Gibson & Healy

DOBBY GIBSON and STEVE HEALY

Two award-winning Minnesota poets on tour.

Dobby Gibson's poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Fence, Iowa Review, New England Review, and Conduit, among other publications. He is the author of Polar, published by Alice James Books in 2005, which won the 2004 Beatrice Hawley Award. He is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the McKnight Foundation. He has also won an Associated Writing Programs Intro Journals Award, and his creative writing has been featured on Minnesota Public Radio's weekly arts broadcast, Word of Mouth. He lives in Minneapolis on the west bank of the Mississippi River.

Steve Healey is the author of the poetry collection, Earthling, published by Coffee House Press in 2004. Earthling, examines the pitfall, pratfalls and particular beauty of being an Earthling, that is, human in a culture of alienation and contradiction. It both celebrates and critiques our brave new hypermodern world. Healey teaches writing to prisoners in several Minnesota Correctional Facilities and is Associate Editor of Conduit Magazine. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Fence, jubilat, Open City, and Verse. Born in Washington, D.C., he now lives in Minneapolis, also on the west bank of the Mississippi River.


http://www.alicejamesbooks.org/polar.html
http://www.coffeehousepress.com/earthling.asp


photo of Dobby Gibson by George Byron Griffiths
photo of Steve Healey by Mark Wojahn

Leanne Grabel

LEANNE GRABEL has appeared in various shows put on by Writers On The Edge. She was a featured author at the very first Yachats Writers' Series, held June 20, 1997 and has returned to the stage here as part of her writing critique group, Vaudvillaineous Poets, and "The Memory Place."

Leanne was co-founder and co-owner of Cafe Lena, the infamous literary cafe in Portland. She is the author of the books Lonesome and Very Quarrelsome Heroes , and The Family Fate Ate , and is the editor of Prison Poetry Project , a compilation of writing and photography by incarcerated violent offenders in MacLaren Youth Correction Facility. Her chapbooks include There's a Pig Running Free , Anne Sexton Was a Sexpot, The Last Weekend of Sylvia Plath, Short Poems by a Short Person, Flirtations, and The Heart .

Her poetry-based theatrical shows include One Woman Shoe, The Lighter Side of Chronic Depression, The Circus of Anguish & Mirth, and most recently, Anger: The Musical all of which have been produced on various Portland stages. She teaches poetry to at-risk teenagers in summer camps, Portland public schools and juvenile prisons.

http://www.leanegrabel.com

Janice Gould

JANICE GOULD is a Native American poet of Koyangk'auwi/Maidu descent. She has published three books of poetry, Beneath My Heart, Earthquake Weather, and Alphabet. Her newest book, Speak to My Words: Essays on American Indian Poetry, was co-edited with Dean Rader and published by the University of Arizona Press. Her poetry and essays have been appeared in numerous journals, reviews, and anthologies. She was awarded grants for her writing from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Astraea Foundation. She earned a Ph.D in English at the University of New Mexico and currently teaches Imaginative Writing and Native American literature at Willamette University in Salem where she is an assistant professor and serves as the Hallie Ford Chair in Creative Writing.

Charles Goodrich

As creator of introductions for guests of the Nye Beach Writers Series I spend a short, intense bit of time with their work, looking for things to say that illuminate their style or personality or career for an engaged and intelligent audience. Most of the time I don't meet the writers until shortly before show time. Sometimes I'm surprised how different they are than I expected, sometimes not. Occasionally, I'm just surprised, period.

My taste in poetry is simple and straightforward. I don't care for work that depends on obscure and mysterious personal references that are meaningless to the reader. I think poetry is a window to the mind of the poet. A clear window works better than a muddy one. Frankly, some poetry makes a better door than a window.

I've learned to be cautious when I see a new title. Some have been apt, but some I still haven't figured out. Here's a sampling of titles by writers I've introduced: In the Margins of the World, A Small Song Called Ash from the Fire, The Mad Painter Poems, Summer Mystagogia, Pink Menace, and Come Over Here and Leave Me Alone.

So you can see, the title of a work can sometimes be a prelude to obfuscation. Some of the writers couldn't tell me what the titles meant. I admit I felt my neck-hairs tense up a little when I picked up Charles Goodrich's collection, entitled Insects of South Corvallis. But that tension just melted away when I began to read, quickly realizing the poems were not only very well-written, but actually about bugs.

The guy writes about what he knows. He was a career gardener for twenty-five years. He's been published widely and Garrison Keillor has read his work on National Public Radio. He is presently an instructor for the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word at Oregon State, a program that brings together creative writers, philosophers and environmental scientists.

