Writing at Centrum

Listen to Erin Belieu's Northwind Reading

Erin Belieu, Artistic Director for the Port Townsend Writers' Conference, gave a public reading on April 15, 2011 at the Northwind Arts Center as part of their Northwind Readings Series.

We hope you enjoy this recording of her reading.

Download the MP3 of the reading (55MB).

Little Red Riding Hood

Longtime Writers' Conference faculty favorite Lana Hechtman Ayers, the author of such books as 
Dance From Inside My Bones and Chicken Farmer I Still Love You, has just come out with a new chapbook: What Big Teeth: Red Riding Hood’s Real Life. The book is available here, and will also be at the Conference bookstore.

Lana will be teaching afternoon workshops during the Conference entitled “Mouth to Mouth: Breathing Life into Persona Poems”. Conference program administrator Jen Betterley caught up with her for an interview about her new book.

Jen: Would you say that What Big Teeth: Red Riding Hood’s Real Life is more of a social commentary about women choosing the life they want, rather than the life that society wants them to have?

Lana: Yes, I would say that my collection is concerned with women’s expected roles in society. Even more than three decades after the women’s movement exploded onto the scene, woman are still agonizing over choosing between work they are passionate about and their familial and domestic responsibilities.  The Red Riding Hood of What Big Teeth never strayed from the path, thus never met the Wolf when she was a little girl. She obeyed all the rules and ended up a young adult women who was married and working at a daycare, who really had no idea who she was or what she was passionate about.

Jen: What first inspired you to take on the retelling of Little Red Riding Hood’s story?

Night Songs

We're delighted to announce that 2008 Centrum Resident Kristina Marie Darling has published her collection of poetry "Night Songs" with Gold Wake Press, an independent Boston publishing house.

Darling is a graduate of Washington University, and the author of multiple chapbooks, including "Fevers and Clocks" and "The Traffic in Women." A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems appear in such journals as Gargoyle, Cider Press Review, and Janus Head.

Literary essays and book reviews have been published in the Gettysburg Review, the Boston Review, Shenandoah, and other magazines.

Darling's awards include residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, as well as others. She currently studies philosphy at the University of Missouri, St. Louis; and hopes to pursue a doctorate in English literature.

"Sedate Travel": Travel Writing with Tom Miller

In 2010--for the first time in our 37-year history--the Port Townsend Writers' Conference will be offering a creative nonfiction workshop dedicated specifically to writing about travel.

Tucson-based writer Tom Miller--you know him from such books as "The Panama Hat Trail" and "Trading With the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba," among others, as well as articles in the New Yorker, Smithsonian, and Los Angeles Times, among many other magazines and newspapers--is leading the class. Read a description of Tom Miller's workshop here. Life on the southern U.S. border inspired his first travel book: “On the Border: Portraits of America’s Southwestern Frontier”, and he is known for the keen eye he brings to travel writing, and the way that he helps students unlock that same power not only of observation, but discovery.  

"I love research," Miller writes. "In minor libraries, in exotic locales, in friends’ living rooms, in museums and factories. And I always keep in mind: the most important part of writing is rewriting. It’s the writing itself that’s difficult. Like many of you, I think I get better at it as I write more, but it doesn’t get any easier."

"In my travel writing workshop we will do the obvious–critique and discuss each other’s ideas and pieces– and the not so obvious–using our favorite writings and writers, we’ll analyze how a sense of place emerges and, by the end of a work, grabs us by the shoulders and shakes us silly. By far the best travel writing I’ve read in years is "The Travels of Mungo Park," which tells of the forays of an 18th century Scotsman into West Africa. Park had imperial tendencies, of course, but also a good eye, a wide vocabulary, and fantastic experiences."

"If Park's journeys were to take place today they'd be called “extreme travel.” I’m quite willing to entertain “sedate travel.” I want to hear you talk about a chess game you observed, and what that game said about the players, their lives, and their surroundings. (Was the chessboard paper or wooden or plastic? Homemade or store-bought? How about the pieces? Was the lighting natural or artificial? Ambient sounds? Spectators?)"

"The stamps in your passport are of casual interest. How your mind was expanded once you arrived is of keen interest. We’ll discuss everything from choosing your words carefully to the use of a notebook. (I used to have a prejudice against Moleskine notebooks; now I’m sold on them.)"

"By the end of our last day I hope you’ll be pleasantly exhausted, enriched, and excited. As Ella Fitzgerald sang, who could ask for anything more?"

Registration for workshops at the 2010 Port Townsend Writers' Conference is available here, as well as by calling us at 360.385.3102, x117 or x131.

Blessing of the Animals

"Brenda Miller writes with such extraordinary grace and intimacy that, despite our weariness and fears, we find ourselves falling in love with the world all over again," notes Kim Barnes. 

In her newest collection of essays, "Blessing of the Animals," from Eastern Washington University Press, Miller builds on the "delicate, elegant, and occasionally devastating" (writes John D'Agata) form that first captured national attention in 2002's "Season of the Body."

With pinpoint accuracy and lyrical honesty, Miller's work cuts to the heart and to the bone. The nineteen essays in "Blessing of the Animals"--including the two Pushcart Prize-winning essays: the title essay "Blessing of the Animals," and "Raging Waters"--pierce to the center of human--and non-human--longing, desire, and change.  

Brenda Miller spends the academic year as associate professor of English at Western Washington University in Bellingham, where she is the editor-in-chief of the Bellingham Review. 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. She led full-house writing workshops at Centrum last summer.

Collective Verse

By Sandra Stephenson

In January 2007, I signed on to a Yahoogroup out of Toronto at the invitation of one of its moderators whom I had met on a discouraged Canadian site called Writers Against War. The group was a curious admixture of poets, theorists, graphic and collage artists, small and micro-pressers, essayists and the like, and I fell into it with a great splash and happily. Here was a medium I could really dig—instant gratification for the poet who likes to send poems sailing upon completion, guaranteed attentive readers (at least a half-dozen), and new poems by return mail within the hour or day.

Conversation, the art of collective verse, has been renewed by e-mail. The epistle is reborn. New horizons for the collective (un)conscious range at the fringes of blog and response; unravelling threads of social organization define emerging etiquettes and an unchiselled aesthetic which is the e-mail conversation transposed to printed page. The page itself transforms where line-length and indent scramble randomly as part of our daily visual diet, the word presented on illuminated plate.

The electronic conversation is a revealing experiment in the free-for-all. It’s the sound of the developed world clapping, clapping its hands over itself. Whether one uses it for practicalities or for joyous creative communication, singing the happiness of being connected in more-or-less random and selected groups, e-mail is sacred play, flirting at times with the profane, engaged always with digging out new realities. Some make bas-relief, others mine.

The Work of Judith Skillman

by Jeremy Voigt

Although often written in accessible language, with clear and memorable images, the work of Judith Skillman, a Centrum creative resident and poet who has released ten books, never settles for mere description. The poems often allow for the slippage, or leaps possible in lyric poetry as well as a probing for a conscious or unconscious understanding of the world. The poems are full of awe, homage, and a dark playfulness—all adding up to a great deal of pleasure. 

Her poem, “Salt” carries a few good examples of her use of strong detail and searching language working to make sense of the images presented. The poem opens: