Workshop @4:30PM & PIE*/Special Reading @6:15PM FREE
4:30 to 6:00PM Paul Hunter leads a free workshop –
STORYTELLING FOR POETS, ESSAYISTS & FICTION WRITERS
6:15 PM to 8:20 Reading & Reception for Raven Chronicles Journal Vol 25: Balancing Acts
Short readings by: Paul Hunter, Luther Allen, Ed Harkness, Alicia Hokanson, Thomas Hubbard, Jill McCabe Johnson, Jed Myers, and Mary Ellen Talley
Plus Open Mic
PIE* = PoetryIsEverything
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Workshop Details:
Workshop 4:30 to 6PM -
STORYTELLING FOR POETS, ESSAYISTS & FICTION WRITERS
by Paul Hunter
It’s not often that poets and writers get a chance to save the world. But here we are, on the verge of environmental disaster, dying for want of what every human should live for—a life in tune with nature. While honing our sense of beauty and utility, we have traded an active life and a sustainable existence for comfort, convenience, and amusement, which tend to magnify our energy use exponentially, and diminish the sense of our surroundings and our physical selves.
In his 2017 book, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, English novelist, poet, and political activist Paul Kingsnorth details his own despair at seeing how entrenched, immoveable, and oblivious is the resistance to global climate change. In despair he resigned from all organized efforts to save the earth, and is living a subsistence life with his family in western Ireland, with a low carbon footprint, raising as much of his food and fuel as he can, using a composting toilet. His only remaining hold is in the world of art, where he sees that humans have been failing by continuing to tell each other versions of the old failed stories. He says that humans need to begin telling each other new stories that might save us and the rest of nature, though the hour is late. (see dark-mountain.net, for magazine issues, books, and blogs)
This workshop is organized to clarify where we stand with regard to the natural world, what our place is, and offer some exercises and materials to allow the writer to abandon the old stories and create new ones that will be more urgent and meaningful than the aesthetics and ethics most of us have grown up with. What perspectives will help us, and what stories do we now most need to tell each other and hear? Bring something to write with, and on, and join me from 4:30 pm to 6 pm, Saturday February 17, at Book Tree in Kirkland. Serious nuts and bolts—there will be no preaching to the choir.
Reader Bios:
Paul Hunter has published fine letterpress poetry under the imprint of Wood Works Press since 1994. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, as well as in seven full-length books and three chapbooks. His first collection of farming poems, Breaking Ground, 2004, from Silverfish Review Press, was reviewed in The New York Times, and received the 2004 Washington State Book Award. A second volume of farming poems, Ripening, was published in 2007, a third companion volume, Come the Harvest, appeared in 2008, and the fourth, from the same publisher, Stubble Field, appeared in 2012. He has been a featured poet on The News Hour, and has a prose book on small-scale, sustainable farming, One Seed to Another: The New Small Farming, published by the Small Farmer’s Journal. His new book of prose poetry, Clownery, In lieu of a life spent in harness, was published in 2017, by Davila Art & Books, Sisters, Oregon.
Luther Allen writes poems and designs buildings from Sumas Mountain, Washington. He facilitates SpeakEasy, a community poetry reading series in Bellingham, Washington, and is co-editor of Noisy Water, a poetry anthology featuring local Whatcom County poets. His collection of poems, The View from Lummi Island, can be found at http://othermindpress.wordpress.com/His work appears in three recent anthologies: WA 129 (an anthology of poems from Washington poets, edited by Tod Marshall), Refugium, and Poetry of the American Southwest, Volume 3.
Edward Harkness is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Saying the Necessary and Beautiful Passing Lives, both from Pleasure Boat Studio Press. His poems can be found online in 2River, Atticus Review, Cascadia Review, The Good Men Project, Hinchas de Poesia, The Humanist, Rat’s Ass Journal, Salt River Review, Split Lip Magazine, Switched-On Gutenberg, and Terrain.Org. Recent publications in print journals include Chariton Review and Miramar. His most recent chapbook, Ice Children, was published by Split Lip Press in 2014. To hear Ed read “Union Creek in Winter,” (and published, not incidentally, on Jan. 21, 2017, the day of the inauguration of #45), go to Terrain.org at http://www.terrain.org/2017/poetry/letter-to-america-harkness/.
He lives in Shoreline, Washington.
Alicia Hokanson, retired from forty years of teaching, now devotes her time to reading, writing, and political activism in Seattle and on Waldron Island, Washington. Her first collection of poems, Mapping the Distance, was selected by Carolyn Kizer for a King County Arts Commission Publication Prize. Two chapbooks from Brooding Heron Press are Insistent in the Skin and Phosphorous.
Thomas Hubbard, a retired writing instructor and spoken word performer, authored Nail and other hardworking poems, Year of the Dragon Press, 1994; Junkyard Dogz (also available on audio CD); and Injunz, a chapbook. He designed and published Children Remember Their Fathers (an anthology), and books by seven other authors. His book reviews have appeared in Square Lake, Raven Chronicles, New Pages and The Cartier Street Review. Recent publication credits include poems in Yellow Medicine Review, I Was Indian, editor Susan Deer Cloud, Florida Review, and short stories in Red Ink and Yellow Medicine Review. He serves editorially with Raven Chronicles and The Cartier Street Review, and still performs spoken word in and around Seattle, and at other venues around the country.
Jill McCabe Johnson is the author of two poetry books, Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown and Diary of the One Swelling Sea, winner of a Nautilus Book Award, and the nonfiction chapbook Borderlines. Honors include an Artist Trust grant, an Academy of American Poets Award, the Mari Sandoz/Prairie Schooner Prize in Fiction, and Scissortale Review’s Editor’s Prize in Poetry; plus the Deborah Tall Memorial Fellowship from Pacific Lutheran University—where she completed her MFA in Creative Writing—and the Louise Van Sickle Fellowship in Poetry from the University of Nebraska—where she received her PhD in English. Johnson teaches Creative Writing and English at Skagit Valley College, and is the founding director of Artsmith, a non-profit to support the arts.
Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press, forthcoming), and two chapbooks. Recent honors include the Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry, The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize, and the McLellan Poetry Prize. Poems are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, and Natural Bridge. He’s Poetry Editor for the online magazine Bracken.
Mary Ellen Talley’s poems have recently been published in Cirque, U City Review, and Ekphrastic Review, as well as in the anthologies, The Doll Collection and Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace. Mary Ellen worked for many years with words and children as a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) in Seattle public schools.