Don Henry

Grammy Award winner DON HENRY'S songs have been recorded by legends like: Ray Charles, Patti Page and Conway Twitty, by country crooners like: Gene Watson, John Conlee and B.J. Thomas and by young hit makers of today like: Blake Shelton, Lonestar and Kathy Mattea...and the list goes on.

But his songs shine most when heard by the very artist who wrote them in the concerts he performs across the country...

At Don's shows, you'll easily spot those who have yet to hear his songs; upon first experiencing them, the listener is often moved to laughter or tears, sometimes both at the same time! And everyone leaves humming, because Don Henry songs stay with you.



Don's unique perspective is expressed in instantly memorable melodies and equally smart arrangements that appeal to listeners across musical borders, and across the nation.

As Dirty Linen observed about his Philadelphia Folk Festival appearance: "The crowd was won over by this guy and his guitar. Long may he write."

To learn more about Don Henry, visit his website at donhenry.com

Walking Bridges

"Walking Bridges" authors featured at November 15 Nye Beach Writers' Series.

Seven contributors to the 70-poet compilation "Walking Bridges Using Poetry as a Compass," were featured on November 15, 2008: Jonah Bornstein, Don Colburn, Cecelia Hagen, Margaret Gish Miller, Rita Ott Ramstad, and Sandra Stone.


Sharon Wood Wortman, co-editor of the book, is also the author of "The Portland Bridge Book," which had its first and second editions published by the Oregon Historical Society Press in 1989 and 2001. "After OHS went out of the business of books, I founded my own press, took out a loan on our house, and published a third edition in 2006," said Wortman. That edition was awarded the 2007 Silver Medal from Independent Publisher. Wortman is also the driving force behind the ongoing "Portland Parks & Outdoor Recreation Bridge Walks" series held since 1991, which evolved into "Poetry and Bridge Walks" in 2006. Wortman is also involved with the 2009 Portland-Vancouver Bridges & Rivers Calendar, a fundraiser for the 100-year birthday celebration of the Hawthorne Bridge planned for 2010. Additional information about her many projects is posted at www.bridgestories.com.


Jonah Bornstein was raised in Southern California and received a Master's in creative writing from New York University before moving to Oregon in 1989, where he co-founded the Ashland Writers Conference. His published books include "A Path through Stone" and "Voices from the Siskiyous." His poem, "Night Blooming Men," was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2000 and two of his poems are included in the nationally acclaimed anthology September 11, 2001, American Writers Respond. His many accolades include the Oregon State Poetry Association Prize and the inaugural Southern Oregon Prize for service to the writing community of the region.


Don Colburn lives in Portland where he is a reporter for The Oregonian. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, he worked for many years at The Washington Post. Colburn became interested in poetry and started writing poems while on a mid-career Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. In 2006, he had two collections of poetry published: His chapbook, "Another Way to Begin," won the Finishing Line Press Prize; and his full-length book, "As If Gravity Were a Theory," won the Cider Press Review Book Award. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.


Cecelia Hagen grew up Norfolk, Virginia, and studied writing and dance at Connecticut College, later receiving a Master's of fine arts in poetry from the University of Oregon. Her work has been published in many national magazines, and in 2007, Passager magazine in Baltimore chose her as its poet of the year. Presently, Hagen teaches memoir writing and coordinates the monthly Windfall Reading Series for the Lane Literary Guild in Eugene.


Margaret Gish Miller was born in Palo Alto, California and now lives in the Willamette Valley where she is a retired English teacher. Her work has appeared in numerous publications and she has received awards from New Millennium Writings and The Writers Digest.


Rita Ott Ramstad's first book, "The Play of Dark and Light," won the 2003 Stafford-Hall Award for Poetry at the Oregon Book Awards; and her poem "Night Beach" traveled on Portland's TriMet buses and MAX trains as part of Poetry in Motion, a campaign that showcases the work of local and national poets on transit vehicles. She teaches English at the Center for Advanced Learning, a charter high school in Gresham.


