CARLOS REYES, Author of several poetry collections including most recently At the Edge of the Western Wave.
Carlos Reyes is an Irish-American poet blessed with an Hispanic name. He is the bard of Cloonanaha (County Clare,
Irleand) and a poet in Portland, Oregon. Carolyn Kizer has said: Mr. Reyes is one of our local and national
treasures. His poetry is as clear and strong as his social conscience. One is always struck by his sensual and sensory
qualities: the touch, taste, feel, color of things, and his ability to capture a mood, a world, in a handful of lines.
TRAVIS CHAMP, Nehalem born and bred. Travis Champ recently released a thirty-poem
collection, Old Nehalem Road.As Nestucca Spit Publisher Matt Love wrote
in his introduction to the book, I first heard Travis Champ read his poetry in January of 2007, at an annual
Friends of William Stafford gathering in Lincoln City. He had hitchhiked 80 miles from Manzanita to read one short
poem, and when I heard it in a church that winter night, I was transfixed.
Edited by MATT LOVE, featuring DOROTHY BLACKCROW MACK, NIKI PRICE,
CARLA PERRY, DENNIS E. JONES and ANDREW RODMAN.
February 14, 2009 marks the 150th birthday of the State of Oregon.
In celebration, several local writers included in "Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon's Sesquicentennial Anthology"
will be the featured authors of the Nye Beach Writers' Series event held that night.
"The whole idea was to commemorate Oregon's 150th birthday," said Matt Love, owner of Nestucca
Spit Press, the book's publisher. "'Citadel merges past and present Oregon voices and stories. I wanted to
produce an unconventional book that integrated the old stories and new perspectives and reflects Oregon's maverick
nature."
Matt Love chose the anthology's title from a quote by Oregon's celebrity author Ken Kesey: "Oregon is
the citadel of the spirit." The book contains 63 original essays by writers who have called the State of Oregon
home. In addition, 61 excerpts from primary documents related to Oregon history are included.
"Michele Longo Eder's first book was published in 2008. Salt in Our Blood: The Memoir of a
Fisherman's Wife, draws on Eder's journals, public records, interviews, essays, and other sources to reflect the
realities of the life of a commercial fisherman and his family.
Just as Overstory Zero, by Robert Leo Heilman, did for the logging industry several year's ago, Salt in Our Blood opens
a window to look in on a unique and endangered Oregon way of life.
Eder's book is aptly titled. Oceans contain roughly the same percentage of salt as do our blood, sweat, and tears. Salt
in Our Blood is full of all four.
Eder's narrative shows us the joy, frustration, hard work, and tragedy in the life of a commercial fisherman. Coming
from the outside to join her husband in his chosen environment and career, she casts a clear eye not only on the
fishing but on the politics, pettiness, and lack of comprehension that endanger Oregon's fisheries and fishermen, and
on the very real dangers they face with each trip to sea to harvest food.
Salt in Our
Blood is a gripping read."
The title of the book is from a quote by John F. Kennedy:
"All of us have, in our veins, the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists
in the ocean, and therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And
when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we
came."
Born in upstate New York, Eder graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1976, moved to Portland, Oregon,
and graduated from the Lewis & Clark law school before moving to Newport. She currently serves on the board of
directors of the North Pacific Research Board, and, as a two-term Presidential appointee, is a Commissioner with the
U.S. Arctic Research Commission. She also serves on the board of directors of the Newport Library
Foundation. To learn more visit
saltinourblood.com
Introduction by Marianne Klekacz:
"Jim Lynch's first novel, The Highest Tide, was published in 2006 to critical acclaim. It's
loosely described as a "coming-of-age fable." I'm not sure that description does the book justice. From the
wonderful foreshadowing on page 2 -- "...one freakish summer in which I was ambushed by science, fame, and
suggestions of the divine"- Lynch had me. I read the book in one sitting.
Like Harper Lee's Scout Finch and J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, "little Miles O'Malley," self-described
wimpy nerd, teeters on the brink of big life changes. He guides us through a momentous summer in his adolescence with
the unflinching eye of "an increasingly horny thirteen-year-old" who looks about nine but is blessed with a
brain that wraps itself around the events in the story in a sophisticated way. He took me by the hand, and I gladly
shared his journey."
Jim Lynch's second novel, Border Songs, will be released this summer. I can hardly wait.
Lynch grew up on a lake near Seattle. After graduating from the University of Washington in 1985, with degrees in
creative writing and journalism, he worked as a reporter in a tiny Alaskan fishing town. He then escaped for
Washington, D.C., where he wrote columns for syndicated muckraker Jack Anderson and short fiction for literary
magazines.
