Carla Perry

CARLA PERRY founder of the Nye Beach Writers’ Series and Writers On The Edge, Inc.

With few exceptions, all writers seek recognition. Some hope that the quality of their work will bring this about, others crow mightily about themselves and take less pains with the work itself, still others are just damn lucky to be in the right place at the right time to write about some popular social phenomenon or person.

But how many quietly write well, win recognition, and also spend enormous time and energy promoting other writers?

Consider Carla Perry. After earning a BA in Poetry from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop in 1970 and publishing her first collection of poetry, No Questions Asked, No Answers Given in 1971, she immersed herself in the life-experiences of marriage, typesetting, child-rearing, divorce, writing computer-software user manuals for Intel, research work for Bonneville Power Administration, and a long stint as co-editor/publisher of Wild Dog, An Erratic Publication of Unconventional Excellence, to alight at long-last in that veritable cosmic-vortex of artistic and philosophical miasma generally known as Yachats, Oregon.

After pondering her past and publishing her second book of poetry, Laughing Like Dogs, Carla was offered an opportunity to begin a writing event there. Thus, the Yachat's Writers’ Series was born. The Series was invited by the Oregon Coast Council for the Arts to relocate in Newport in 1999, and the name was changed to the Nye Beach Writer's Series to reflect the new locale.

With 150 regional, national and international writers successfully presented, Carla was named the winner of the 2002 Oregon Book Awards’ Stewart Holbrook Special Award for outstanding service to the literary community of Oregon.

She still had energy enough to write her first short story, which was anthologized in Scent of Cedars (released Fall 2002), publish poems and short nonfiction in the Pronghorn Press anthology Dense Growth 2002, and to have her interview of Ken Kesey published in Tin House #11, then translated into Romanian for the publication TIMPUL. She also received honorable mention for a poem submitted to the 2002 Kay Snow Awards for Poetry.

In 2003 Carla received the Governor's Art Award for "extraordinary achievement and commitment to Oregon's art," and a 2003 Oregon Literary Fellowship from Literary Arts, Inc. for her fiction.

If she sounds like a busy literary icon, that's because she is, efficiently assembling press releases, making contacts and sending invitations for the 2004 Nye Beach Writers’ Series season, while reading submissions and planning future workshops, special events and projects for the non-profit organization, Writers On The Edge, Inc. Although some snidely assert that she is a workaholic, Carla maintains that she is having fun, and would rather do this than go shopping, even though our President maintains shopping would be a higher expression of patriotism.

For additional information www.dancingmoonpress.com

Introduction by Scott Rosin
Photo by Ed Cameron

Paulann Peterson

Paulann Petersen’s work has appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, Willow Springs, Calyx, and the Internet’s Poetry Daily.

A collection of her poems, The Wild Awake, was published by Confluence Press in 2002; Quiet Lion Press published Blood-Silk, a volume of her poems about Turkey, in 2004; and a third collection, A Bride of Narrow Escape, has been released from Cloudbank Books. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she serves on the board of Friends of William Stafford.

Paulann Peterson was awarded Literary Arts' Stewart H. Holbrook Award, recognizing her "significant contributions that have enriched Oregon's literary community" ­ namely organizing the William Stafford Birthday Readings all over Oregon and the U.S. Her recent book of poetry A Bride of Narrow Escape was nominated for an Oregon Book Award.

Roy Parvin

There is a paragraph in Northern California author Roy Parvin's novella Betty Hutton that may just sum up thematically the intent of his work thus far. The protagonist, Gibbs, is a troubled man with a history of finding trouble:

But it was what stood at his back, the ocean of land behind Gibbs, that pulled at him like a tide. He'd never been farther west than the eastern fringe of Pennsylvania, had never been anywhere. He'd heard about Montana, though, a place that sounded like everything hadn't yet been decided, where there still might be some time left. A cellmate had told him of the chinooks, the southerly winds capable of turning winter into spring in a matter of hours, sometimes a ninety-degree temperature swing, and it had seemed to Gibbs lying in their dank cement crib, it seemed as if such a thing as the chinooks was possible, anything was.

One has to wonder whether if, in the crucible of our current troubled times, the threadbare cliché of personal redemption in literature, let alone in real life, has become almost meaningless. Roy Parvin's well-drawn characters and elegant prose seem to hold out the promise that there are possibilities, at the very least.