Sandra Stone is the 2007 winner of the Dana Award in poetry, which is presented to an under-recognized American poet for mastery of craft, inventive use of language, and substance. Her first collection of poems, "Cocktails with Breughel at the Museum Cafe," was selected in the Cleveland State University annual manuscript competition. The following year, "Cafe" received an Oregon Book Award. Stone's work has appeared in numerous national publications and in several anthologies.

Donna & Bonnie Henderson

Intro by Marianne Klekacz:

In 1995, Bonnie Henderson joined CoastWatch and adopted a mile-long stretch of beach known as Mile 157 between the Siuslaw and Umpqua river outlets to the Pacific Ocean.

On her regular patrols of "her" beach, she became intrigued by the variety of detritus washed up onto the shore. Her discoveries included glass fishing floats, brand new athletic shoes, dead birds, a dead whale, a half-buried shipwreck, and a "mermaid's purse" (If you're wondering what that is, you'll have to read her book, "Strand" to find out).

She began to try to track the debris back to its source. Her curiosity led her to Washington and ultimately to Japan and China. Along the way she learned that the Japanese call our treasured glass floats "gomi" (junk) and are amused that we collect them. She learned about the movements of sand along the shore, the intricacies of trans-Pacific container shipping, and the devastation that can result when oil is spilled into the ocean.

She then set what she had learned down into a book, "Strand." It's a fascinating read.

Please welcome Bonnie Henderson.

Airlie poet Donna Henderson is a busy woman. She is a mixed media artist, a licensed clinical social worker, has a private practice in psychotherapy, teaches at Western Oregon University, has published two chapbooks (one of which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in 1997), and will be publishing a full-length collection of poems, "The Eddy Fence," in 2009. She is widely published in journals and anthologies and teaches poetry workshops at The Attic in Portland.

It seems to me that Donna uses the imagery of lyric poetry to explore questions raised by other areas of her life. Her poetry tackles posers like the nature of death and identity. Her poetry is fluid and musical, and she often performs it to musical accompaniment.

Please welcome Donna Henderson.

Jack Hart

Jack Hart, began work at “The Oregonian” as a reporter, arts and leisure editor, and Sunday Magazine editor, before becoming a training editor and managing editor. He holds a University of Wisconsin doctorate in Mass Communications and has taught at five universities. Hart is a frequent lecturer at Harvard’s prestigious Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism.

Jack Hart is also the author of A Writer’s Coach: An Editor’s Guide to Words That Work, released as a Pantheon hardback in 2006 and as a Vintage Books paperback in 2007. “A Writer’s Coach” is Hart’s effort to make writing less painful for the rest of us. The book can help any writer learn the tricks and habits of good writers.

“Just about everybody agrees that good writing is tight, that it’s forceful,” Hart explains. “Good writing incorporates lively verbs and clean syntax. It’s colorful. It includes descriptive elements that can put you in the scene. It’s rhythmic. ” Developing a process to get you there is not some closely guarded mystery, Hart explains, but the step-by-step conquest of craft.

Introduction by Marianne Klekacz ;
"On my desk most days is my favorite teacup of the moment. It carries the following inscription: “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” I like it because it reminds me that writing is darned hard work.

Tonight’s featured writer is definitely a professional. After decades in journalism, he’s compiled the knowledge he gathered as a writer and editor into A Writer’s Coach: The Complete Guide to Writing Strategies That Work.

Jack maintains that good writing can dance. His book is not your standard “how-to” manual but rather a comprehensive discussion of what it takes to get better and better, to become part of the continuous conversation that is literature. It’s earned a favored place on my bookshelf, right next to the “little White book,” Strunk and White’s Elements of Style.

Behind every great writer is a great editor. But until you can afford to hire a great editor, you need to develop those editorial skills yourself. A Writer’s Coach is a great place to start. Its discussions of brevity, clarity, rhythm, and connecting to other humans will help you look at your work with a clearer eye.

Jack doesn’t neglect the “no-noes” either. A Writer’s Coach also provides some choice advice about creeping nouns and passive verb constructions, dangling modifiers, the dreaded adverb, and hackneyed language and clichés.

