Marianne Klekacz

MARIANNE KLEKACZ graduated from Marylhurst University with a B.A. in English/Creative Writing, and received her M.F.A. from Pacific University. She is the author of the chapbook, "Life Science," which won the Edna Meudt Memorial Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies in 2003, and the full-length poetry collection, "When Words Fail," was released in 2009 by Dancing Moon Press.
Words Fail Me

Marianne has extensive experience winning prizes in poetry, serving as a judge in poetry contests, and leading panels on the topic of poetry. She is the recipient of a Binford Writing Scholarship at Marylhurst and a former president of the Oregon State Poetry Association and a board member of Writers On The Edge.

She recently resigned from Intel Corporation and now lives fulltime in a remote valley on the west side of Oregon's Coast Range mountains, along with a husband and an enormous variety of wildlife.

Lauren Kessler

Lauren Kessler’s newest book, Dancing With Rose: Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimers, is an intimate, first-hand account of what it means to live with Alzheimers. For five months Kessler immersed herself in an alien landscape just a few miles from her home. She took a minimum-wage job as caregiver in an Alzheimers facility to better understand and write about the disease that claimed her mother's life.

“I am a writer of what is called literary nonfiction," says Kessler. “I tell true stories, factual stories based on extensive research, but I tell them as much as I can, as much as the material will allow me, the way a novelist would -- with scenes and characters and dialog, with an eye for the telling detail and an attention to the larger narrative.”

A special honor has been bestowed on Lauren Kessler -- her book, “Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of A Japanese American Family,” was chosen the one book people all over the state will read for Oregon's first state-wide "Oregon Reads" in 2009, part of the state's 150th birthday celebration. All 130 of Oregon's public libraries will receive copies of this book.

Kessler is the author of nine other excellent narrative nonfiction books including: “Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley: The Spy Who Ushered In The McCarthy Era”; Los Angeles Times best-seller and Oregon Book Award finalist “The Happy Bottom Riding Club,” a biography of the pioneering aviatrix, Hollywood stunt pilot and bordello Madame, Pancho Barnes; “Full Court Press,” a season-in-the-life narrative about women's sports; and “After All These Years,” portraits of 1960s radicals.

Kessler’s journalism has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times Magazine, O magazine, salon and The Nation. She is the founder and editor of Etude, an online magazine devoted to new and emerging voices in literary nonfiction. www.laurenkessler.com
www.clevergirlthebook.com

Photo by Carla Perry

Alexander Knapp

Alexander Knapp is traveling all the way from his home in London, England to read at the Nye Beach Writers’ Series in conjunction with his appearance at the Ernest Bloch Music Festival.

For the past thirty years, Alexander Knapp has published articles and lectured on ethnomusicology world-wide. He is a composer, arranger, conductor, broadcaster on radio and television, and performer. He has been a consultant and accompanist to cantors and choirs recording Jewish music.

In 1992, Alexander was appointed the first Joe Loss Research Fellow in Jewish Music at City University, London. In 1993, he was invited to present the first-ever series of lectures on Jewish music at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. He returned to China in 1994 and 1996 for additional lectures. His anthology of essays on Jewish music published by the Music Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Arts in 1998 is the first and only book in the Chinese language devoted exclusively to aspects of Jewish music.

Knapp’s lecture series for Spring 2001 at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies includes three categories: Jewish Music, Arabic Music and Miscellaneous. Among the many topics listed for Jewish Music, we find Temple Chant: Before and After, Jewish Music in the First Century, The Golden Age of the Cantor, The Life and Music of Ernest Bloch, and The Music of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley.

"Arabic Music" consists of a ten-session course covering geography, history, society and general culture, religion, sacred and secular vocal music, voice production and performance practice, solo instrumental music, melodic and rhythmic modes, dance, form, improvisation, composition, acculturation and interculturalism, modern developments, and popular styles.

Under "Miscellaneous," Knapp lists Aspects of Performing Arts and Ritual in Present-Day Buryatia (Eastern Siberia), Music From Around the World, Communicating through the Musical Score, and Musical Transcription.

All this is backed up with a dry wit and sparkling eyes. It might not seem so, but the audience is in for a real treat.

