Jim Bodeen

Jim Bodeen is a literature and writing teacher of Latino students at Davis High School in Yakima, Washington, the publisher and editor of Blue Begonia Press, and the author of several books of poetry including Whole Houses Shaking, Impulses to Love (poems set in North Dakota, Chile and Vietnam), and most recently, This House: A Poem in Seven Books. His plan with This House was to write a single poem about a single morning spent in his garden, listening to "In This House, On This Morning" by the Wynton Marsalis Septet. The poem, an epic narrative, is based on dreams, interactions with his wife, his children, his students, his friends–- but it evolved into a book that took ten months to write.

Jim, who writes in both English and Spanish, edited the book, With My Hands Full, a bilingual anthology of transformational poems by thirty-five young Latino writers. These pieces are witness to loss, migration and arrival. They explore border crossings that are geographical, political and personal. Jim calls these writers abrecaminos–-those who make a way where there is no way.

Jim received a BA in Education and a BA in History, plus a Masters in English from Central Washington University and a Master of Religious Education from Seattle University. As part of the Lincoln County School District Goals 2000 grant, Jim taught a workshop yesterday at Waldport High School.

Bodeen says of his work --

Being called to poetry is being called to listen. It is listening to the deepest sounds. The principles are basic–-extreme sobriety, practicality and courage.

Jim Bodeen and his wife Karen, his book designer and typesetter, have devoted their lives to poetry and poets.

Sandra Scofield

SANDRA SCOFIELD is the author of seven novels, the first published in 1989. Beyond Deserving was a 1991 Finalist for the National Book Award and a winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. A Chance to See Egypt won the Texas Institute of Letters 1997 Fiction Award. Three of her books were finalists for Oregon Book Awards. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Oregon Institute of Letters, and the Oregon Arts Commission.

Sandra is a graduate of the University of Texas and the University of Oregon, and earned a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction in 1979, with particular interest in language arts scholarship. She was on the faculty of Southern Oregon State College (now Southern Oregon University) and has extensive experience as an educational planner, working with the Northwest Educational Laboratory, the Montana Department of Public Instruction, the Portland, Oregon public schools, the Alaska school districts of Tok and McGrath; and Southern Oregon State College, where she chaired the committee to develop their special education program.

In addition to writing fiction, Sandra is a regular book reviewer for national newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, the Oregonian, Dallas Morning News, and Newsday, and also contributes to the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Boston Globe.

She is currently working on Occasions Of Sin, a memoir-based fictional a memoir-based fictional account of how a precocious Catholic girl of fifteen forms wrongheaded notions about love and sex by over-identifying with her dying mother.

Larry Colton

Featured on October 17, 1997 AND February 17, 2001

Larry Colton’s resume begins in 1965 when he was a professional baseball player, playing for the Philadelphia Phillies. His Major League Debut was on May 6, 1968 and he played one season. His next job was teaching English and journalism for the Portland Public School District.

Larry’s first book was Idol Time, published in 1977. The book is a profile of the Trail Blazers’ championship season. From 1984 to 1986 Larry worked as a corporate writer for Nike, then became a fulltime freelancer, and has since written over 250 feature stories for magazines such as Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Ladies Home Journal, and The New York Times Magazine.

In 1993, his second book, Goat Brothers, was published by Doubleday. The book became a main selection of the Book of the Month Club and was optioned for a movie. The story chronicles the lives of himself and four fraternity brothers from their days at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s to their present middle age.

His third book, Counting Coup: A True Story of Basketball And Honor On The Little Big Horn, was published in September 2000 and immediately became the International eBook Foundation non-fiction book of the year. It is also in the running for a Pulitzer Prize.

In Native American tradition, a warrior gained honor and glory by "counting coup" – touching his enemy in battle and living to tell the tale. Larry spent fifteen months living among Montana’s Crow Indians to follow the struggles of a talented, moody, charismatic young woman named Sharon LaForge, a gifted basketball player and a descendant of one of George Armstrong Custer’s Indian scouts.

Larry lives in Portland and still has a day job. He works as Project Director of the Community of Writers, a non-profit organization in Portland dedicated to improving the quality of writing instruction in Oregon’s public schools.

www.communityofwriters.com

Doug Marx

DOUG MARX is a poet, essayist, freelance journalist and teacher. His first book of poems, Sufficiency was a 1994 Oregon Book Awards nominee. His literary journalism includes dozens of profiles and interviews of literary figures such as Czeslaw Milosz, Carolyn Forché and Barry Lopez.

He is a frequent contributor to the Oregonian, Willamette Week, Writer's Northwest, Left Bank, and Publisher's Weekly. His poems have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Columbia, WILD DOG Literary Magazine, Willow Springs and many other literary journals.