This is a book that will enrich your writing and your pleasure in reading.
So let the dance begin. Please join me in welcoming Jack Hart."

Photo by Carla Perry

Robyn Hercey

The Lonesomes are a trio made up of songwriter, guitarist and lead singer PHIL FAVORITE , bassist MARK ZEHR , and drummer ROBYN HERCEY on backing vocals. For this special Newport performance, the trio will be joined by ADAM ELLIOTT of Smidgen on lead guitar.

The Lonesomes are three Illinois transplants, all graduates of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Phil Favorite works as a newspaper editor and designer for special sections at The Oregonian, and is editor of New Home Monthly. He lives in Portland with his wife Anne and their two young boys Bobby and Dylan.

Mark Zehr is a stay-at-home dad who lives in Forest Grove with his wife Laura and son River.

Robyn Hercey is a senior systems engineer with Corillian Corporation who lives in Portland with is wife Keri and daughter Amalia.

Most, if not all, these children are here tonight.

In 2002 THE LONESOMES released their promo/demo "Summer Friend," a five-song collection that runs that gamut from sunny pop to twangy country to heavy rumble rock. In 2003, The Lonesomes began work with producer Brian Berg on "Circling The Sun," a thirteen-song CD due to be released in two weeks.

The Lonesomes have a website where you can find more info: www.thelonesomes.us.

please welcome.... THE LONESOMES.

Bette Lynch Husted

BETTE LYNCH HUSTED's memoir, Above The Clearwater: Living on Stolen Land, chronicles the history of Husted's family which settled near the Clearwater River in northern Idaho.

The benchland above the Clearwater River in north-central Idaho had been the home to the Nez Perce Indians until the Dawes Act opened their reservation to settlement in 1895. As a child on the family homestead, Husted says she grew up feeling the presence of the long-displaced Nez Perce.

Husted received a BA in English from the University of Idaho and an MA in English from the University of Colorado. She spent 19 years teaching high school English in White Swan, Washington, Polson, Montana, and in Hermiston and Joseph, Oregon. She then spent 13 years teaching American Literature, Native Literature, Northwest Literature, and Writing at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton.

Her essays, short stories and poems have appeared in a broad selection of anthologies, literary journals and magazines. Her essay, Salmon Run, was selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2000. She lives in Pendleton with her husband Dean, and for those who have already read the book in anticipation of tonight's event, she still watches birds and foxes and practices early morning T'ai Chi.

Copies of Bette Husted's memoir, Above The Clearwater published by Oregon State University Press, and her poetry chapbook, After Fire, are available at the back table.

Please welcome.

Donna Henderson

DONNA HENDERSON chapbook, Transparent Woman, produced on a letterpress from handset type, printed on fine paper and bound with string, was a finalist for the 1997 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. The title poem of this collection was first published in Calyx Journal and subsequently included in A Fierce Brightness." Her most recent chapbook, Gazpacho, contains a sequence of poems on the final illness and death of her mother, together with watercolors by her sister Darcy V. Henderson. In the past few years, Donna Henderson's poems have appeared in Fireweed, First Things, Room of One's Own, and other magazines. Her reviews and articles have been published in journals of spirituality, literary scholarship and social work. Her poem Dawn is included on the CD Alive at Dawn by pianist Diane Baxter, principal keyboard artist for Yaquina Orchestra and the Bloch Music Festival. She has received various state, national and international recognitions, including a Pushcart Prize nomination. Ms. Henderson recently completed her first full-length collection of poems, Are You With Me Here? Her photography and mixed media artwork is regularly exhibited at the River Gallery in Independence as well as in one-woman shows around the Willamette Valley. Ms. Henderson is a licensed clinical social worker with a private practice in pyschotherapy in Monmouth, teaches counseling at Western Oregon University and is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College.

Lorrie Haight

EXTREME SELF-PUBLISHING!

"HOW TO MAKE A HARDCOVER BOOK AT HOME IN YOUR SPARE TIME"

A demonstration by Lorrie Haight of Long Beach, Washington.