Karen Karbo

Portland writer Karen Karbo’s new book Generation Ex: Tales From the Second Wives Club, is a wildly funny, at times painfully accurate portrayal of an underreported social trend: the "ex-relationship." Many people, including Karbo, have married, divorced and remarried and find themselves in a tangle of relationships that require diplomacy, delicate negotiations and tact. Generation Ex, Karbo's fourth book, tells the stories of women who have survived dating, marriage and divorce and now find themselves in the middle of messy situations.

Karbo's three previous books have all been named New York Times Notable books of the Year. Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me is a novel of babies and friendship, mothers and fathers, and the havoc of procreation. Trespassers Welcome Here, Karbo's first novel, was published in 1989 and deals with Soviet émigrés in Los Angeles. Her other books include Big Girl in the Middle and The Diamond Lane.

Karbo is a contributing editor at Conde Nast Women's Sports and Fitness, a correspondent for Outside magazine, and writes for Vogue, Elle, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, Fast Company, and The New Republic. Her current specialty is the professional guinea pig story, where she puts herself through terrifying and humiliating experiences for the enjoyment of smarter people everywhere. Past guinea pig exploits include diving the World War II shipwrecks of Truk Lagoon in Micronesia, surf camp, flying trapeze school, and shark handling in the Bahamas.

Karbo is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and a past winner of a General Electric Younger Writer Award. She grew up in Whittier, California and graduated from USC film school.

www.karenkarbo.com

William Kittredge

William Kittredge became a major cultural voice with his 1987 collection of essays Owning It All, which mapped the emotional terrain of the modern West. His memoir, Hole In The Sky,

was marked by questionings, qualifications, wonderings. His task was introspection, the examined life, a cutting away of rationalizations, self-dissection. He explained from the outset that his was a memoir of failure. The book describes his childhood and youth farming in the Warner Valley of southeastern Oregon, up to the point when he is thrust out of that isolated insular Eden.

In his book of short stories We Are Not In This Together, and book of essays Who Owns The West?, Kittredge pursued and dismantled the Western moral code that emphasized independence, hierarchy, private ownership and resource exploitation. Kittredge’s most recent book, published by Knopf in December 2000, is a wide-ranging inquiry. He ponders how to create physical and spiritual sustainability of all creatures. He touches on the cave-paintings at Lacaus, France, the World Bank, Twelfth Century Italian mosaics and the life of Frederico Garcia Lorca. The goal is to reconcile the needs of people with the needs of places and creatures. The Nature of Generosity, Kittredge says, "proceeds more like a dance than an argument."

William Kittredge grew up on the MC Ranch in southeastern Oregon, farmed until he was 35, studied in the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, and became the Regents Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Montana until he retired in the spring of 1997. He received numerous prestigious awards including a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, two Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Awards for Excellence. He was co-producer of the movie "A River Runs Through It."

He is also the author of Western novels of the "Cord" Series, the short story collection The Van Gogh Field, and a book of essays Owning It All. With Annick Smith, he edited The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology.

Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey, cultural and literary icon, is the author of One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, as well as children's books, screenplays, articles, and several other novels.

Kesey grew up in Springfield, Oregon, graduated from the University of Oregon with a degree in Speech and Communications and received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to enroll in the Creative Writing program at Stanford. During his college years he volunteered at a Veterans Administration hospital in an experimental program involving mind-altering drugs.

Kesey's home-grown parties evolved into 1960s San Francisco day-glo "happenings" and "acid tests" with light shows, body painting, exotic costumes, strobe lights, eastern mysticism, sexual mayhem, and eventually a hook-up with Jerry Garcia's band "The Grateful Dead." In the summer of 1964, Kesey purchased a 1939 school bus, painted it psychedelic, and took the Merry Prankster crew on a road trip to New York. Neal Cassady (made famous as Dean Moriarty in "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac) was the driver. The rest, as they say, is history.

In recent decades, Ken Kesey has been writing, directing and performing plays including "Where's Merlin?" (toured England for the 1999 solar eclipse), and "Twister: a Musical Catastrophe for the Millennium's End." Kesey was awarded the CES Wood Retrospective Award honoring his lifetime achievements at the Oregon Book Awards ceremony in November 1999.

"I think it’s important for writers to get out there on the road and read their stuff to the audience," Kesey said. "I see performance as a "Thing." Performance is a form of publication. Performance is when you go public. And publication of literature is the point. When we go over on the coast to Newport in April to do a "Thing" in front of the public, that’s publication." — Ken Kesey.

http://www.intrepidtrips.com/