When he returned to the Northwest, it was to Spokane, where his stories won national honors including the Livingston
Young Journalist Award. Later, he wrote for The Seattle Times and served four years as the Portland Oregonian's
Puget Sound reporter. He now devotes himself full-time to writing fiction. Lynch lives in Olympia, Washington, with
his wife and daughter. To learn more visit
thehighesttide.com
Space is limited to 16 poetic participants. First come and first served. Admission is free to all participants
and spectators.
Matt Love, director of Writers On The Edge, will host the event.
Many prizes will be awarded.
FOURTH ANNUAL OREGON COAST
INSTANT HAIKU SLAM CLASSIC
Attention all brave and exhibitionistic poets on the Oregon coast! In celebration of National Poetry Month, the Nye
Beach Writers' Series invites performance poets and curious spectators to the Fourth Annual Oregon Coast Instant Haiku
Slam Classic.
The event, sponsored by Writers On The Edge, takes place Saturday, April 18, at 7:00 p.m., at Cafe Mundo, a
full-service, natural foods restaurant located at the corner of Southwest Coast Street and Second Place in the
historic Nye Beach area of Newport. Admission is free to all participants and spectators. Matt Love, director of
Writers On The Edge, will host the event. Many prizes will be awarded.
The popular Haiku Slam Classic is a four-team poetry competition, scored by the audience in a format similar to a
diving event where judges hold up numerical scores. All poets are randomly grouped into teams, which may have three or
four members depending on the number of people who sign up.
splashes of the bay the jaws of Newport, jagged glide in by moonlight
Haiku, a poem five beats, then seven, then five ends as it began
Traditionally, haikus are un-rhymed, 17-syllable, three-line poems (5-7-5 structure). The Oregon Coast Instant Haiku
Slam Classic format retains this 5-7-5 structure, but competition haikus can rhyme. Poets can also expect to write
upon a wide variety of subjects, presented to them on the spot by the hosts.
After teams are formed, they compete against each other. The host throws out a word or phrase, such as "beach" or
"bailout" or "hope," and each member from each team composes a haiku relating to that word or phrase. After the
one-minute thinking/writing time is up, the poets recite their haikus and the judges score them on a scale of 1 to 10.
The teams continue competing until the team with the highest total wins the final round and thus, poetic glory.
Prizes will be awarded to the first- and second-place teams. Even if a person does not want to participate in the
competition, three volunteer judges are needed for each round. Judges will be selected from the audience.
CLAUDIA HANDLER, was one of six poets chosen by Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center and the Los
Angeles Poetry Festival to participate in the Poets/ALOUD Series in 2006. New work has been included in the anthology,
A Poet's Haggadah: Passover Through the Eyes of Poets, edited by Rick Lupert, creator
of the Poetry Super Highway.
Claudia's poems have also appeared in various printed literary journals, and online. She is also the author of the
full-length poetry collection, Going Under, published in 2007.
Claudia appeared on OPB's "Live Wire Radio" for their Special Anniversary Show, broadcast in April 2007 and
featured in their "Favorite Moments of 2007 Show," which aired February 2008. She's also appeared on The Moe
Green Poetry Hour, and Breathe.
Claudia is a guest lecturer at University of California at Northridge. She is also the co-director of Valley Contemporary Poets, an organization dedicated to bringing poetry to the San
Fernando Valley and greater Los Angeles area. A native New Yorker, Claudia moved to California in 2002 and makes her
living as a counselor, helping people to get out from under avalanches of fear and sadness.
The Differences
God always tries to get you to go to his house. The Devil is willing to travel.
In God's bed, you're a dry blue dress in a river. A bicycle that doesn't leave tracks in
snow.
In the Devil's bed, you doh-si-doh with monkeys. He makes you feel like butterscotch and meat.
When you're with God, gongs breathe and sway, and yes, the earth does move.
When you're with the Devil, you move.
When you're with the Devil, you have to pay attention not to mention God's name.
When its over, God brings you water that tastes like stems and sky.
The Devil doesn't stick around. The Devil doesn't dawdle. He takes the window and leaves the sill hot.
After you fuck God, you can talk to turtles.
After you fuck the Devil, smoke comes out, and your toes light up like Christmas.
JOHN WITTE's poems have appeared widely, in publications such as The New Yorker, Paris
Review, and American Poetry Review, and been included in The Norton Introduction to Literature, among several
anthologies. He is the author of Loving the Days (Wesleyan University Press, 1978),
The Hurtling (Orchises Press, 2005), and Second Nature (University
of Washington Press, 2008).