Lorrie Haight began creating hardcover books by hand for her husband, Smitty, a fisher poet and storyteller. Ten years later, after producing hundreds of hardcover books, she began teaching the craft of bookmaking to others who were interested in both the process and self-publishing. She now gives bookmaking demonstrations at craft shows.

Lorrie has been a featured workshop instructor at the Fisher Poets Gathering in Astoria for the past few years. She is also the author of her own book of stories based on her days as an Alaska fisherwoman.

During the presentation, participants learn how to lay out written material, then fold, gather and sew the pages into sections of the book called "signatures." She demonstrates how to bind the book, measure material for the book cover, cut and glue the covers together and ultimately glue the finished books into the finished covers using starch in the hinge crease.

Handouts available at the demonstration include contact information for all book publication requirements such as ISBN and Library of Congress numbers, bar codes and copyright forms.

Lorrie Haight's video, "Lorrie's Book Making Demonstration," is available for purchase, through email: booklady@pacifier.com or call Lorrie directly at 360-642-8090.

Freeman House

FREEMAN HOUSE, an environmental organizer and co-founder of two watershed restoration groups, has written a remarkable memoir about human-animal interdependence.

Part lyrical natural history, part social and philosophical manifesto, Totem Salmon: Life Lessons From Another Species, tells the story of a determined band who've worked for over two decades to save one of the last purely native species of salmon in California. The book, called the Zen of salmon restoration, traces the evolution of a Mattole River valley community in Northern California.

Refusing to accept the extinction of their river's wild salmon, a handful of locals (including House) formed the Mattole Watershed Salmon Support Group. Working cooperatively, they began restoring the silt-choked Mattole themselves, building weirs and fish traps to divert salmon as they struggled upstream, and using these captives to propagate and release wild stock in much greater numbers than would be possible in risky riverbed spawning. It was lonely, exhausting work, but the group persisted through mistakes and hard lessons and brought back not only the river's king salmon but also its coho run.

"This wonderful book chronicles the way reverence for wild salmon stitched together a Northcoast California community of loggers, ranchers, hippies, environmentalists and bureaucrats. Its salmon-lore is encyclopedic and the story of the community's growing cohesion has filled me with an abiding joy." Peter Coyote, author of Sleeping Where I Fall.

Freeman House was born in pre-Disneyland Anaheim. He gained his education in economics through his experience as a commercial fisherman and tugboat owner-operator; and in art and social dynamics while running with the counterculture theatrical/political Diggers in sixties San Francisco.

He also attended classes at Oregon State University and the University of California, Berkeley. Freeman House is co-founder of the Mattole Watershed Salmon Support Group and the Mattole Restoration Council. Total Salmon: Life Lessons From Another Species won "Best Non-Fiction Award" from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association when the book was first issued in 1999. This year, Freeman House was named the 2002 recipient of the Harold Vurster Memorial Award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters for the quality of prose in this book.

www.czrecords.com/dhouse/freeman/totem.htm

Linda Hogan

LINDA HOGAN, a descendant of the Chickasaw Nation, grew up in a military family that moved often although most of her childhood was spent in Oklahoma and Colorado. Her books of poetry include Eclipse, Seeing Through the Sun, That Horse a collaboration with her father, and The Book of Medicines which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Colorado Book Award. Her novels include Mean Spirit, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Oklahoma Book Award for fiction in 1990, and Solar Storms, winner of the Colorado Book Award. Her books of nonfiction include Dwellings, From Women's Experience to Feminist Theology, and the recently released Sightings

co-authored with Brenda Peterson. Linda Hogan is also the author of a textbook on poetry, several plays and numerous essays, mostly on environmental issues.

She is the recipient of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Seeing Through the Sun a Guggenheim grant, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Oklahoma Book Award for fiction, and the prestigious Lannan Award for outstanding achievement in poetry, an award which may not be applied for. She also won a Five Civilized Tribes Museum Playwriting Award and in July 1998, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas.

When asked why she writes both fiction and poetry she replied, "With fiction I can take political issues and weave story and character around them. Not enough people read poetry."