Doug was a founding member of Northwest Writers Inc., and is a board member of Oregon Literary Arts. His eight-week workshop So You Want To Write, offered through Mt. Writers Series in Portland, begins this coming week. This class, he says, is for "closet scribblers" and helps students become acquainted with fiction, creative writing, nonfiction and poetry, in addition to encouraging their own writing. Doug has participated in the Portland Public Schools’ Writer-in-Residence program since 1996.

Doug is also a professional land surveyor, rabid poker player, and fine blues guitarist.

Judith Minty

Judith recently returned to her home in Michigan after a year as Visiting Professor/Poet in Residence for the creative writing program at the University of Alaska in Anchorage. She has taught in or been the visiting poet for the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, the University of California at Santa Cruz, Interlochen Center for the Arts, Syracuse University, even at the Muskegon Correction Facility in Michigan. Judith was also director of the Creative Writing program at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California for 12 years.

Her first book, Lake Songs And Other Fears, was recipient of the US Award of the International Poetry Forum in 1974. Her other full-length books are Yellow Dog Journal, In The Presence Of Mothers, and Dancing The Fault. Her chapbooks are Letters To My Daughters, Counting The Losses and The Mad Painter Poems. Judith’s poetry, essays and short stories have been published in numerous magazines and in over fifty anthologies.

In July, renowned poet Diane Wakoski suggested that Judith Minty be nominated Michigan state poet laureate instead of songwriter Bob Seger since Seger has never been considered a poet. Wakoski wrote: "Judith represents the state in a wonderful way. She’s a woman, which would be nice, a native Michigander, she is in love with the wilderness, and has a whole series of poems… about the Yellow Dog River in the Upper Peninsula."

Michael T. Young

Nothing escapes Michael Young's notice, from the cosmic to the microscopic, and in the best of these challenging, sometimes difficult poems, that notice is transformed into images so arresting and beautiful that they stop the heart for a moment and enter into the reader's memory for good

From a review written by Rhina P. Espaillat

That is high praise indeed for a poet’s first full-length poetry collection. Transcriptions of Daylight was published in September by Rattapallax Press.

Michael was born in Reading Pennsylvania but moved to New York City in 1990 to write. He lived there for nine years, during which time he attended New York University, Hunter College and various writer’s conferences. His work has been published in The Christian Science Monitor, Rattapallax, Pivot, The Hollins Critic, Folio, and other literary journals. His chapbook, Because the Wind Has Questions, was published in 1997.

Michael resides in New Jersey and earns his living as a computer programmer.

As Michael wrote:

Poetry encourages paying attention to thought. It provokes us to question.

rattapallax@yahoo.com

Peter Coyote

Peter Coyote is an accomplished actor who has appeared in more than sixty American and European films playing the romantic lead, villain, or lawyer. (Scoundrel and lawyer are not always the same thing.)

His first movie was Die Laughing in 1980. The most recent include Erin Brockovich, Red Letters, More Dogs Than Bones, Wednesday Woman, The Basket and A Time For Dancing, all released or broadcast on TV in 2000. His distinctive voice can be heard in TV commercials, voice-overs, documentaries, and audiobook recordings including the infamous Zen Flesh, Zen Bones followed by Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

However, Peter Coyote was a writer before he was an actor. In recent years he has been writing film scripts, introductions to anthologies such as What Book!?–Buddha Poems From Beat to Hiphop, and original essays such as his contribution to Hey Lew, a book about Beat poet Lew Welch, as well as a chapter in the book Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life. Peter won a Pushcart Prize in 1993 for "Carla’s Story," published in ZYZZYVA magazine, and in 1996 was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and sent daily dispatches to Mother Jones.

Peter Coyote’s first book is his memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall. This book is a candid account of life at the epicenter of, as he put it, "hellaciously good fun." The book provides insights into his life with the gorilla theatre of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Digger movement, which evolved into the Free Family. Peter writes unapologetically about his relationships with the Hells Angels, his women and children, drug consumption, plus the failures of both communal living and his experience as a stockbroker on Wall Street. Peter will be reading from his book, so I’ll fast forward to more recent history.

Peter Coyote has been a practicing Zen Buddhist for 25 years and remains a forceful political activist, especially concerning Native American rights and environmental issues. He plays the guitar, writes his own songs and sings. Copies of his audio cassette called Over The Spinal Telephone are available through his website: www.petercoyote.com. Proceeds go to indigent jazz musicians.

In March, Peter was the "Voice of Oscar." On August 23, the film ROME: Power and Glory, narrated by Peter was voted the "Best Educational Documentary" at the Third Annual DVD Entertainment Awards. The six-hour program was originally aired on The Learning Channel.

