Robert McDowell

Robert McDowell is the founder and executive director of STORY LINE PRESS. The mission of the press is to advance works that tell a story, works that fit into the "new formalism" and new narrative movements in poetry. The new formalists work in a traditional poetic framework, such as sonnets, formal rhyme schemes or blank verse. New narrative poets are interested in telling a story in verse.

Robert is also a poet and critic. His books include Sound and Form in Modern Poetry (with Harvey Gross, University of Michigan Press, 1996); The Reaper Essays (with Mark Jarman, Story Line Press 1996); The Pact, a poem published in limited edition by Aralia Press, 1996; The Diviners, a 71-page narrative poem published in 1995 by Peterloo Poets of England; Quiet Money, poems published in 1987 by Henry Holt & Co.; History, Hardware, & Romance, a fine art book published by Indiana State University and New Harmony Art Gallery in Indiana; and At the House of The Tin Man, a chapbook of 23 poems selected in an open national competition in 1983, published by The Chowder Press in Massachusetts.

Previously, he worked as an associate editor at CTB McGraw-Hill; a Ghostwriter for "Kids N Sports," a nationally syndicated column, Coordinator of the University of Southern California’s Reading Series, a writer-in-residence, and Assistant Professor of English at Indiana State (now the University of Southern Indiana. His formal education includes an MFA from Columbia University’s Graduate Writing Program and a BA from the University of California in Writing & Literature.

Story Line Press: www.storylinepress.com

His newest book, On Foot In Flames was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. www.pitt.edu/~press

Jeff Wallach

Jeff Wallach is a rarity. He is a creative writer who makes an incredibly satisfactory living by commercial writing. And he specializes in commercial writing on topics he loves: golf, travel, outdoor recreation, and the environment. His first book, Beyond The Fairway: Zen Lessons, Insights, and Inner Attitudes of Golf was published by Bantam in 1995. Blue Heron published What The River Says: Whitewater Journeys Along The Inner Frontier in 1996. He has written over 300 articles, essays, and reviews for Outside, Sierra, Travel Holiday, E Magazine, Men’s Health, Rodale’s Scuba Diving, Money, Town and Country, Sunset, Lear’s, Diversion, Trilogy, Golf Digest, Golf Magazine, Golf Illustrated, National Golfer, Links, Discover, Popular Science, etc. He is an editor of America’s Greatest Resorts and a contributing writer of Petersen’s Golfing.

Jeff has taught writing at Milton Academy, Lewis & Clark College, and the Oregon Graduate Institute. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in English from Vassar College and a Master’s in Writing from Brown University.

Golf and outdoor recreation are ODD areas of interest for a New Yorker. He went west to Oregon, stayed a while, then returned to live for years on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Luckily, some kind of major cataclysmic epiphany rocked him to his soul and brought him back to Portland where he bought a house and settled down.

While still living in New York he spent a season as a whitewater river guide on Idaho’s River Of No Return, which is how he came to write What The River Says. The book is "a river-guide’s summer of inner exploration and discovery. It is a journey to challenge both the body and the spirit, revealing to those who test the river’s steep descent, their own ragged edges, and finally, their focused center.

Dan Raphael

Dan Raphael gives innumerable readings all over the Pacific Northwest. Most of his e-mail correspondence is a litany of the dates and places where he will be performing, or places where he is hosting readings of the people he publishes. He’s recently performed at Portland’s Artquake and Poetry Festival, Seattle’s Bumbershoot and Red Sky Poetry Theater, at Eastern Oregon State College, Blue Mountain Community College, Linfield College and Southern Oregon State. One enigmatic e-mail message said he’d just given a reading that night at Merry’ Barefoot Boutique. Last month he held a reading called 26 WOMEN, which featured several women represented by his press, 26 BOOKS. Tomorrow he will be reading at Oregon Books at noon in Depoe Bay, where, by the way, Walt Curtis, Glegg Kleiner, Clemens Starck, and Carla Perry will also be reading.

Besides his job with Oregon’s Department of Motor Vehicles, his family -- which includes a wife and very tall son-- and other interests like home brewing, basketball and computers occupy his time.

Dan Raphael is the publisher of 26 BOOKS, which so far has published 17 of its planned 26 books of 26 pages by 26 Northwest poets. The newest of the series is TEXTS, by Tom Taylor from Oysterville which has just been released. Dan also hosts a monthly reading series at Borders Books in Downtown Portland.

Trees Through the Road is Dan Raphael’s 13th book of poetry. Other recent books include Molecular Jam (published by Jazz Police Books, La Grande), The Bones Begin to Sing (published by 26 BOOKS) and Rain Away (from Leaping Mountain Press, Fort Collins.) Some, or most of these books are available here tonight.

Dan claims, and I have no reason to doubt him, that over 300 of his poems have been published in over 100 magazines, most recently in Hubbub, Tight, Paper Radio, Talus & Scree, and The Temple.

Rebecca Cohen

My love of stories well-told comes from my family where no incident was too small to make a good story. My father, a Danish immigrant, raised me on Hans Christian Andersen. My mother, an elementary school teacher, read to me daily until I could read for myself. With no television, we were always sharing our reading aloud. These roots gave me the background to develop the skills necessary for carrying on the oral tradition.