Linda has a Masters degree in English and Creative Writing from the University of Colorado and is currently a professor in the English Department at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She served for two years on the National Endowment for the Arts poetry panel, and volunteers in wildlife rehabilitation.

Chanrithy Him

In making these introductions, I usually try to keep it light. In the case of Chanrithy Him, I won't even make the attempt. She is a survivor of a Twentieth Century event so incredibly insane that there is almost no historical yardstick available to measure it. Hitler killed to exalt a master race. Stalin and Mao Zedong slaughtered all who opposed their extreme communist ideology. The Rwandans and Serbs joyfully butchered their enemies in an explosion of ancient feuds. In a perverted sense, there was almost a certain twisted logic to their viciousness.

Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, on the other hand, had almost no perceptible ideology, no plan, no goal, unless it was to destroy an entire culture and people, his own people. He armed the poorest and most ignorant and set about killing the intelligent and educated. Two million people, or about thirty percent of the Cambodian population were slaughtered. The country became a huge prison camp of unchecked disease and suffering, without medicine or industry or an economy or even the suggestion of civilization. A list of occupations available in Cambodia during the years of the Khmer Rouge would be short: demagogue, soldier, informant, slave, corpse.

Chanrithy Him, recounts her grim childhood years in When Broken Glass Floats, Growing up Under the Khmer Rouge, winner of the 2001 Oregon Book Award for Non-fiction. She works as a research associate at Oregon Health Sciences University School of Medicine, performing work on a long-term study on post-traumatic stress disorder among Cambodian refugees in the U. S. When Broken Glass Floats was also a finalist for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, finalist for the PEN USA West Literary Award, and nominee for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award.

The book is a work of art. Chanrithy Him writes in a plain, forthright style surprisingly free of embellishment and emotion, taking you to a place no sane person would ever willingly go. Yet, you are compelled to turn page after page, fascinated and humbled by the overwhelming strength of character displayed by a remarkable human being trapped in one of the most horrific moments in human history.

U.S. Indochina Educational Foundation

Pam Houston

Pam Houston is the author of two short story collections, Cowboys Are My Weakness, which won her the 1993 Western States Book Award, Waltzing the Cat, and a memoir, A Little More About Me, and numerous articles.

Pam Houston is also the sort of writer that Hollywood loves. Not only because she tells a good yarn, but because she actually has gone to the trouble and inconvenience of having adventures to write about, rather than just making up a pack of lies, like the rest of us. Hollywood is going to sniff her out. We've been treated to Ernest Hemingway sagas in his minimalist style. We've had to suffer through Hunter S. Thompson's adventures with recreational pharmaceuticals in his paranoid gonzo-journalism style. Norman Maclean's beautiful A River Runs Through It: and Hole in the Sky. The wry coming of age memoir, This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolf. But they're all guys.

Now we've got the chance to see a real woman adventurer at work, a huntress, licensed river guide, horsewoman, skier, mountain trekker and rock-climber, sailor and glider-pilot, a traveler of continents, mountains and rivers. I could say how good her work is, how she uses the back-drop of her experience to explore the rough country of relationships and her own inner journey, but it would take a long time.

From her memoir, A Little More About Me, she says this: "The two best things a writer can be, in my opinion, are honest and brave. In the moments when a writer can be both these things, he or she speaks for every living thing, without trying."

Sam Hamill

When Carla requested biographical information about him, poet, editor and translator Sam Hamill made a very specific statement about introductions:

"The shorter the Intro; the better I like it,"

which presents me with a dilemma. In preparation, I read a lot of material on each guest writer presented here. I've come to realize that some writers have more interesting writing than lives, and others, more interesting lives than writing. Then along comes Sam Hamill, who is damned interesting on both counts, but who says: 'keep it short.' Yet the purpose of intros, of course, is to acquaint the audience with the writer. So, here goes nothin'.

