Robert Michael Pyle

Like many writers who come to the Nye Beach Writer's Series, Robert Michael Pyle has amassed an impressive array of credits and accomplishments. Fifteen books, ranging from butterflies to Bigfoot. Awards, including a John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Washington Govenor's Writing Awards, a Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Award, and a Distinguished Service Award from the Society for Conservation Biology.

Besides founding the Xerces Society for invertebrate conservation, he has worked as Land Steward for the Nature Conservancy and a butterfly conservation consultant in Papua, New Guinea. He has lectured on conservation and taught field courses and creative writing seminars and served on numerous faculties around the country and abroad.

I could go on. There's more. But if he sounds a little too cerebral, not to worry. Many writers start out with terrific brains, which often become fossilized under the tremendous dry weight of academia. To the delight of his readers, Bob Pyle combines an informed imagination, encyclopedic memory and sense of humor with the enthusiasm of an extemely articulate ten-year-old boy.

One reason for this may be, fortunately for both us and Bob, is that in 1982 his house burned down. "Out of this came three good things... I decided to...resign several roles of influence in conservation... to write full time." The second thing was a new romance that has maintained ever since, and the third, his book Wintergreen, of which Bob says, "defined my trajectory as a writer."

He had seen how colleagues in the professional conservation world sometimes became cut off from the natural world to become "office and airplane bound, prisoners of committees, meeting mired." His hands-on approach to life and his work are summed up best in Walking the High Ridge, Life as a Field Trip: "Since my conviction is that heaven is to be found in deep attention to the billowing brilliancy and ordinariness of the world as we find it, it seems to me that the way to know time and to honor the world is to use the days as well as can be."

barbara Lefcowitz

Barbara Lefcowitz has recieved writing fellowships and prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and Maryland Arts Council, among others. Her fiction and essays have appeared in over 400 journals. A native of New York, she obtained a Bachelor of Arts from Smith College, a Masters in English from State University of NY in Buffalo and a Ph. D. in English from the University of Maryland.

Recently retired from her professorship of English at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland, Lefcowitz is also a visual artist who creates collages and silk paintings, studies languages and has educated herself in astronomy and neurology. Teacher, world traveler and a prolific writer of poetry, fiction and experimental essays, her work is a reflection of her life, the arts, science, memory and the landscape of the mind. A self-described loner, she distances herself from the current self-defined literary schools and feels that university-based creative-writing programs in America are more problematic than helpful to aspiring writers.

Barbara Lefcowitz is the author of seven books of poetry and one novel. Her newest collection, The Politics of Snow, contains the poem "Pacific Shadows," which she wrote while visiting Newport in 1999. The collection contains poetic conjecture on subjects ranging from the Great Cosmic Yawn to Andalusia, from Josef Mengele to Joe DiMaggio, from Warsaw to Brooklyn. Resisting the current tide of literary obfuscation, her poetry is decidedly comprehendable and accessible.

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 Braucher

Featured on April 17, 1998 AND July 21, 2001

Poet 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.

She 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.

If you think she's a stuffy academian, you couldn't be more wrong. Braucher is a playful writer and she's charming and funny in front of an audience.

Her new book of poetry, Sending Messages Over Inconceivable Distances is an exploration of her August 1992 journey to Changsha, Hunan Province, People's Republic of China. She went there to adopt a daughter who was then just eight weeks old. Braucher is donating all royalties from this book to the Foundation for Chinese Orphanages, a non-profit organization that sponsors projects in cooperation with the Chinese government to support children still living in Chinese orphanages.

Braucher is also the founding editor of The Portlandia Group, a fine poetry press that holds an annual Poetry Chapbook contest.

From her poem Travel Instructions for China:

Travel lightly
The itinerary can change at any time without notice
Your baby is liable to suffer from under-stimulation
She will be in culture shock
Your life will be permanently changed
In China, everything is difficult
But nothing is impossible
Bring coffee
Bring comfort foods
You are a woman
Travel lightly

Win McCormack

McCormack was an honors graduate of Harvard College and earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon. He was editor of the New Oregon Publishers books Profiles of Oregon, Great Moments in Oregon History, and The Rajneesh Files.

Win McCormack is a major publisher in Oregon and the president of McCormack Communications. His latest publishing endeavor was a 1999 foray into creative writing when he launched Tin House Press and produced the first issue of Tin House literary journal, a serial named for the tin-covered Victorian home in Portland that acts as the journal’s West Coast headquarters. Tin House is a very upscale, intelligent, bi-coastal, book-size publication with offices in Manhattan and Northeast Portland. It publishes–as stated on the cover–Fiction, Poetry, Pilgrimages, Profiles, Lost Books, Food and other Obsessions. McCormack serves as the publication's editor-in-chief and publisher.

"This was a dream I had for many years, but it always seemed too impractical an undertaking," McCormack said. "I was sort of getting into my 50s and realized if I was going to do it, I should do it now." The idea of the upscale, well-designed quarterly, was to pay its writers well, present funky features, and not be too trendy.

McCormack’s own writings go back to his arrival in Portland from New York City when he earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon. He is also an honors graduate of Harvard College.

He has been investing in magazines since the 1960s when he helped create Mother Jones. He has been treasurer of Oregon Business Magazine since 1984, and is president of two publishing companies: New Oregon Publishers, and McCormack Communications. He is an official of the Democratic Party of Oregon, and has taught creative writing at the University of Oregon and the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem.

McCormack's feature article, "Deconstructing the Election," appeared in the March 26, 2001 issue of The Nation.

www.tinhouse.com

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

June & Joren Rushing

JUNE RUSHINGcomes from a large family of performers–including both parents, grandparent, aunts, uncles and cousins. Her roots are in Country Western and Germanic folk, with special training in jazz and classical.

Her husband, JOREN RUSHING, played his first live concert in July 1966 and has played most Friday and Saturday nights for the past twenty-six years. He has opened for Commander Cody, Big Brother & the Holding Company, Kingfish, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Robert Hunter, Merle Haggard, Ferlin Husky, Earl Thomas Connely and more. Both June and Joren have played with several bands, the most recent were Lonesome Ghosts and Three Bricks Shy. Their new CD features the title track "Walker After Midnight," a song with lyrics by Robert Hunter and music by Joren Rushing



June Rushing performing Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" with the June Rushing Band
at Cafe Mundo, Newport, Oregon, April 24, 2009.
Video Copyright Carla Perry

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

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.

Garrett Kaoru Hongo

Garrett Hongo was born in 1951 in the back room of a general store built by his grandfather in Volcano, Hawaii. His family left Volcano when he was less than a year old and Hongo grew up in South-Central Los Angeles. He received a BA cum laude in English from Pomona College, and a Master of Fine Arts in English from the University of California at Irvine. He also participated in graduate studies in Japanese language and literature at the University of Michigan and graduate studies in critical theory at the University of California-Irving. He lives in Eugene and is a Distinguished Professor of Arts and Science as the University of Oregon where he is Director of the Creative Writing Program. He speaks Japanese, German, Spanish and English.

Garrett is the author of three books: Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaii, Yellow Light, and The River of Heaven, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He also edited the anthologies The Open Boat: poems from Asian America and Songs My Mother Taught Me. He received the Oregon Book Award for non-fiction in 1996, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others.