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.

Charles Goodrich

As creator of introductions for guests of the Nye Beach Writers Series I spend a short, intense bit of time with their work, looking for things to say that illuminate their style or personality or career for an engaged and intelligent audience. Most of the time I don't meet the writers until shortly before show time. Sometimes I'm surprised how different they are than I expected, sometimes not. Occasionally, I'm just surprised, period.

My taste in poetry is simple and straightforward. I don't care for work that depends on obscure and mysterious personal references that are meaningless to the reader. I think poetry is a window to the mind of the poet. A clear window works better than a muddy one. Frankly, some poetry makes a better door than a window.

I've learned to be cautious when I see a new title. Some have been apt, but some I still haven't figured out. Here's a sampling of titles by writers I've introduced: In the Margins of the World, A Small Song Called Ash from the Fire, The Mad Painter Poems, Summer Mystagogia, Pink Menace, and Come Over Here and Leave Me Alone.

So you can see, the title of a work can sometimes be a prelude to obfuscation. Some of the writers couldn't tell me what the titles meant. I admit I felt my neck-hairs tense up a little when I picked up Charles Goodrich's collection, entitled Insects of South Corvallis. But that tension just melted away when I began to read, quickly realizing the poems were not only very well-written, but actually about bugs.

The guy writes about what he knows. He was a career gardener for twenty-five years. He's been published widely and Garrison Keillor has read his work on National Public Radio. He is presently an instructor for the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word at Oregon State, a program that brings together creative writers, philosophers and environmental scientists.

Please welcome Charles Goodrich . . .

http://springcreek.oregonstate.edu/

Rick Bartow and Bill Stiffler

Original songs and stories by Rick Bartow highlight a concert by guitarist Bartow and bassist Bill Stiffler. Dubbed "Songs from a lifetime of living," the evening's concert spans the thirty years since Bartow introduced live music to Lincoln county at the Uptown tavern in Newport.

Rick Bartow is a world-renown artist in addition to being a Newport musical treasure. His paintings, prints, masks and sculptures are shown in Oregon, Chicago, San Francisco, Arizona, British Columbia, Germany, Japan and New Zealand. "The Cedar Mill Pole" is on display in the First Ladies Sculpture Garden at the White House. Rick, park Yurok Indian, was born and raised in Newport.

Bill Stiffler has been involved in the Newport theatre, music and art scene for over thirty years. He has been a wanderer, fish merchant, musician in many local historic bands, and a teacher in Lincoln County schools. But it was music that brought Stiffler to Newport from Seattle. Stiffler performed with a string of pioneer bands here in Lincoln County, including Mushin, Bones, The Sons of the Beaches, Original Face, and Cyrano the Snub-Nosed Dullards. He currently performs with Rick Bartow and Friends every Thursday night at Mo's Annex on the Newport bayfront.

Jerry Martien

Poets have a lot of latitude when it comes to the role they play in a culture. They can chronicle or comment, entertain or enlighten or simply bear witness to the slice of time they occupy. Jerry Martien does all these things. An environmental and political activist in the Humboldt Region of Northern California for thirty years, he has labored as a carpenter, editor, teacher and board member of several organizations. He has taught creative writing and nature writing for the past seven years at Humboldt State University. His published work includes Shell Game, described as A True Account of Beads and Money in North America, and a collection of poetry, Pieces in Place.

Pieces in Place is a collection of poems that are best described in the opening lines of Martien's essay, "A Defense of Poetry (Is a Defense of Place:)"

"The poem arises from the ground of its making. By way of a human attention, deliberately placed there-- held there, till it is shaped by the rule of that ground. ... The poem surrounds us. The poet loiters deliberately in the dooryard, maintaining cultural access to that nourishing circumstance. Speaks on behalf of the still-living, still sacred grove, and labors to restore the springs to which we all go when thirsty."

Please welcome Jerry Martien

Jennie Shortridge

JENNIE SHORTRIDGE was a plumber, cook, rock-and-roll singer, corporate marketing executive and freelance writer before tackling the project that has sent her back on the road in 2003--writing the slightly autobiographical adventure novel Riding With The Queen.

"I wanted to write about my beautiful hometown of Denver, and I wanted to write about a musician coming home from the road," explains Shortridge. "I've been a working musician since age 16 and I thought it would be an interesting lifestyle to explore."

Riding With The Queen is about Tallie Beck, a hard-luck gal in her mid-thirties who has made many bad decisions about men and has finally hit the wall in her chosen profession of bar singer. In disgrace, she returns home to Denver, the place she escaped from at age 17. Talli has a bad attitude and continues making bad decisions, but at least she wishes she wouldn't. Out of character, she falls in love with Perry, a man who runs a homeless shelter, and somehow life begins to change for Tallie. Not improve, but change.

With a deft and touching hand, Shortridge creates a funny, sexy, smart and heartbreakingly real protagonist. Talli's relationships rise and fall in response to lies, deceptions and omissions, much the way real life gets in the way of denial. Talli eventually admits she is an alcoholic, commits to a relationship with Perry, is offered a recording contract, and becomes a bar manager. It looks like a happy ending.

Jennie Shortridge now lives in Portland, Oregon and is working on her second novel. "This one is about a freelance food writer with big-time food issues," says Shortridge. "She's losing someone she dearly loves to cancer, dealing with an emotionally distant mother, and trying to unravel the mysteries of her family's secrets while at the same time trying not to eat herself into blimplike proportions. Like Tallie in 'Riding With The Queen,' like many of us, she's on a mission to understand her past so she can move on with her life." Shortridge promises to accompany herself on guitar and sing on February 21, besides reading from her novel.