Whelped in 1943
orphan of the Last Good War,
adoption and battering by Utah farm-folk
escape to jail, heroin, San Francisco
a turn-around at words of Beat Poets Rexroth and Snyder,
wrong turn into Marine Corps and Okinawa
slow turn into conscientious objector
Zen-Buddhist
long-term immersion in Confucius and Cantos
birthed Copper Canyon Press
water-hauling, wood-splitting
twenty-foot trailer
electricity a stranger
fifteen books of poetry
twenty-eight translations from Ancient Chinese, Japanese, Estonian and Ancient Greek
editing, editing
two Pushcarts, a Guggenheim
awards, fellowships
scholarship by candlelight
ever seeking the way of poetry.

Copper Canyon Press

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.

Richard Hoyt

Richard Hoyt is the author of twenty-one mysteries and thrillers; two under the alias of Nicholas van Pelt. His first novel, Decoys, a John Denson mystery, was published in 1980. Since then, he has published seven John Denson mysteries and eight James Burlane international thrillers.

Richard, born in Hermiston, Oregon, grew up on a small farm outside Umatilla, Oregon. His father was a moonshiner and a rodeo cowboy; his mother was manager of the school cafeteria. He has a Master of Science in journalism from the University of Oregon and a PhD in American studies from the University of Hawaii. He served as a counterintelligence agent for the United States Army and was a fellow in international editing and reporting at the Washington Journalism Center. He served briefly as a Washington correspondent for newspapers in the Pacific Northwest and was a reporter for two years for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and three years for the Honolulu Advertiser. He taught journalism and mass media courses at the University of Maryland, College Park, and for six years at Lewis and Clark College in Portland.

In researching his thrillers, I learned that he has traveled to Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, France, Morocco, Mexico, Guatemala, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, Korea, Gibraltar, Canada, Jamaica, England, Portugal, Hong Kong, Brazil, the Soviet Union, the Netherlands, Spain, and Belize. His last overseas trip to he Philippines lasted over three years. In 1984, he rode Soviet trains from Nadhodka, near Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan to Finland. In 1987, he rode riverboats from the headwaters of the Amazon to the Atlantic Ocean.

Richard’s novel, Siege, won the American Mystery Award as the best espionage novel of 1987. His latest novel, Stomp, set in 1957, is an existential mystery and a coming of age story. It is largely autobiographical, based on Hoyt's growing up in Umatilla. The book deals with true love, a series of rapes, a bit of stalking, near-death train-proximity sex, a murder attempt (by the heroes), ruined lives, a body found after forty years, and the return of the exiled author in time for his appearance tonight, one more stop on an extended book tour.

Carl Hanni

Featured on June 12th & 13th as part of Vaudvillianous Poets and April 17, 1999

April is NATIONAL POETRY MONTH, so tonight, for us, performance poet CARL HANNI will be the representative of all poet’s everywhere.

Carl is a vibrant, dramatic performer of poetry coast to coast in every conceivable situation, including headlining once at the Nuyorican Café in New York City and as a member of the Portland Slam team that went to the National Poetry Slam in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1995.

In 1994, his chapbook, Crash Worship was published and he produced the CD Talking Rain: Spoken Word and Music from the Pacific Northwest. Since then, his poetry has been featured on several CD and cassette compilations of spoken word. Carl also ran the Literary Arts Program at Portland’s Artquake Festival for three years.

His poetry appears regularly in innumerable literary journals, magazines and anthologies and it seems hardly a week goes by where the Portland papers don’t publicize his involvement at public poetry readings. His enthusiastic, appreciative audiences follow him from event to event. Carl’s first full collection of poetry, Night Shift, was published by Quiet Lion Press in 1996.

Mod Media is his one-man, independent publicity firm. Most of his clients are musicians or record labels, although he also works with writers, dancers, theater people, comics and filmmakers. He promotes their work locally, regionally and nationally.

Carl graduated from American University, in Washington, DC, in 1988 with a BA in Literature and a minor in Cinema Studies. He dreamt of going moving to Bisbee in 1999 and that's what he did and that's where he's been for the past three years.

www.modmediapublicity.com

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.

Six Local Writers

SIX LOCAL WRITERS!