Roy's name may not yet be a household name, but he seems to be moving in that direction. His work is receiving numerous prestigious awards and he was granted a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in December 2003. He splits his time between households in the Bay Area and the Trinity Alps, which provide many of the settings for his work. His book of short stories, the Loneliest Road in America, came out in 1997, and his three novellas "In The Snow Forest" was published in 2000. He is currently writing a novel.

Please welcome Roy Parvin...

Suzanne Paola

The first thing I want to mention about tonight's guest writers is that Suzanne Paola and Bruce Beasley, who have both received Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, teach at Western Washington University and live in Bellingham, are married. That particular fact seems to have struck a strong chord somewhere in my brain that tickles when I read their work, perhaps a reaction from watching Ozzie and Harriet as a child.

I mean, not only do we have here a couple of extremely intelligent human beings, both who have independently developed habits of thinking in metaphysical terms about the world in which they live, and then filtering their own difficult life-experiences through two uniquely crafted crucibles of internal, intellectual critique....they have also undergone self-reinvention. Add to the mix that they have educated, reflected upon and re-educated themselves about an enormous and dizzying array of topics having to do with things theological, historical and current. Then, I ask you, consider these folks at breakfast. I smell overdone eggs, burned toast, boiling coffee. ("Not so," says Suzanne, "we are mundane, normal. The eggs and coffee are perfect.")

Suzanne Paola, author of poetry books Petitioner, Glass, and Bardo, which won the 1998 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, and most recently The Lives of The Saints, is also Suzanne Antonetta, author of her memoir Body Toxic, winner of the 2002 American Book Award. In Body Toxic, she writes of heroin addiction, the saints of every day, of god, of a quiet nuclear and chemical-dumping disaster she still experiences, we will all experience, for the rest of our lives, in horrific images and beautiful language.

Please welcome Suzanne Antonetta Paola.

Chuck Palahniuk

CHUCK PALAHNIUK was a featured author of the Nye Beach Writers' Series in 1999, just before his novel Fight Club was released as a movie starring Brad Pitt. He has written four other books including Choke, Survivor, Invisible Monsters, and his newest, Lullaby, which involves a lethal African poem, an unwitting serial killer, haunted-house broker and a frozen baby. All of Chuck's books have been bestsellers.

Lullaby is a chillingly pertinent parable about the dangers of psychic infection and control in an era of wildly over proliferated information: "Imagine a plague you catch through your ears ...."

Chuck was born in Pasco, Washington. He worked as a diesel truck service mechanic for thirteen years after graduating from the University of Oregon with a BA in journalism. He won an Oregon Newspaper Editors Association Award for most comprehensive coverage of a news event, an Oregon Book Award for best novel, and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. And, he has been a major underwriter of the Nye Beach Writers' Series, for which we are eternally grateful.

"Humor is crucial," Chuck says. "Otherwise, why bother?

www.chuckpalahniuk.net

Brenda Peterson

"If landscape is character, then Northwesterners are most like water," writes BRENDA PETERSON in Singing to the Sound.

Brenda Peterson is the author of a staggering array of books including three novels, one of which, Duck And Cover, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her nonfiction includes Living By Water, Nature and Other Mothers, and Sister Stories. She also co-edited, with Linda Hogan, the highly acclaimed anthologies, Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals, a Book-of-the-Month Club/One Spirit and Quality Paperback Club selection, and The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women Writing on the Green World.

Plus, in the past few months, Sightings: The Gray Whale's Mysterious Journey, was published by National Geographic, and Living By Water was re-issued by Fulcrum Press. Singing To the Sound: Visions of Nature, Animals and Spirit, a sequel to Living By Water, was released by NewSage Press. Her memoir, Build Me An Ark, explores her deep connection with animals and her work for the restoration of wild wolves. Her articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Orion, Sierra, and Utne Reader.

Brenda was born in 1950 in the High Sierras of the Pacific Northwest and raised on a national forest lookout station surrounded by a million acres of wilderness. She was an editorial assistant for The New Yorker in the seventies but returned to the northwest and has lived in Seattle, Washington on the shores of Puget Sound for over twenty years.

http://literati.net/Peterson/

Ron Price

To write the introductions of featured writers for this series, I read as much material as possible about them from book reviews and interviews, whatever is available on the Internet. Usually there is enough to get a sense of a writer, their background and personal interests. Often there is more than enough. Sometimes there is too much. Occasionally, there is way more than I want to know. Or you want to know. Writers. Sheesh.