Please welcome Charles Goodrich . . .

http://springcreek.oregonstate.edu/

Ariel Gore

There is a line in an old Jimmy Buffet song that says "we are the people our parents warned us about." We laugh when we hear that because we like being part of the surprise our folks got when they realized what a tactical error they'd made by having children. And so many children. Obviously, if they'd exerted a little more restraint there wouldn't be this population bulge called the Baby Boomers. The Sixties might have just been a calmer, quieter extension of the Fifties. Things might not have gotten so crazy.

So, Jimmy Buffet needs to add another line or so to that song–- to the effect that our children are the unwarned-about people now freaking out our parents even more than we did. Issues that barely got a nod from Baby Boomers way back when are being addressed and politicized and radicalized. One of those issues is teen single motherhood.

ARIEL GORE is the founder of Hip Mama. As a single, teen-age mother, she encountered traditional negative value judgments, guilt and social stigma, but little support or positive information about being a good parent or creating a strong sense of family. Hip Mama was the progressive forum she created to address those concerns. The magazine evolved to represent progressive families of all varieties and gained national recognition. Ariel, who once debated Newt Gingrich on MTV on the subject of single parenthood and welfare, is now a sought-after authority on child-rearing. She recently moved to Portland, the "city with the highest per-capita subscription rate" to Hip Mama. She is the author of The Hip Mama Survival Guide and The Mother Trip.

BEE LAVENDER joined Hip Mama in 1997 as managing editor. Former teen mom, activist and writer, she has launched new projects such as Mamaphonic and Girl-Mom, an online resource for teen parents. Ariel and Lavender are co-editors of Breeder: Real-Life Stories of a Generation of New Mothers, 36 essays from some brave new mamas.

www.hipmama.com

www.foment.net

David Gans

with THE JUNE RUSHING BAND & ROBIN REMAILY

David Gans is a songwriter, producer/host of the nationally syndicated GRATEFUL DEAD HOUR, and co-producer of the Dead boxed set So Many Roads (1965-1995). He spent twenty-five years gigging around Northern California while earning his living as a journalist and radio producer. He has strong ties to the Grateful Dead, and has recently co-written two new songs with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, "Like a Dog," and "Shut Up and Listen," but he says it would be unwise to infer too much from the Dead connection.

"I was a musician and songwriter before I ever heard of the Grateful Dead. I was a songwriter before I ever picked up an electric guitar and before I ever knew what improvisation was all about. No matter how good you are at jamming, it eventually comes down to the song."

David recently co-produced Might as Well: The Persuasions Sing Grateful Dead, a critically-acclaimed collection of Dead songs by the legendary a capella band. He is on a three-month tour promoting his new CD Solo Acoustic. The tour takes him through California, Nevada, Washington, Oregon, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia. He is playing at the Newport Performing Arts Center through arrangements with Joren Rushing.

He is also the author of Playing in the Band, an oral and visual portrait of the Grateful Dead, and Conversations with the Dead. He is the editor of Not Fade Away: The Online World Remembers Jerry Garcia.

www.trufun.com/gigs.html

www.musicbox-online.com/gans.html

Jane Glazer

Jane Glazer grew up in small-town Iowa, in a large family, among animals and books. Her father was a veterinarian; her mother an artist. Jane was widowed at 30 but went back to earn an MA in English Literature while raising three children. After a Fulbright year in Dublin, Ireland, and a two-year Peace Corps stint in South America, she taught in Eugene and Portland schools for twenty years. During that time, she began to publish her poetry in small journals.

Her first book of poems, Some Trick of Light, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards in 1994. Her work has been described as "poems of precise observation and social conscience, informed by an educated sensibility and a first-rate mind."

Poems from Some Trick of Light take us to Ireland, Russia, Italy, and Beijing. The first poems in her book are dramatic and provide description of foreign lands with painfully stark commentary. The book’s second section delves into family memories, deaths of grandparents, and the suicide of her husband. The poems are tender and unpretentious, with no trace of the melodramatic.

A second collection, Moles and Mausoleums, is ready for publication.

The Memory Place

THE MEMORY PLACE — "Hilarious, Touching, Revealing" — was written by and stars a six-member cast: SUSAN BANYAS, LEANNE GRABEL, STEVE SANDER, WENDY WESTERWELLE, GREG BIELEMEIER, AND ELIZABETH TSCHALAER.

What does it mean to remember? The ancient cartographers found that to represent the world in perspective, they had to draw it in the shape of a heart. I began to notice in working with people on the poetry of their stories that landscape shaped memory in particular ways, and in this sense, shaped the character of the person remembering. Like the land itself, autobiography is a living, breathing, moving, changing dance.

-- writes Susan Banyas, co-founder of Dreams Wells Studio and the eclectic theatre, SO&SO&SO&SO, Inc., in Portland.