SHEILA EVANS spent years teaching in California’s Central Valley. Her articles appeared in local newspapers, the Oregonian, Eugene Register-Guard, Newsweek, Oregon Coast Magazine, Northwest Travel, Creative Woman, and Portlandia Review of Books. Her 1996 novel Maggie’s Rags, is set in a small town resembling Yachats.

HOWARD OSBORN abandoned a career in poetry to become an agricultural economist. His career took him from Oregon to Boston to Washington, DC, to most of Latin America. He served with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and with the Organization of American States. He has written two books of poetry and a chapter "Research Technology and the Small Farm" which appeared in a compendium Alternatives in Food Production. He will be reading from his recent poetry chapbooks: Decision Tree and Moon Meanderings and Reflections.

RUTH HARRISON was born in Kansas, grew up in Colorado, and has been an Oregonian since 1950. Her first teaching assignment was in a one-room school. She is now a retired professor of medieval literature who writes and gives occasional poetry workshops. Her poems appeared in regional, national and international publications. Her poetry collection, Bone Flute, was published in 1996 by Cape Perpetua Press of Yachats. She has just completed work on a second book, Nightwalk.

MICHAEL BURGESS is a columnist for Upper Left Edge and the author of Uncle Mike’s Guide to the Real Oregon Coast, a tongue-in-cheek guide for tourists who should vacation elsewhere. Magic and Magicians, an introduction to magic for young readers, was published in 1991. He was founding president of Northwest Writers, Inc. based in Portland, has written for film and television, and has provided humorous social commentary to local radio and television stations. He and his partner, Darlene Dubé recently opened OREGON BOOKS in Depoe Bay. The bookstore is the first and only bookstore devoted solely to books about Oregon and books by Oregon authors. He also writes horoscopes that appear monthly in Inkfish.

SCOTT ROSIN headed for the woods of Toledo, Oregon in 1971 and began writing in 1978. His first three plays were one-acts. Longer plays have been performed at the Next Wave Youth Theatre and the Newport Performing Arts Center. His most recent work, "The Stolen Hours," was produced in November 1996. He is currently working on a collection of poems about surfing, a collection of woods poems, a screenplay, several short stories, a novel, a play and prose poems. In addition to his work as a writer, Scott has been a fire fighter, smoke jumper, tree planter and timber faller.

CARLA PERRY is the founder and coordinator of the Yachats Writers’ Series, co-editor of Talus & Scree International Literary Journal, a photographer, book publisher, and a poet. She received a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Her work has been published in national magazines and is the author and illustrator of two books: No Questions Asked, No Answers Given, published in 1971 and Laughing Like Dogs, published by Cape Perpetua Press in 1996.

Anndee Hochman

Anndee Hochman has written essays, articles, book reviews and short fiction for the New York Times Book Review, Ms., the Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Review, etc. She is a former Washington Post reporter and her essays on women and family have appeared in a variety of magazines, newspapers and literary journals. Her first book Everyday Acts & Small Subversions: Women Reinventing Family, Community and Home, is a book of essays published in 1994 by Eighth Mountain Press. When writing the book, Hochman looked for women with purposely chosen, nontraditional families they sculpted to meet their own needs. The resulting book presents options for both straight and lesbian women, and the complications and freedoms those options offer.

Honesty and family are central themes in Anndee’s life and in her writing. She has elected to define her life outside society’s prescribed roles so has chosen "truth over tranquility." And because keeping secrets has too high a cost, she lives and writes the truth.

Anndee, a former resident of Portland, Oregon, lives in Philadelphia and teaches creative writing as an artist-in-residence in public schools on both coasts. She has also worked as a counselor for homeless teenagers, coordinator of a women’s writing workshop, a theater critic and a bartender.

Robert Heilman

ROBERT HEILMAN is an essayist, public radio commentator and storyteller. He dropped out of high school into a life of seasonal manual labor in 1970, picking up work in moving and hauling, construction, reforestation, and gyppo logging..

Ten years later, he accidentally fell — ten feet, head-first — into freelance writing. Heilman will read from Overstory: Zero, Real Life in Timber County