April 7 Free Poetry Workshop with Barbara Drake

April 7 Free Poetry Workshop with Barbara Drake

Willamette Writers Coast Branch continues its free Writers-on-Writing workshops with Barbara Drake on March 7, 2009, at the Newport Public Library from 7-8:30pm. Known as a master teacher and poet, she will lead “It’s All About Words: a Poetry Workshop.”

“Does it matter which words you use in a poem as long as you have a good idea? Is a poem about something or can it be about language itself? Words are the building blocks of poetry but there are so many choices, how do we make those choices? In this workshop we will ask these questions and will use word exercises and language games to write drafts for new poems.”

With degrees from the University of Oregon, Barbara Drake has taught at Michigan State and Willamette Universities; Lewis & Clark, Whitman, Linfield, and Southern Oregon Community Colleges. She has won a National Endowment for the Arts Award, a Northwest Art Foundation Grant, a NEA Fellowship, and the Edith Grant Distinguished Professor Award from Linfield College. She is best known for her textbook Writing Poetry, now reissued by Wadsworth in 1994. She also co-authored Concepts in Literature, Grades 7-12.

Her poetry chapbooks include What We Say to Strangers, Love at the Egyptian Theatre, Life in a Gothic Novel, Bees in Wet Weather, Space Before A, and most recently, Small Favors from Traprock Press. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies: Prescott Reader, Sumac Reader, The Plain Truth of Things, and O Poetry!

Her book of poetic essays, Peace at Heart: An Oregon Country Life (OSU Press, 1998) tells of
raising Romney sheep and wine grapes on a small farm near Yamhill.

She has published articles, reviews, fiction and poetry in Northwest Magazine, North American Review, Northwest Review, Centennial Review, Western Humanities Review, Green House, Wormwood Review, as well as the Oregon Literary Review and Windfall.

Thanks to a Lincoln County Cultural Trust 2009 grant to bring writing teachers into the schools, Barbara Drake will also be a visiting teacher in creative writing in Toledo High School.

The next Willamette Writers Coast Branch meeting on May 5 features Bob Welch with a Nonfiction Workshop, 7-8:30 p.m. Admission is free. Public welcome.

The Writers-on-Writing series is also sponsored by the Newport Public Library and the Sylvia Beach Hotel. Contacts: Sue Lick, 867-4692, suelick@casco.net; Dorothy Blackcrow Mack, 765-2383, dmack@centurytel.net; www.willamettewriters.com.