The Nye Beach Writers’ Series welcomes the six performers in "THE MEMORY PLACE," a choreographed literary performance. The show is a combination of f storytelling, dance, comedy, song and drama performed in Portland this past winter to sold-out audiences.

THE MEMORY PLACE layers film, dance and monologue into 10 scenes of memories. Normally, the Nye Beach Writers’ Series hosts just two writers each month, but in this Special Performance, we are privileged to experience a collaborative foray into words and linked pieces expressing perception and memory where love and food and landscape play prominent roles. The result is a tight and meaningful wander through deep conceptual waters presented in a mix of storytelling, dance, comedy, song and drama.

Susan Banyas, a writer and the director of Dreams Well Studio, spent the past several years developing a method for helping performers turn their own personal histories into performing material. Her title piece, which begins the show, incorporates dance into two love stories evoking 1940s San Francisco.

Elizabeth Tschalaer, a movement artist, performs her bilingual passage from Switzerland to Portland in "Between Places," a haunting and sparse memory drama.

Gregg Bielemeier, dancer and choreographer, recalls a Catholic holy day of his childhood in the dance monologue "Pilgrimage to Crooked Finger," which is as much about the physical images of a story as it is about the story itself. He also provides smooth dance cameos with his signature quirkiness and intuitive awareness of how movement reads on the stage.

Wendy Westerwelle, master storyteller, shines like a diva, casually fanning herself as she recounts the flamboyant characters of Storefront Theatre’s glory days and of her childhood summers at a Jewish resort community.

Steve Sander reflects on discovering the world of sensuality through literature in "The Burrough of Queens," as he recounts his first experiences of erotic literature in a tale woven around family life.

Leanne Grabel shows a polished craft in the beat-poetry saga "The Family That Fate Ate" and paints her landscape — 1950s Stockton, California -- in hilarious detail as she searches for a Bohemia paradise.

Vaudevillainous Poets

SUSAN BANYAS
J. STUART FESSANT
JOHN DOOLEY
CARL HANNI
STEVE SANDER
LEANNE GRABEL
WALT CURTIS

Featured June 12 & 13, 1998

SUSAN BANYAS is a mom/artist who co-founded the eclectic SO&SO&SO&SO and Dreams Well Studio in Portland. Her work synthesizes movement, language, and visual art into performance art, short stories, theatre, and her recently released CD of monologues and music "Soul Stories." She is writing and directing a theatre piece "The Memory Place" opening in December at Dreams Well starring Leanne Grabel, Steve Sander, Wendy Westerwelle, Gregg Bielemeier, and Elizabeth Tschaler.

J. STUART FESSANT, whose alternative language is actually saxophone, can be found during the day involve din digital audio and sound design at one of Portland’s leading recording studios. Stuart worked as the accompanist and sound designer for all of the Leanne Grabel’s shows, and can be heard on several recordings, including the cassette Neurotransmission released in 1996. Always listening, Stuart derives great joy listening to his 2-year-old daughter Simone and her mother Lisa.

JOHN DOOLEY is one of the more uproarious and talented of the Portland, recently selected for Portland’s national slam team. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, as have his witty stories, illustrated chapbooks and commentaries. His band, The Hydropods, has performed up and down the West Coast and released a well-received CD in 1996. John’s poetry readings are legendary and tend to tickle even the psyche.

CARL HANNI, a member of the original Portland national slam team and the author of Night Shift, a very well received book of poetry released in 1996, lives in Portland where he works in the music business. He produced the "Talking Rain: Spoken Word and Music from the Pacific Northwest" CD in 1994, and has been known to floor audiences with his incisive, lethal, hilarious poems that move from the gothic and noir to the pagan, psychedelic, apocalyptic and just plain pissed-off.

STEVE SANDER, who has played Job in "JB" and George in "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf" on Portland stages, is a songwriter, actor, poet, and the co-creator of Café Lena, Portland’s premier poetry café since 1991. Steve was instrumental in the organization of the Columbia Theatre Company, has performed in myriad theatrical and musical performances, and appears every morning as the breakfast cook extraordinaire at Café Lena.

LEANNE GRABEL has been writing and performing poetry in collaboration with a variety of talents over the past twenty years in Portland. She wrote and performed three poetry-based theatrical shows in the past five years: "One Woman Shoe," "The Lighter Side of Chronic Depression," and "The Circus of Anguish & Mirth." She has published several books of illustrated and regular poetry, including Short Poems by a Short Person, Flirtations, and The Last Weekend of Sylvia Plath. She co-founded Café Lena and is the mother of two fabulous daughters with Steve Sander.

