Greg Kleiner

Greg Kleiner’s first novel, Where River Turns To Sky, is the story of an eighty-year-old man who promises his lifelong friend, now confined to a nursing home, that he will not die alone. He visits every day for two years until the one weekend when he escapes to go fly-fishing. The friend dies while he’s gone. Vowing to allow no other person to die alone, he buys a rundown mansion in the Oregon town of Lookingglass and paints the house a shocking red lipstick colorl. He then invites a handful of elders move in with him. The book shows that death is not necessarily an end, rather a lesson in living.

The Chicago Tribune called Gregg’s novel, "a lovingly told story of aging, the betrayal of our bodies and minds, and death….you’ll leave this book with a deeper understanding of what it’s like to be old and how quickly human contact can redeem the loneliest among us."

Where River Turns to Sky was a finalist for both the 1997 Paterson Fiction prize and the 1997 Oregon Book Award.

Gregg is a third-generation Oregonian, a graduate of the University of Oregon with degrees in Journalism and German literature. At age 16, he spent a year as an American Foreign Exchange Student in the mountains of northern Thailand. For a month of that year, he lived at a Buddhist monastery as a novice under the tutelage of an aged monk. He’s worked as a dairy goat farmer, hotel concierge in Switzerland, freelance journalist, wildlife biologist, carpenter, and technical writer. He makes his living now writing and teaching. Gregg lives in Corvallis, with his wife, Lori, and two small children, Eli and Sophia.

Anita Feng

ANITA FENG received an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University. She won several awards including the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, an Illinois Council award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Most recently, she received the Andrés Berger-Kiss Award for non-fiction.

Her first poetry collection, Internal Strategies, is a book that tells the story of her husband, Xiao Ge Feng, growing up through the turmoil of communist China. The book follows the course of his life from severe childhood illness to forced labor in Manchuria, through factory work, education, immigration to the United States and marriage.

Anita lives in Issaquah, Washington with her husband and three children where she maintains a studio as a professional potter specializing in ocarinas, musical instruments made from clay.

Ocarinas are an ancient folk instrument that originated in Central and South America where it was used by native tribes. Each tribe had its own "tuning" and could be identified at a distance from the music played. The tone of an ocarina is haunting, rich, unique. The word "ocarina" means "little goose egg" in Italian. Later, in America, it became known as the "sweet potato." According to the webpage information, Anita has been designing and creating ocarinas since 1974.

www.scn.org/bg599

Sharon Doubiago

Sharon Doubiago is a native of Los Angeles, has a Master’s Degree in English from California State University at Los Angeles and considers home anywhere along the Pacific Coast.

She teaches workshops and has been a resident instructor in numerous writing programs throughout the country, including at the Ph.D. program at the University of Denver, the Masters Poetics Program at the Naropa Institute, the Napa Poetry Festival, Warren Wilson College, The University of California at Santa Cruz Writers’ Pool, the University of Minnesota’s Split Rock Arts Program, France’s Loire Valley Writers’ Retreat, Ashland Oregon’s Writers Conference, the Art Institute of Antigua, Guatemala, and at the University of Wyoming. She has been leading "The Autobiography of the Soul," her signature writing workshop, throughout the Northwest and world for the past fourteen years.

Sharon’s most recent published book is The Husband Arcane. The Arcane of O, from Gorda Press, a book length poem and interview provoked by the issues of gender, race, domestic violence, poetics and America raised during the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Other published works include two epic poems: Hard Country (1982) which will be reprinted in 1999 by East End Press, and South American Mi Hija (University of Pittsburgh, 1992). Her two collections of short stories are El Nino, published by Lost Roads in 1989, and The Book of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, published by Graywolf in 1988, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards. Her collection of poems, Psyche Drives the Coast, won the Hazel Hall Oregon Book Award in 1991.

Sharon received two Pushcart Awards for both poetry and fiction. She also won the Woman Writer Genius Award, Gloria Steinem’s Woman Writer Award and the Oregon Book Award. Sharon recently returned to the Oregon coast after a stint as Visiting Writer for the University of Wyoming. On November 13 she will begin teaching "Creative Writing/Voice of the Soul" at a week long Writing Workshop in Guatemala. She will read tonight from her newest poetry manuscript Body and Soul.

M.K. Wren

M.K. WREN arrived in Oregon in 1963 and tried to make her living as a painter. Her training, from the age of 10, was in art and her degree from the University of Oklahoma is a Bachelor of Fine Arts. She studied professional writing at Oklahoma, but it wasn’t until 1970 that she decided to get serious about writing.

She began with a mystery novel, Curiosity Didn’t Kill The Cat, published in hardbound in 1973 by Doubleday, the first publisher she sent it to. The book marked the debut of Conan Joseph Flagg, Oregon’s first resident series-character detective. Doubleday went on to published five more Conan Flagg mysteries which all became Detective Book Club selections, reprinted by Ballantine Books. Ballantine also published her seventh Conan Flagg mystery, Dead Matter, and her eighth, King of the Mountain. Berkley published Wren’s three-volume, 500,000-word science fiction novel, The Phoenix Legacy as a paperback original.

M.K. has taught writing classes accredited by Linn-Benton Community College, conducted workshops and served on panels at Willamette Writers summer conferences, Oregon Science Fiction Conventions, Writers of the Pacific Northwest and Oregon Writers Colony conferences, the Yachats Literary Festival, Portland State University/Salem campus, at Portland State University’s "Haystack" Summer Sessions at Cannon Beach, and at Sitka Center for Art & Ecology.

http://mkwren.com

Rene Denfeld

Rene Denfeld is the author of The New Victorians: A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order (published by Warner in 1995) and Kill The Body, The Head Will Fall: A Close Look at Women, Violence, and Aggression. Her work has also appeared in numerous publications, including Glamour, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the New York Academy of Sciences. She recently had an article titled "Outgrowing Your Parents at Age 8," on mentally handicapped parents, appear in the New York Times Magazine section.