Ron Price is an exception. There is a lot of material available in praise of his work, his abilities as a wordsmith, much mention of his deep sense of place and kinship with the natural world, as well as his very deep concern about racism in America.

But there isn't a lot about Ron Price himself. Though raised in the Mississippi Delta by parents from the Midwest and east, he describes himself as a southerner by geography but not by culture. He studied with black poet icon Etheridge Knight in the late Seventies in Memphis, moved to Philadelphia just in time to live within fifteen blocks of the bombing of the MOVE house by the Philadelphia Police Department, which resulted in the destruction of sixty neighboring rowhouses. He wasn't happy about it, but managed to carry on.

He is co-founder of the Free Peoples Poetry Workshop, a participant in the following programs: Poet in the Parks, Poet in Prisons, and Poet in the Schools. His work has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies. He is the author of Surviving Brothers and a recording called A Crucible for the Left Hand. His latest work is A Small Song Called Ash From the Fire.

He now labors as Poet in Residence at the Juilliard School, where he teaches creative writing. He describes his current life "as about as interesting as woodlice." A curious statement, especially when one considers his past proximity to those bombings in Philadelphia. Or that the Juilliard School is located in Manhattan, recent former home of the New York World Trade Center. Woodlice? A person has to wonder where Ron is contemplating moving next.

http://www.rattapallax.com/

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."

Charles Potts

Charles Potts is the founder and president of Tsunami, Inc., publisher of The Temple, a quarterly of contemporary poetry in Chinese, Spanish and English. He is the author of twenty-two books, and his work has been included in dozens of anthologies. He is a frequent guest on radio and TV, and is heavily involved in business, politics and volunteer work in his hometown of Walla Walla, Washington. Charles has also been chair of numerous poetry festivals for over least three decades, an instructor in computer processing of Chinese and Oriental languages in China, and part-time instructor at Walla Walla Community College. He is also an interim instructor at Whitman College and the Free University of Seattle.

Yesterday we received a copy of his newest book Nature Lovers. On the back cover is a quote from Ronald Koertge, which I will read to you. "When my conscience goes south for the winter, I turn to the fearless Charles Potts, a moralist with a sense of humor. If he had an 800 number I’d call him every day!"

Charles was born in Idaho Falls in 1943 and raised on a ranch east of Mackay, Idaho. He graduated from Idaho State University in Pocatello in 1965 with a BA in English has been writing poetry ever since. Three books were published last year: Little Lord Shiva: The Berkeley Poems, Lost River Mountain, and Fascist Hiakus.

Charles founded Litmus Inc., which published eighteen books in Salt Lake City including Charles Bukowski’s Poems Written Before Jumping Out Of An 8-Story Window in 1968. He was the Northwest representative to Chinese Computer Communications, Inc., and to the Pinxxiee Corporation from 1988 to 1993 in Beijing and Changsha, China. In 1994, Charles received the Distinguished Professional Achievement Award from the College of Arts and Sciences of Idaho State University. From 1995 to 1997, he lived in Japan where he wrote a newspaper column, "Japan’s Political Choices" for the Kyushu Gleaner.

Charles is also an Accomplished Toastmaster, an investment real estate broker, and a Master Practitioner in the Society of Neuro Linguistic Programming.

Copies of SOME of Charles’ books are available at the back table. He will be glad to autograph and sell copies during intermission.

www.thetemplebookstore.com

Ritah Parrish

Ritah Parrish has made a name as a humorous performance poet and in 1996 and 1997 was the queen of Portland’s poetry slam scene. Her work has been cited for its outrageous jocularity combined with unflinching details of brutality.

Her first book of poetry was Ribbed For Your Pleasure. She is also the author of the short story collection, Pink Menace, which contains an assortment of harsh examinations of human perversion written in a most engagingly droll way. Reviewers have said these stories are devilishly twisted views on our inner dilemmas and complex psychological issues without any hint of misery or angst. The characters just do what they must.

Ritah starred in the one-woman shows: I Think He’s A Sociopath But the Dance is Saturday Night, and Bite Down Hard. Her latest two-woman show, Bottomless, ended its Portland run last night.

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.