John is also the editor of The Collected Poems of Hazel Hall (Oregon State University
Press, 2000), and a former editor of Northwest Review. He is the recipient of two
writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a residency at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work
Center. He lives with his family in Eugene, Oregon, where he teaches literature at the University of Oregon.
Coming Back Alive: When the fishing vessel La Conte sinks suddenly at night in
one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds and record ninety-foot seas during a savage storm in January 1998, her five crewmen
are left to drift without a life raft in the freezing Alaskan waters and survive as best they can... A fisherman's
worst nightmare has become a Coast Guard crew's desperate mission.
Other publications by SPIKE WALKER include...
Working on the Edge: Surviving in the World's Most Dangerous ProfessionKing Crab Fishing on Alaska's High Seas
Nights of Ice: True Stories of Disaster and Survival on Alaska's High Seas
Alaska: Tales of Adventure from the Last Frontier and Coming Back Alive
To order advance tickets Call 265-ARTS Toll free 1-888-701-7123 Or stop by the Newport
Performing Arts Center, 777 West Olive Street, during regular business hours.
Tickets will be pre-sold at the Performing Arts Center for the July 2009 Craig Carothers show.
Free to Students
CRAIG CAROTHERS
CRAIG CAROTHERS grew up in the Pacific Northwest. His parents, both music teachers, introduced
him to a wide range of music including jazz, classical and blues. Carothers also cites a number of Motown, pop and
folk influences.
DORI APPEL, Ashland monologist and author of the newly released poetry collection, Another Rude Awakening, is also a playwright, author of the award-winning Freud's Girls, Hot Flashes, The Lunatic Within, and Lost and Found.
KAIA SAND, poet, multi-media collagist, and co-editor at Tangent Press, reads with Jules Boykoff,
from their co-authored book, Landscapes of Dissent: Guerilla Poetry & Public Space.
JULES BOYKOFF is a poet, teacher of political science at Pacific University in Forest Grove,
and the author of
Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States
The Suppression of Dissent: How the State and Mass Media Squelch US American Social Movements
Prize-winning poetLAUREL BLOSSOM's most recent book is Degrees of Latitude, a book-length narrative prose poem exploring the geography of a
woman's life (Four Way Books, 2007).
Laurel is a lifelong swimmer and, when not actually immersed in some body of water, swimming, she likes to be immersed in
reading about it. Thinking that others might feel the same way, she has collected stories, essays and poems into an
anthology called Splash! Great Writing About Swimming.
Since moving to South Carolina, she has edited an anthology of 20th century Edgefield poetry called Lovely Village of the Hills,
available through Paperwhites, 102 Courthouse Square, Edgefield SC 29824, (803) 637-0600.
In addition to poetry, Laurel has written essays and book reviews for such publications as Publishers Weekly, American Book Review,
and Small Press Review. Her interviews and essays on cultural and political topics, ranging from writers' colonies and
amusement parks to art forgeries, libraries, and nuclear non-proliferation have appeared in Poets & Writers
Magazine, Empire State Report, and things (UK), among others.
MARIANNE KLEKACZ graduated from Marylhurst University with a B.A. in English/Creative Writing, and received
her M.F.A. from Pacific University. She is the author of the chapbook, "Life Science," which
won the Edna Meudt Memorial Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies in 2003, and the full-length poetry
collection, "When Words Fail," scheduled to be released in 2009 by Dancing Moon Press.
Marianne has extensive experience winning prizes in poetry, serving as a judge in poetry contests, and leading panels on the topic
of poetry. She is the recipient of a Binford Writing Scholarship at Marylhurst and a former president of the Oregon State Poetry
Association and a board member of Writers On The Edge.
She recently resigned from Intel Corporation and now lives fulltime in a remote valley on the west side of Oregon's Coast Range
mountains, along with a husband and an enormous variety of wildlife.
MARC ACITO is a would-be actor who ended up a writer.
For those who do not know me, I'm very famous. My
debut novel, How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater, won the
Oregon Book Awards' Ken Kesey Award for the Novel, although I sometimes leave out the Oregon part to make it sound more important.
It was also selected as a Top Ten Teen Pick by the American Library Association, though it still has not achieved my ultimate goal
of being banned by irate fundamentalists. The New York Times chose College as an Editors Choice, it's been optioned for
film by Columbia Pictures and is translated into five languages I can't read, though I can now say "cunnilingus" in
Norwegian.