The New Victorians rattles the sensibilities of old-school feminists with the postulate that today’s feminists are more in tune with the Victorians of the 1800s when women were politically helpless, weak, victimized and morally pure. She feels women of her generation are abandoning the women’s movement and maintains that the movement’s current leadership encourages a return to sexual repression and political powerlessness. The book, alternating memoir and commentary, contains descriptions of Denfeld’s experiences as an amateur boxer as well as arguments supporting her research that women are more violent than is ordinarily thought. The book offers a practical battle plan which includes confronting the issues of child care and birth control, working for equal government representation, and treating sexual assault as a serious crime.

In 1993, after lawsuits forced the opening of amateur boxing to women, Denfeld joined the Grand Avenue boxing gym in Portland. In her second book, Kill The Body, the Head Will Fall, Denfeld describes her experience in sweaty and bruising detail, and uses boxing as a window on the politics of female aggression. She challenges the notion that women are defenseless and less likely than men to become violent. Denfeld argues that the denial of female aggression and the trivialization of female violence are roadblocks to women’s equality. The book examines anger in the female; abuse and violence committed by women against children or adults with whom they have relationships; female criminals; and females in the military and in sports. She claims women are not less aggressive or less violent than men.

Rene was raised in Portland, Oregon by a single mother and was one of five siblings in a racially-mixed family. She is the mother of two adopted children, the second of which is a brand new addition to her family. In addition to writing, Rene has competed as an amateur boxer and in 1995 won a Tacoma Golden Gloves title.

Annie Callan

Annie Callan was born in Dublin, graduated Magna Cum Laude from Portland State University, then received an MA in Poetry from Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars.Her novel, Taf was published in November 2001. She also teaches classes in the Pacific Northwest and in Ireland, by invitation. Her book of poems, The Back Door was published in 1995 by Trask House Press. Her memoir Swimming at the Joyce Museum, won the 1997 Siobhan fellowship for Literary Nonfiction from the Heekin Foundation. Annie won the Academy of American Poets Award, the William Stafford Poetry Fellowship, and an award from Portland PEN Women as well as many other writing prizes. She has been writer-in-residence at the Hedgebrook Writers Retreat for Women, at Sitka Center for Art & Ecology, and spent last winter in the Wallowa mountains as Fishtrap’s Writer in Residence. Her poems, stories and essays have been published in literary quarterlies and journals in the US, Canada, Wales and in Ireland.

Annie has been a writing instructor at Portland Community College, University of Portland, the Northwest Writing Institute of Lewis & Clark College, Catlin Gabel, Marylhurst and other schools in the Portland area. She has also taught at Dublin City University and Scripps College in Claremont, California. She has been a guest lecturer at Oregon Chautauqua and for the Oregon Council for the Humanities and participated in the Literary Arts’ Writers in the Schools Program at Grant High School, Vancouver School for Arts and Academics; Riverdale School and at Elder Hostel Women’s Writing Groups. She works as a freelance journalist and consulting editor for Glimmer Train Press.

http://anacallan.com

Rodger Larson

Rodger Larson‘s first novel, What I Know Now, was published last year Henry Holt. The book was a finalist in the 1997 Oregon Book Awards’ and received the Andrés Berger Award for Fiction. The novel is aimed at the young adult audience and is about family breakdown and the dawning awareness of sexuality. His second novel, with the working title of ELI RIDDLE, is set in the foothills of the Oregon Cascades.

Rodger received a BA in Humanities from Evergreen State College, and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from Antioch University. He completed course work at the Northwest Writing Institute of Lewis & Clark College, and at Portland State University.

He currently teaches writing part-time to high school students at the Metropolitan Learning Center in Northwest Portland. He has taught at Portland State University School of Extended Studies and their Salem Center, and for Portland Community College at the Columbia River Correctional Institution. For the past two years, he has also been teaching ten-week fiction workshops in his home.

Floyd Skloot

Floyd Skloot, the recipient of the 1996 William Stafford Fellowship in Poetry from Oregon Literary Arts, is the author of two collections of poems, Music Appreciation (University Press of Florida, 1994) and Poppies (from Story Line Press and Silverfish Review, 1994). Both books were finalists for the Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

Skloot’s other awards include fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts and the Illinois Arts Council; the Emily Dickenson Award of the Poetry Society of America, and writing residencies from Centrum Villa Vontalvo, and the Heinrich Boll Foundation of Ireland. His poetry appeared has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Poetry, The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, New England Review and others in America, Ireland, Wales, England and Canada.

In addition to his poetry, Skloot is the author of three novels: Pilgrim’s Harbor (1992), Summer Blue (published by Story Line Press in 1994) and Open Door (also published by Story Line Press, in 1997). He also wrote a collection of essays about illness called The Night-Side, which was named one of the best books of 1996 by New Age Journal and was a finalist for the 1997 Oregon Book Award in Literary Nonfiction. His prose work has appeared in The Best American Essays of 1993 and American Scholar, The Antioch Review, Runner’s World, Boulevard, Virginia Quarterly, Southwest Review and Commonweal. He is a regular book reviewer for the Portland Oregonian.

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1947, Skloot was educated at Franklin and Marshall College where he received a BA, and at Southern Illinois University where he received his MA studying with the Irish poet Thomas Kinsella and the late novelist John Gardner. He currently lives in Amity, Oregon.

http://home.earthlink.net/~skloot/

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