Summer Sitka Workshops

Writers encounter nature, imagine change at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast

Seven professional writers will lead workshops at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology during summer 2007. They join 64 of the finest teachers, artists and scientists in the Pacific Northwest instructing 75 workshops in the pristine and inspirational coastal reserve of Cascade Head and the Salmon River estuary, located four miles north of Lincoln City, Oregon.

Joanne Mulcahy, Writing about Food, Place, and Culture, April 14 15.

Kim Stafford, Writer as Attentive Resident & Restless Vagabond, May 26 27.

Margaret Rozga, Writing Poems in Response to Nature, June 9 10.

John Daniel, Seeking the Self in the Natural World, June 11 14. What if memoir and nature writing are nothing different? Asks the author of Rogue River Journal, winner of a 2006 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.

Sarah Rabkin, Everyday Poetry, June 24, & Circling Home: Writing for Beloved Places, June 29 - July 1. Writing poems is a way of paying attention.

Fred Barrett, Writing Your History, Your Legacy, August 4.

Debra Gwartney, The Language of Place, August 6 9. As managing editor of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, with Barry Lopez, she helped create a landmark work of language, geography, and folklore.

Sitka Center’s workshop program offers intensive examination of various artistic and scientific issues. This program is the largest of its kind in Oregon. Workshops are one to five days and all instruction takes place in one of the Center’s four studios or outdoors in the spectacular surroundings.

The intimate classes with professional instructors open the way for all ages, abilities, and backgrounds, teaching the tools and techniques of the medium, while encountering nature, and imagining and understanding personal and environmental change.

Registration is now open for Sitka’s 2007 workshop season and complete course offering can be accessed inline at www.sitkacenter.org or by calling for a catalog at 541-994-5485.

Joanne Mulcahy, Writing about Food, Place, and Culture, April 14-15
Joanne B. Mulcahy teaches and directs the Writing Culture Summer Institute at the Northwest Writing Institute, Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of Birth and Rebirth on an Alaskan Island, a biography of an Alaska Native healer. Her essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including The Stories that Shape Us: Contemporary Women Write about the West, and These United States.

Kim Stafford, Writer as Attentive Resident & Restless Vagabond, May 26-27
Kim Stafford is the Director of the Northwest Writing Institute and William Stafford Center at Lewis and Clark College. His recent books include Early Morning: Remembering my Father, William Stafford (2002); The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writers Craft (2003); and A Thousand Friends of Rain (2005).

Margaret Rozga, Writing Poems in Response to Nature, June 9-10
Margaret (Peggy) Rozga has published poetry in many anthologies and literary journals, including Nimrod, Out of Line, and Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine. Her poetry has been included in four collaborative exhibits with works by visual artists. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha where among the courses she teaches is an interdisciplinary, team-taught course, Drawing and Writing Poetry in Response to Nature. In 2002-2003, she enjoyed a two-month residency at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. She has also been in residence at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois.

John Daniel, Seeking the Self in the Natural World, June 11-14
John Daniel is the author of eight books of memoir, essays, and poetry, including Rogue River Journal, winner of a 2006 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and The Trail Home and Looking After, both of which won the Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction. The recipient of a Wallace Stegner fellowship at Stanford University and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he has taught creative writing at Stanford University, Ohio State, Oregon State, Sweet Briar College, Lewis & Clark College, and other institutions. For the past three years he has been the Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at St. Lawrence University in New York State and Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at St. Marys College of California.

Sarah Rabkin, Everyday Poetry, June 24, & Circling Home: Writing for Beloved Places, June 29 - July 1.
An award-winning writing instructor in the Environmental Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Sarah Rabkin has led scores of workshops on writing and on creating illustrated field journals. Her articles, columns, essays, and poems have been published widely. She loves language, landscapes, and the potent places where the two intersect, and she takes pleasure in helping others find the power in their own voices.

Fred Barrett. Writing Your History, Your Legacy, August 4
Fred Barrett, a graduate of the University of Michigan, lives in Portland, Oregon and has owned Alder Press since 1993. He is the author of four books, including Sea-Mountain: Cascade Head-Salmon River Anthology (The Oregon Coast), Ziiza: A Story of the Oregon Country, and his latest, Gus Maples Dictionary.

Debra Gwartney, The Language of Place, August 6 - 9
Debra Gwartney, a member of the nonfiction writing faculty at Portland State University and a freelance editor, is managing editor of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, a landmark work of language, geography, and folklore created by a community of American writers intent on revitalizing our intimacy with place. Her short stories, essays, and articles have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Creative Nonfiction, Prairie Schooner, Tampa Review, Kenyon Review and many others. In addition to awards in both writing and editing, she is a recipient of a Literary Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction, a Wurlitzer Foundation.