I was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, on January 11, 1966, attended by Three Wise Guys. The couple who raised me deny it, but I
suspect I might be the secret love child of Liza Minnelli and Peter Allen, which explains my effervescent personality and fondness
for prescription medication.
I grew up in Westfield, New Jersey, the small-town star of high school and summer camp musicals. Y'know, the guy who wore Capezio
dance shoes and leg warmers to school. In my defense, it was the 1980s.
FUN FACT #6: I have had 36 jobs in my life, and almost as many hair-dos. Neither the jobs nor the hair-dos worked out very well.
I began my writing career with my syndicated humor column, "The Gospel According to Marc,"
which earned me poverty wages at nineteen alternative newspapers nationwide, as well as the sobriquet "the gay Dave Barry."
FUN FACT #7: When I met Dave Barry, he looked me in the eye and said, "Let's just get one thing clear: I'm the gay Dave
Barry." I still freelance, most notably as a commentator for National Public Radio's All Things Considered and Live Wire
Radio. I live mostly in my head, but my body resides in Portland, Oregon, which is a good place to write because there are lots of
strange people and it rains all the time.
I've just co-written a play with Cynthia Whitcomb. It's called Holidazed. It's about a suburban soccer mom whose life
gets turned upside down when she takes in a pagan street kid. And I'm hard at work on the third in the Theater People series,
tentatively called, The Jazz Hands of God.
CHERYL STRAYED's award-winning stories and essays have appeared in more than a dozen magazines, including
the New York Times Magazine, The Sun, Washington Post Magazine, Allure, and DoubleTake.
Her personal essays, "Heroin/e" and "The Love of My Life," were both selected for inclusion in the prestigious Best American
Essays collections (in 2000 and 2003 respectively). Her novel, Torch, published by Hougton Mifflin
in 2006, was a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award and selected by The Oregonian as one of the top ten books by Pacific
Northwest authors.
Raised in Minnesota, Strayed has worked as a political organizer for women's advocacy groups and was an outreach worker at a
sexual violence center in Minneapolis. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University Graduate Creative Writing Program. She lives in
Portland, Oregon with her filmmaker husband and their two children.
PETER SEARS, a poet and literary activist, recently had his fifth chapbook Luge,
published by Cloudbank Press (June 2008). His third full-length collection, Green Diver, is due out in
the fall of 2009.
Sears' poetry collection, Tour: New & Selected Poems, was published by Breitenbush
Books in 1987. The Brink, his fourth poetry collection, won the 1999 Peregrine Smith Poetry
Competition, and the 2001 Western States Book Award in poetry.
He is also the author of Secret Writing, published by the Teachers & Writers Collaborative, and
Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem, published by Scholastic Inc. Both are supplementary teaching texts.
Peter Sears' poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Saturday Review, New York Times, Rolling Stones, Mademoiselle, The Christian
Science Monitor, Mother Jones, Orion, and many literary journals and anthologies. His poem, "When the Big Blue Light Comes a Whirling up Behind"
was read by Garrison Keillor on The Writers Almanac.
Originally from New York City, Sears is a graduate of Yale and the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. He taught English at the
middle-school and high-school levels for several years before coming to Oregon in the mid 1970s to teach creative writing at Reed
College. He has also taught at the Northwest Writing Institute of Lewis & Clark College, and at the Pacific University Writing
Program in Forest Grove.
Sears is the founder of the Oregon Literary Coalition, co-founder of
The Friends of William Stafford, co-founder of Community of
Writers, and has served on the Oregon Arts Commission. He is the recipient of the Stewart Holbrook Award for his efforts
to Oregon's literary community.
BART KINGis an Oregon high school teacher and author of
The Pocket Guide to Brilliance
The Pocket Guide to Girl Stuff
The Pocket Guide to Boy Stuff
The Pocket Guide to Games
The Pocket Guide to Mischief
What on Earth Science Series - a book of "science-based fiction"
co-authored with his wife, LYNN KING.
His book, An Architectural Guidebook to Portland, was recently re-released by
Oregon State University Press.
Bart is a very funny guy.
At work in the home office.
July
August
September
October
November
Welcome to the Nye Beach Writers' Series Calendar of Events!
The Nye Beach Writers' Series is pure literary entertainment and showcases authors of diverse types of
writing including fiction, nonfiction, plays, songs, Oregon history, memoir, poetry, essays, and investigative journalism.
The Newport Belle (a sternwheeler riverboat) has donated lodging for March author/presenter, Jim Lynch.
Newport South Beach Marina (541) 867-6290 Reservations: (800) 348-1922 Nancy@NewportBelle.com