Suzanne Lummis

One of my favorite quotes comes from a fellow named T.S. Eliot, who once said about writers, "Hacks imitate, artists steal" which, while acknowledging the fact that all new work is connected with what has come before, doesn't define the distinction between artistic plagiarism and artistic recycling.

Obviously, the first is only about a superficial re-rendering of established work, but the second is really about the wholesale theft, absorption and creation of new work from old. West Side Story from Romeo and Juliet.

Nearly every film and pulp Western, Shane, The Magnificent Seven and True Grit, all from the Sixth Century Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf.

Tonight we have with us a poet who is not only a fan of T.S. Eliot, but also of Raymond Chandler and fairy tales and the misty, dark, cruel-streets-of-the-city genre known as noir.

Not only Director of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, actress, playwright, performance artist and founder of the high-spirited, text-driven troupe Nearly Fatal Women, but also a thief in the highest artistic sense, her work and words crisp and not only teeming with irony and humor, wisdom and spirit, but pure magic... mercy... I want to have her baby.

www.cortlandreview.com (Issue #16)

www.thedrunkenboat.com (Spring 2001)

www.poetix.net/closeup.htm

Tom Spanbauer

Featured on June 19, 1998 and March 16, 2002

For me, the term "dangerous writing" conjures up the following: I have a sudden inspiration, a snippet of something flashes through my mind, a line or two that I don't trust myself to remember. I want to get it down on paper before it dissolves, so I start frantically looking for a pen or a pencil and a piece of paper, you know an old lunch sack, an envelope, anything, just to get that fragment jotted down before it leaks out of my brain, and then, the damn pen won't work, or the wax paper sandwich wrapper I found won't take the ink, and just as I find an old collection notice that's perfect, some joker overreacts and honks his horn, though I'm barely straddling the centerline, but the way he's carrying on you'd think I was totally in his lane and we were bound for glory. He waves jovially enough as he passes, but I do notice he's not using all his fingers...

To be honest, that's not what Tom Spanbauer means when he refers to "dangerous writing," also the name of his legendary writing workshops. Rather, he is referring to the act of being honest with oneself on paper. On the surface, that may not seem like a dangerous or even daring act. But it is. When the words one believes to be the truth about oneself are actually written, they take on a power that is no longer exclusively controlled by the writer. The spin that could be applied when the ideas were merely in a person's mind or coming out of a person's mouth melt away. The words lay the heart bare for all to see. Those words become a separate entity, an unflinching, unvarnished document of the self.

Tom Spanbauer writes unflinching, unvarnished novels. It's a tough enterprise to take on, especially when the subject is homosexuality in the over-mythologized Old West, as seen in his 1991 cult classic, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon. And it apparently doesn't get easier with time or practice. Ten years have passed between books. He says of his recent epic, In the City of Shy Hunters, a fictionalized chronicle of the decimation of gay culture in New York City during the early years of the AIDS epidemic: "Writing this book almost killed me."

Larry Brooks

You know, the question often comes up: what does a person do after his five-year career in pro-baseball with the Texas Rangers fizzles because of an arm injury, followed only a few years later by the disappointing discovery that he was not really cut out to be a stockbroker, and compounded by seventeen years in the industrial-hype trenches, writing scripts and brochures for an expanding audiovisual production company that catered to the likes of Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz Credit Corporation, Cargill and a slew of other Fortune 1000 firms, steadfastly clawing up the corporate ladder rung by rung to Executive Creative Director and partner in one of the largest corporate communications firms in the west, only to see the firm sold out from beneath him?

Does he become an emotional basket-case, a bar-fly or simply join a monastery? Not on your autographed John Grisham. In the face of incredible odds, he quietly dusts off the old word-processor and writes thrillers. And sells 'em.

Tonight, the Nye Beach Writer's Series presents one of the most currently successful writers in the state. With over 200,000 copies sold of his first novel, Darkness Bound, since publication by Onyx Books in October of 2000, and a second book, Pressure Points, just released by Onyx in December of 2001.

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

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/

Peter Sears

Peter Sears was born in New York, grew up in the East, graduated from Yale and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He won the 1999 Pergrine Smith Poetry Competition for his book of poems, The Brink. His first book-length collection, Tour,was published in 1987. He has also published four chapbooks of poetry and two teaching books, Secret Writing and Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem. His work has been published in many magazines and literary journals and widely anthologized.

Besides having the reputation of being affable, Peter Sears is an extremely busy guy. He founded and manages the Oregon Literary Coalition and co-founded The Friends of William Stafford. He formerly taught creative writing at Reed College and has since taught for the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis and Clark. At this time, he splits his time between the publishing company Rubberstampmadness Inc. in Corvallis and Community of Writers in Portland.

Peter Sears has a well-earned reputation for promoting the literature of other writers, both from his teaching and time spent with the Oregon Arts commission, but tonight we honor him for his own work.

Rubber Stamp Madness

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."

Blake Nelson

I think that it is safe to say that in our collective consciousness there exists the character-concept of the young, emerging writer. A someone who goes to college, dabbles in whatever youth-driven pop-culture exists at the time, and by dint of talent, an unerring ear, dedication to craft and unrelenting hard work, finds a strong and unique narrative voice to write a simple, unembellished story about coming of age.

That novelist actually exists, his first novel was an immediate success and now in its tenth printing.

If you're thinking of J. D. Salinger and Catcher in the Rye, you're out of luck. J.D. isn't here tonight, so he's out of luck too. Salinger was hot stuff in the Fifties, but didn't attempt to write his novel from a feminine point of view. Besides, Hollywood never made Catcher in the Rye into a movie. But Hollywood did film Blake Nelson's first novel, Girl, and he IS here.

Comparable to the strong, narrative voices reminiscent of Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge and the character Mattie Ross in Charles Portis' classic, True Grit, Blake's creation of Andrea Marr in Girl is compelling and unsentimental, as tough as the meanest street in Portland. I think she'll be around a long, long time.

A product of Portland and Jesuit High School and educated at Wesleyan University and New York University, Blake knocked around New York and San Francisco performing poetry at spoken word events, but eventually found his way back to Portland where he wrote Girl in 1993. Girl was picked up by Simon and Shuster in 1994, and the film version was released in 1999. Blake's second novel, Exile, saw print in 1997, also by Simon and Shuster. His third novel, User, will be released this fall by Versus Press.

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

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."