My career is that of a children's librarian, but my avocation is storytelling. With story well told, history, values, and consciousness are passed on in such a way that they remain available for use when needed. In my work with children, stories told orally prove invaluable for developing listening and cognitive skills, which are the foundation of speech and reading.

The stories I will tell in Yachats are from the Yakonan-speaking people who once lived on this coast between Heceta Head and Cascade Head. The stories were written verbatim from tellings by Alsea George and William Smith. Both men were very old at the time and the Yakonan language was from their childhood. The written works are often repetitive and rambling. What I have done is make these stories "listenable" for the current generation of Lincoln County dwellers. I do this work with the permission of Siletz tribal members and money I receive from these tellings will be used to enhance the tribal library.

A Lincoln County native, Rebecca Cohen has been telling stories in the oral tradition for over 20 years. She currently works as a Youth Services Librarian at the Newport Public Library.

Miriam Mathews Weinbender

Miriam Mathews Weinbender earned a masters in Public Health from Oregon State University; an MA in English from the University of Illinois and a BA in Philosophy from Willamette University in Salem.

She’s had training in HIV sensitivity and for the Oregon Alcohol/Drug Addiction Program. She was an instructor of Communications and Related Technology at Portland Community College from 1964 to 1976, and a part-time Creative Writing Instructor at Clatsop Community College in 1976 and ‘77; then at Tillamook Bay Community College in ’88 and ’89. She is an American Red Cross HIV/AIDS I Instructor and a volunteer teacher of the HIV/AIDS class for Work Release Clients at Marion County Corrections Dept. and for Tillamook County.

Her book, Waterseed is a gathering of poems about the Nestucca River Valley. She is preparing a collection of poems of grief called Mourning at the Brown Brink. She is also working on fiction, a little novel, and essays of social criticism from a liberal point of view.

Sally Ann Stevens

Sally Ann Stevens is a poet and writer who lives in Gleneden Beach. She earned her BA in English Literature/Creative Writing from Agnes Scott College, Georgia, and her MA in Creative Writing from Antioch University in Ohio. She studied history and folklore in England and Ireland.

Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in Pebbles, Oregon Writers Colony Anthology, and several literary journals, including all three issues of Talus & Scree. In November, she was awarded first place prize in non-fiction for her story "What’s Water" by New Millennium Writings. She is the author of two books and is currently working on a collection of poetry.

Sally Ann records books on tape for the Oregon State Library for the Blind. She teaches poetry and writing for Oregon Coast Community College, Lincoln City, and at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Otis. She is also coordinating Salon readings at Salmon River Café in Lincoln City the second Saturday of each month through March, then on Thursday nights through the summer.

Her credo, she states, is "I believe in God, myself, family, my lover and best friend, the sanctity of life and nature, and lifelong education — probably in that order."

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.

Barbara La Morticella

For twelve years, BARBARA La MORTICELLA has been co-host with Walt Curtis of a weekly poetry show "Talking Earth," broadcast on KBOO radio in Portland. From the station’s control booth, she has interviewed almost every writer that ever stepped across Portland city limits. Barbara is also poetry editor of the Alliance, a progressive newspaper.

Her most recent collection, Rain on Waterless Mountain, poems about environment and love, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in 1997. Her work also appears in numerous literary magazines and anthologies including From Here We Speak the Oregon Literary Series anthology, and Women’s Struggles, Women’s Visions published by the Maud Kern Art Gallery in Eugene, OR. She has given hundreds of poetry readings on the east coast and in Washington, Oregon, and California. She was the editor of the Portland Poetry Festival anthology, and is co-editor of Portland Lights. In 1999, she received the very first Oregon grant given specifically for Oregon women poets.

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 Sheckley

Robert Sheckley is a living icon. A national treasure. A man who began writing stories in the 1940’s and ‘50s and was one of the major creators of the genre of science fiction.

Bob was born in Brooklyn in 1928 and raised in New Jersey. He studied at NYU after serving in Korea. He began writing stories and selling them to science-fiction magazines after graduation, producing several hundred stories over the next several years. He became a bohemian writer on the Spanish island of Ibiza in the 1970s, haunting Paris and London as well. He returned to NYC ten years later as fiction editor of OMNI magazine.

Bob has written about sixty-five books to date, including twenty novels and nine collections of short stories. He often worked in collaboration with Roger Zelazny. He wrote fifteen scripts for the "Captain Video" television series, and sixty scripts for "Behind the Green Door," narrated by Basil Rathbone. He won the Jupiter Award for the best science fiction story of 1974. Was named Visiting Scholar, Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT in 1983. In 1991, he received the Daniel F. Gallun award for contributions to the genre of science-fiction.

Several of his books have been made into movies. His first novel, published in 1958 was Immortality, Inc. That became the movie, "Freejack," starring Mick Jagger, Renee Russo, Emilio Estevez, and Anthony Hopkins. He wrote the story for "The Tenth Victim," starring Marcello Matroianni and Ursula Andress. Outside of science-fiction, his most famous work is The Game of X.

Harlan Ellison wrote: "If the Marx Brothers had been literary rather than thespic fantasists….they would have been Robert Sheckley."

www.sheckley.com