The documentary Renewable Power: Earth’s Clean Energy Destiny, also narrated by Peter, recently received the Golden Apple Award from the National Education Media Network and the Golden Eagle Award. The film provides a vision of a world transformed by solar and hydrogen energy. Next month, filming will begin on Midwives — the story of a Vermont midwife (played by Sissy Spacek) who loses a patient during a very complicated birth. The midwife is accused by the state of murdering the mother; Peter stars as the lawyer who defends her.

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial will be re-released in March 2002 to mark the film’s 20th anniversary. Peter played the good-guy scientist named Keys.

The Nye Beach Writers’ Series is honored to host such a charismatic, rebellious, bawdy, notorious, explosive, controversial and eloquent author. I’ll introduce Peter Coyote by reading a quote from a speech he made to students at Grinnell College in Iowa, where he graduated in 1964.

"The mechanism by which the self is directed is called intention. Intention is, to my mind, the single most powerful force on earth available to humans. Through focusing our intention and making it fixed and immovable, we can become like a stake driven into the bed of a rushing creek, forcing the flow around us."

www.petercoyote.com

Diane Averill

Two of Diane Averill’s books, Branches Doubled Over With Fruit, and Beautiful Obstacles, were finalists for Oregon Book Awards. Beautiful Obstacles was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 1999, she received an Oregon Literary Arts grant in poetry. Diane’s earlier books include the chapbooks Turtle Sky and Ella Featherstone Poems: A Sellwood Sequence.

Diane is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Oregon and was an assistant poetry editor of The Northwest Review. She taught poetry writing for five years in the Talented and Gifted Program for the Portland Public Schools and is currently is a professor of creative writing, poetry and English composition at Clackamas Community College.

Her writing has been included in several compilations, including "From Where We Speak," an anthology of Oregon poets published by Oregon State University, and "Pacific Northwestern Spiritual Poetry," published by Tsunami Inc. She has work in the upcoming anthology of ghazals written by English-speaking people, tentatively called "Ravishing Disunities" published by the University of Massachusetts.

(Ghazals are two-line poems, each stanza standing on its own. Ghazals seldom exceed twelve couplets, averaging seven. The term originated in Iran in the Tenth Century based on a Persian’s verse form and was carried to India in the Twelfth Century by the Moghuls. When Persian gave way to Urdu as the language of poetry and culture in India, the ghazal gained popularity. Although the ghazal deals with the whole spectrum of human experience, its central concern is love. Ghazal is an Arabic word that literally means "talking to women."

Poetry doesn’t have to be serious business. Each of us is a beginner each time we sit down to a blank piece of paper. Keeping this in mind helps us not get stuffy.

-- Diane Averill

Anita Sullivan

Anita Sullivan’s newest book, The Family Piano, is a collection of forty short essays first broadcast on National Public Radio’s "Performance Today" from 1989 to 1999. These essays are about piano tuning and performance; some are funny, some serious. Anita is also the author of The Seventh Dragon: The Riddle of Equal Temperament, a book on the philosophy of piano tuning which won the Western States Book Award for creative nonfiction in 1986, and I Hear the Crickets Laughing, a chapbook of poems published in 1996.

Anita was born in Boston, grew up in Florida, California and South Carolina, received an MA in English in 1970 from Clemson University in South Carolina, and has lived in Corvallis since 1981 where she tunes pianos for a living.

In 1976, she had the chance to become a piano tuner’s apprentice and immediately switched careers from teaching and journalism to full-time piano tuning. She has also written articles and lectured on early keyboard temperaments–- a concept I am sure she will explain. In addition to writing, Anita translates Greek poetry and prose. She is working on a novel about a piano tuner who tunes pianos in a haunted music building.

Diana Cohen

Diana Cohen was born and raised in northern New Jersey and attended Oberlin College in Ohio where she majored in creative writing and women’s studies. She moved to Portland in 1986 and has held myriad jobs in various fields including DJ, janitor, carpenter, bookstore manager, and mediator. She published her first collection of poems, Grasp: Selected Poems from the First 30 Years, in 1995.

Since then, she has been focusing on her moneymaking career, which is not poetry. She earns her living in corporate America as a fabrication technician in a microchip facility. She also recently received her associate of general studies degree, and is currently working towards a bachelors degree in management and organizational communication through Marylhurst College.

Diana has read and performed her work all over Portland including at Portland’s International Women’s Day celebration, and in other states such as at her mom's Unitarian Church in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, in New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, and at political events such as the anti-Oregon Citizens Alliance Walk for Love and Justice.

Her work has been published in Spoon River Poetry Review, Rain City Review, and three anthologies: Sister/Stranger, The Unitarian Universalist Poets, and the soon to be released Between Our Lips. She won an honorable mention in the National Billee Murray Denny Contest.

Diana has performed her poetry in the 3-woman show Dykes Using Our Mouths: Revolutionary Poetics, in Love Cabaret at Dreamswell Studio, and for The Way Back, an arts event for women healing from abuse.