January 17 | 7 PM

Newport Visual Arts Center

open mic follows

Admission $5.00

Free to Students

CARLOS REYES & TRAVIS CHAMP

Carlos Reyes

At The Edge of the Western Wave

 

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
Old Nehalem Road

 

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.

 

February 14 | 7 PM

Newport Visual Arts Center

open mic follows

Admission $1.50

Free to Students

Launch of Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon’s Sesquicentennial Anthology

 

Published by
Nestucca Spit Press

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.

Matt Love

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.

 

March 21 | 7 PM

Newport Visual Arts Center
777 NW Beach Drive
Newport OR 97365

open mic follows

Admission $5.00

Free to Students

MICHELE LONGO EDER & JIM LYNCH

Michele Longo Eder

Introduction by Marianne Klekacz:

"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."

Salt In Our Blood

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


The Highest Tide
Jim Lynch

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

April 18 | 7 PM

Cafe Mundo
711 NW 2nd Court
Newport, OR 97365

Team Sign-Up at 6:45 PM;
no pre-registration

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.

2008 Haiku Winners

2008 Winners!
Sam Canning-Kaplan, Joe Jordan & Laura Eberly
An account of the 2008 Instant Haiku Slam
— by Laura Eberly

"close call"

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.

May 16 | 7 PM

Newport Visual Arts Center

open mic follows

Admission $5.00

Free to Students

CLAUDIA HANDLER & JOHN WITTE

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.

For more information: http://www.claudiahandler.com/


John Witte

Second Nature

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.

For more info:
http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/WITSEC.html
http://poems.com/feature.php?date=14153

His Cap

Why because
he was happy he threw his cap
into the sky over the field behind his house

he picked it up
and tossed it again his unspoken
hooray wobbling through the air people did this at games

when the war
ended they were so glad they
threw their hats it was part of the language of our lives

he was trying to
understand giving another heave
of his cap with its little bill into the blue sky the unseen

celestial matter
making a funny quacking sound
practicing his blatty duck voice his mother calling come in

this minute
leaving his cap in the grass why
because he was warm then with no need of a cap until now

June 20 | 7 PM

Newport Visual Arts Center

open mic follows

Admission $5.00

Free to Students

SPIKE WALKER

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.

Coming Back Alive

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

 

July 18 | 7 PM

PERFORMING ARTS CENTER
SPECIAL EVENT
SPECIAL LOCATION

no open mic

Admission $10.00

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

 

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. 

CRAIG CAROTHERS on YouTube - Gotta Give Up On You

He’s toured with or opened for Mose Allison, Karla Bonoff, Jonatha Brooke, Rosanne Cash, Bruce Cockburn, Paula Cole, Robert Cray, Catie Curtis, Crash Test Dummies, Donovan, Peter Himmelman, John Hiatt, Leo Kottke, Patty Larkin, Michael McDonald, Dennis Miller, Anne Murray, Danny O'Keefe, Leroy Parnell, Paula Poundstone, Boz Skaggs, Toad The Wet Sprocket, Richard Thompson, Jethro Tull, Romeo Void, Loudon Wainwright III, Tim Weisberg, David Wilcox, Warren Zevon, and many others. 

His song, Little Hercules, recorded for Trisha Yearwood, went Gold. 

Craig is now traveling the country in support of his most recent CDs, Solo and Nothing Fancy.

Craig Carother's official website: http://www.craigcarothers.com

August 15 | 7 PM

Newport Visual Arts Center

open mic follows

Admission $5.00

Free to Students

DORI APPEL

Dori Appel

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.

Dori Appel's official website: http://www.doriappel.com/

 

September 19 | 7 PM

Newport Visual Arts Center

open mic follows

Admission $5.00

Free to Students

KAIA SAND & JULES BOYKOFF

 

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
  • Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge

 

October 17 | 7 PM

Newport Visual Arts Center

open mic follows

Admission $5.00

Free to Students

LAUREL BLOSSOM &
MARIANNE KLEKACZ

Laura Blossom

 

Prize-winning poet LAUREL 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.

Laura's official website: http://www.laurelblossom.com/

 


Marianne Klekacz

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.

November 21 | 7 PM

Newport Visual Arts Center

open mic follows

Admission $5.00

Free to Students

SCRIBBLE!

 

An interactive literary and dining event. Details pending

 

Our 2010 event lineup:

  • January: Fisherpoets Gathering In Newport featuring JOHN BRODERICK and others, pending confirmation.

  • February: MARC ACITO

  • March: CHERYL STRAYED

  • April: FIFTH ANNUAL INSTANT HAIKU SLAM CLASSIC

  • May: PETER SEARS

  • June: BART KING

January 16 | TBA


Location: TBA

Fisherpoets Gathering

In Newport

 

featuring JOHN BRODERICK and others, pending confirmation.

 

 

 

 

February 20 | 7 PM

Newport Visual Arts Center

open mic follows

Admission $5.00

Free to Students

MARC ACITO

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.

http://www.opb.org/programs/artbeat/videos/view/211-Marc-Acito

http://www.marcacito.com/


March 20 | 7 PM

Newport Visual Arts Center

open mic follows

Admission $5.00

Free to Students

CHERYL STRAYED

Cheryl Strayed

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.

Torch

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.

 

For more information: http://www.cherylstrayed.com

 

 

April 17 | 7 PM

Cafe Mundo

6:45 p.m. Team Sign-Up

FIFTH ANNUAL

INSTANT HAIKU SLAM CLASSIC

 

 

 

 

 

May 20 | 7 PM

Newport Visual Arts Center

open mic follows

Admission $5.00

Free to Students

PETER SEARS

Peter Sears

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.

Tour

The Brink

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.

Luge

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.

 

 

June 19 | 7 PM

Newport Visual Arts Center

open mic follows

Admission $5.00

Free to Students

BART KING

BART KING is 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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