WALT CURTIS is Portland’s "Unofficial Poet Laureate." His novel, Mala Noche, was originally published in 1977 by Joel Weinstein of Mississippi Mud. A decade later Gus Van Sant selected Mala Noche for his directorial debut and created the film that launched his anti-Hollywood movie-making career. Mala Noche, the novella, has just been republished — 20 years later — along with other essays in the new 1997 BridgeCity Books edition, Mala Noche & Other "Illegal" Adventures.

"I am a romantic realist." Curtis writes on page 1. "My name is associated with notoriety. However, I have written some pretty poems about friendship and the beauty of the Pacific Northwest. In other words, as a poet, I’m not a total failure!"

Mala Noche, the book, provides real names and real photos of real people. Curtis is honest with his readers. He wants us to know! He wants us to understand his love! He wants us to LIKE him! (He uses a lot of exclamation points in this book!)

Walt has written and published twelve small-press books including Angel Pussy, the Erotic Flying Machine, The Sunflower, The Roses of Portland, Mad Bomber’s Notebook, Journey Across America, Perckerneck Country, and Salmon Song. A 65-minute performance documentary called "Walt Curtis, Peckerneck Poet" was recently produced and directed by Bill Plimpton. Walt was filmed in Portland, at the Clackamas County Fair, Café Lena, and Willamette Falls. The film also features various denizens of the poetic underworld, Walt’s red ’63 Valiant, and an exceptionally beautiful sketch of naked mud-wallowing along the Clackamas River. The film was shown at festivals in Fall and Winter 1997.

Walt has been hosting a poetry show on KBOO radio for twenty-five years and is the secretary of the Oregon Cultural Heritage Committee.

Molly Gloss

As the Nye Beach Writers Series moves into an eighth year of existence, it should come as no surprise that return authors show up more frequently. Tonight I have the honor of welcoming back one of Oregon's most notable contemporary scribes.

Few novelists produce work that consistently garners awards and recognition. After gaining notice with her first novel, Outside the Gates, she won the Oregon Book Award and the Northwest Booksellers Award for Fiction for her second, The Jump-Off Creek. Her third, The Dazzle of the Day, was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award. Wild Life, her latest novel, was awarded the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award.

Her female characters are tough and intelligent, as firm-jawed as Mattie Ross of Charles Portis' True Grit and as two-fisted as Amelia Evans of Carson McCuller's The Ballad of the Sad Café. Her ideas are nothing if not original; she has managed to put Quakers into outer space and a turn of the century feminist out among a tribe of Bigfoot. She writes in an introspective style reminiscent of Willa Cather with a touch of wry cynicism and open-heartedness that reminds one of Emma Goldman.

She's a Northwest original and we're proud to have her stop by.

Please welcome Molly Gloss...

www.mollygloss.com

Leanne Grabel's Portland Critique Group

LEANNE GRABEL recently began teaching poetry to at risk teenagers in a summer camp, spreading the liberating qualities of poetry to the battered youth of modern American. She’s working with teenagers as a means of violence prevention and has been holding poetry writing classes in the juvenile prisons and Portland public schools.

Leanne was co-owner, with her husband Steve Sander, of Café Lena, where Portland’s Beat underground thrived in the presence of great food and great talk.

PATRICIA BOLLEN works for the Housing Authority of Portland. She's been writing poetry for six years, studying under Judith Barrington and Paulann Peterson.

CASSANDRA SAGAN BELL is a poet and singer/songwriter who has been earning her living as a Poet In The Classroom since 1984. She was a recent winner of the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poetry of the Jewish Experience, and was nominated in 1997 for a Pushcart Prize.

WILLA SCHNEBERG worked for the United Nations Transitional Authority in Phnom Penh from July 1992 to June 1993 and served as a District Electoral Supervisor for Cambodia_s first "free and fair" elections, since the time of the French colonial period.

Her photos have appeared in the pages of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and have been exhibited at Sacred Circle Gallery, House of Asia and the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center.

Her first book was Box Poems published by Alice James Books. Her second collection of poetry is In The Margins Of The World.

She has received two Literary Arts Fellowships for her poetry. Andrei Codrescu has said of her work, "These are the poems of a traveler and a lover who feels both the terror of time passing and the consolation of eternity. From such tension spring lovely poetic objects."

Willa Schneberg is a licensed clinical social worker in private practice in the Pearl District. She received an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship in Poetry in 1994 and 1999.

KAREN BRAUCHER grew up in Massachusetts and has worked as a high-tech manager, consultant, business writer and teacher. She received a Masters of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College, a Masters of Business Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Masters of Education from Lesley College. And Braucher is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Colorado at Boulder where she studied with the late poet Richard Hugo. Her poetry won the Worcester Poetry Prize, the Grolier Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize. She was awarded a 1996 Oregon Literary Fellowship for her poetry. Her first book, Heaven's Net was the winner of the 4th Annual Bacchae Press Chapbook Contest.