magazine, Fourth Genre, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She teaches writing at the University of Idaho and lives with her husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, on Moscow Mountain.

Barnes will be in residence during the 2009 Port Townsend Writers Conference, leading a workshop in nonfiction. She will be giving a public reading on July 12, at 7:30 pm at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater.

Native State: The Work of Tony Cohan

At the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, we're excited to be able to offer more creative nonfiction workshops in 2009 than ever before in our thirty-seven year history, with four separate core morning workshops in creative nonfiction featuring instructors Kim Barnes, Denise Chávez, Liliana Valenzuela, and Tony Cohan (pictured)--whose memoirs On Mexican Time and Native State have helped to define the fom.

"When I first read On Mexican Time, I had the distinct feeling that I'd met a soulmate, someone who struggled through and celebrated life in the way I most cherished," says Artistic Director Cristina García.

"His quest to find a home in another culture spoke to me deeply, and his mishaps were hilariously relayed. But it wasn't until I read his memoir Native State that  Irealized he was a true master of the form. Cutting between his own riveting story and that of his difficult, dying father's, Native State is a brilliant testament to forgiveness. His summer workshop should be remarkable."

More information on all of these workshops is available here. Registration for these workshops, as well as our fiction and poetry workshops, is available online over the holiday break.

Boundless Curiosity: The Work of Liliana Valenzuela

The Port Townsend Writers' Conference, taking place the week of July 12-19, is delighted to be able to present Liliana Valenzuela, one of the foremost English-to-Spanish translators in the world--a translator who is also, as Artistic Director Cristina García notes, a superb poet in her own right.

"I had the privilege of having her translate my fourth novel, A Handbook to Luck," García says. "When she was done, I wished I’d written the book in Spanish!"

Liliana's workshop class will focus on the words that we use in our writing.
"What is your particular linguistic treasure trove?" she asks. "How can you use it to enrich your writing?"

 In her workshop, participants will be able to expand writing repertoire, including the use of colloquialisms, regionalisms, conversations, observations, eavesdropping, and sayings.

In private conferences, she will review and comment on work submitted by students prior to the workshop in the genre of their choice (two to three poems, or a 1,500-word prose piece).

"At the Miami Book Fair recently, Sandra Cisneros waxed rhapsodic over Liliana and her gorgeous translation of Caramelo," García says. "Liliana brings her boundless curiosity, her poet’s musicality, and an exquisite ear for language to everything she touches. Her workshop promises to be a fascinating experience."

Register online for this workshop as well as all Conference workshops. For more information, read class descriptions for all faculty members.

Liliana Valenzuela is the acclaimed Spanish language translator of works by Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, Denise Chávez, Nina Marie Martínez, Ana Castillo, Dagoberto Gilb, Richard Rodriguez, Rudolfo Anaya, Cristina García, Gloria Anzaldúa, and many other writers. An award winning poet and essayist whose work has appeared in the Edinburgh Review, Indiana Review, Tigertail, and other journals and publications, Liliana is also a dynamic performer, recently engaged to record the audiobook edition of La casa en Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros for Random House Audio.

A Director of the American Translators Association, she has translated literary works, art and photography books, museum catalogs, and web sites. Born and raised in Mexico City, Liliana is an adopted tejana. She received a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in Cultural Anthropology and Folklore from the University of Texas at Austin, where she lives with her family.

A Place of Dialogue

[Chris Abani in an interview with Pen World Voices]

Poet and novelist Chris Abani will be in residence during the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, July 12-19, 2009. He'll be leading a generative workshop in fiction techniques. Registration for this workshop is nearly full, but there are spaces still available.

Conference registration is available here, or by calling the Centrum registrar at 360.385.3102, x114.

Registration Open for 2009 Writing Workshops

If you were at the Port Townsend Writers' Conference in 2008, you remember the scene: lively workshops, great conversations, the vibrant readings and lectures series, the central gathering places--the bookstore, the lounges, the wide open lawns, the bluff at sunset. 

And it's all happening again in 2009, with more readings, craft lectures, and afternoon workshops than ever before--and it's happening three times.

It all starts May 7-10, with a new offering that we're rolling out. Called "The Literature of Witness," it's a two-track workshop--one in poetry, and one in fiction--that focuses on how to write about devastating experiences--both global and personal.

Throughout history, it has been writers who have borne witness and testimony to global and personal upheaval—from transmigration, armed conflict, racial conflict, and environmental degradation to personal experiences of maltreatment and exploitation.

The poetry track will be guided by Carolyn Forché; novelist Micheline Aharonian Marcom will lead the fiction side. These workshops will serve to help participants develop skills in writing about things that you have witnessed or experienced--how to go to difficult places, and, through depth of craft, how to shape and convey that experience.

Marcom grew up in Los Angeles and Beirut, before the Lebanese Civil War. Her first novel, “Three Apples Fell From Heaven,” (2001), praised for both its beautiful prose and the candor with which it depicted the horrors of the 1915-17 Armenian genocide, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. She has since published three other novels: "The Daydreaming Boy," "Draining the Sea," and "The Mirror in the Well."  

Register for all 2009 workshops online, or call the Centrum registrar at 360.385.3102, x114.

Writing About Family

One of the major highlights of the 2009 Port Townsend Writers' Conference, July 12-19, will be the presence of novelist, nonfiction writer, and playwright Denise Chávez, widely regarded as one of the leading Chicana writers in the United States. 

Chávez's fiction includes "The Last of the Menu Girls," a short-story collection about an adolescent girl's passage into womanhood, and "Face of an Angel," an exploration of a woman's life in a small New Mexico town, with which Chávez gained a national readership for her portraits of Chicanos living in the Mexican-American borderlands.

During the Conference, Denise Chávez will lead participants in an exploration of the meaning of family. She'll encourage participants to ask several questions of themselves, including: Who is your tribe? What contracts do we have with them? And how do these contracts—implicit, unspoken, spoken—impact our lives?

"In a word, this workshop is about truth," Chávez says. Who is your least favorite relative? What are your family mythologies? What are the major events in your family’s life? ¿Quién te parió? Who gave you birth? And where have you gone from there? As Novalis, the French writer and philospher said, “Where are we going…always home…”

Register for this workshop online or call Centrum at 360.385.3102, x114.

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.

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.