Whitney Otto

Since the usual format of a Nye Beach Writer¹s presentation characteristically includes two writers, there is always the question of whether they will be disparate or similar, or in any way complement one other. Although we have presented fiction and nonfiction writers together before, an interesting aspect of tonight¹s guests is that their work neatly dovetails in a very odd way.

Tonight¹s fiction writer¹s style is emphatic and declaratory, a plainspoken rendering of rich detail about her character¹s lives that seems to imply fact rather than fiction. Their fictional personality traits and peculiarities are presented from a distance, as if the story was a product of research rather than imagination. Yet the nonfiction writer with us tonight has chosen to research and write about historical figures both outrageous and unconventional, and brought them to life in such an intimate way that their stories border on the unbelievable, the stuff of modern myth.

Whitney Otto has written four novels, her first the wildly successful 1991 How to make an American Quilt, made into a film by Steven Spielberg. Her subsequent works include Now You See Her, The Passion Dream Book and in 2003, A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity.

Whitney Otto writes shrewdly and incisively about a certain kind of modern women, and as I mentioned, from a distance. There is a feeling of the expatriate about her characters, as if upon dismissing the mainstream life of American consumerism and embracing a certain consciousness regarding artistic sensibility, they neglect to adequately substitute a clearly defined course leading elsewhere. They inhabit a floating world of their own devising, oddly elitist and nearly invisible to the rest of society, but somewhat unsatisfying to occupy.

Please welcome Whitney Otto.

Lauren Kessler

Lauren Kessler’s newest book, Dancing With Rose: Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimers, is an intimate, first-hand account of what it means to live with Alzheimers. For five months Kessler immersed herself in an alien landscape just a few miles from her home. She took a minimum-wage job as caregiver in an Alzheimers facility to better understand and write about the disease that claimed her mother's life.

“I am a writer of what is called literary nonfiction," says Kessler. “I tell true stories, factual stories based on extensive research, but I tell them as much as I can, as much as the material will allow me, the way a novelist would -- with scenes and characters and dialog, with an eye for the telling detail and an attention to the larger narrative.”

A special honor has been bestowed on Lauren Kessler -- her book, “Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of A Japanese American Family,” was chosen the one book people all over the state will read for Oregon's first state-wide "Oregon Reads" in 2009, part of the state's 150th birthday celebration. All 130 of Oregon's public libraries will receive copies of this book.

Kessler is the author of nine other excellent narrative nonfiction books including: “Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley: The Spy Who Ushered In The McCarthy Era”; Los Angeles Times best-seller and Oregon Book Award finalist “The Happy Bottom Riding Club,” a biography of the pioneering aviatrix, Hollywood stunt pilot and bordello Madame, Pancho Barnes; “Full Court Press,” a season-in-the-life narrative about women's sports; and “After All These Years,” portraits of 1960s radicals.

Kessler’s journalism has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times Magazine, O magazine, salon and The Nation. She is the founder and editor of Etude, an online magazine devoted to new and emerging voices in literary nonfiction. www.laurenkessler.com
www.clevergirlthebook.com

Photo by Carla Perry

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.

Bruce Beasley

Whenever I feel a little too upbeat, maybe a little too sane or satisfied, and even though I know better, I can rely on a few select Southern writers to remind me of the realm of refractive gloom and gothic moodiness that I probably deserve. I¹m talking about writers like Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, Flannery O¹Connor, fun folks, who, if there was opportunity to accompany them in an elevator during a potential power outage, might make one consider the stairs. Excellent writers, tough topics: alcoholism, humiliation, misery, the nature of evil, humanity and the gods we invent.

Our next reader is Southern, a scribe with an unflinching knack for slicing into the big questions of existence, the recipient of several awards and the author of four volumes of poetry including Spirituals, The Creation, Summer Mystagogia and most recently, Signs and Abominations.

Please welcome Bruce Beasley.

Mitch Luckett

A fellow recently asked me if being a good writer was anything like being a good liar. I shot from the hip and told him that I hadn't thought about the topic too much, but conceded that I considered myself a good writer and an adequate liar.

I've been ruminating on his question and all its ramifications ever since.

An essential aspect about being a good writer and an adequate liar is that you hope your hindsight is better than 20-20, and if you have doubts, you ruminate until it is.

I had to consider the fact that my questioner was, after all, an attorney, so where did he get off asking me if I was a good liar? I judiciously and perhaps generously decided that being a good attorney was not necessarily synonymous with being a good liar, even though I have seen Johnny Cochran in action. I finally concluded that being a good attorney had more to do with concocting a version of the facts that was more favorable towards a particular point of view. Which turned out to be a bad idea, because that made me think of politicians.

More ruminating, and I realized politicians concoct versions of something in their line of work, but don't rely on all the facts, the use-ratio at best one or two out of a hundred. They call this spin. Politicians are, I must admit, much better liars than writers or lawyers, but when you get right down to it, I'd rather read a good book or hear a good yarn than be harangued by a politician or cross-examined by an attorney, and if the writer, who in this case is an adequate liar and can also sing and play blue grass banjo and harmonica and has written a very strange and humorous book called To Kill a Common Loon, I think the best thing to do is just introduce him and sit down.

Please welcome Mitch Luckett