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Distinguished Faculty for Discerning Writers

STAN SANVEL RUBIN, Director, Poetry

"This is a small, very selective program for motivated and experienced adults. There are high standards, but no condescension. No enforcing an aesthetic as if it were the aesthetic. Instead, individual choices, individual challenges, individual achievement-all of which it's our job to support.  As a writer, I know writing is a way of being. There's a time for community, and a time for solitude. When we're together, sparks will fly, and there will be high spirits as well as intelligent conversation with people who care about writing. (Bring your passion to residency.) When you're working at home, you will have new voices, new skills, and a new vision working for you. The process matters as much as a credential. The purpose? What you make it."

Stan Sanvel Rubin served for over twenty years as Director of the Brockport Writers Forum and Videotape Library (SUNY), a multi-faceted literary arts program. He holds the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. The Post-Confessionals, a collection of his interviews with contemporary American poets, was published by Associated University Presses.  Hidden Sequel, winner of the Barrow Street Book Award for 2005, was published in 2006.  He is the author of four other collections, Lost and Midnight, both from State Street Press, On the Coast, a chapbook (Pudding House, 2002), and Five Colors,  from CustomWords (WordTech, Cincinnati). His poems have appeared in such magazines as The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, The Georgia Review, The Ohio Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Chelsea, Iowa Review and several anthologies.  He was awarded a 2002 Constance J. Saltonstall Foundation Grant in poetry.  He regularly writes essay-reviews of contemporary poetry for the journal, Water-Stone.

LINDA BIERDS—Poetry Master Class, Summer 2008 Residency

 "The autobiography of her imagination would be only half as intense were the writing itself less
beautiful and clear, less perfect to pitch"    —Stanley Plumly

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Faculty

DAVID BIESPIEL

David Biespiel's books of poetry include Shattering Air, Pilgrims & Beggars, and Wild Civility. His anthology, Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets, received the William Stafford Memorial Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. Among his honors are a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University, a Lannan Fellowship, & a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in literature. In addition to being director and writer-in-residence at the Attic Writer's Workshop in Portland, Oregon, he teaches at Oregon State University, and has taught at Stanford University, University of Maryland, Portland State University, George Washington University, and has also been the Richard H. Thornton Writer-in-Residence at Lynchburg College in Virginia & Writer-in-Residence at Wake Forest University. A contributor to American Poetry Review, Parnassus, Poetry, and The New Republic, he is the editor of Poetry Northwest, a magazine that has revived the discussion of poetry and other arts.

MARY CLEARMAN BLEW, Nonfiction, Fiction, Criticism

Mary Clearman Blew grew up on a small ranch in Montana and is author of the acclaimed essay collection All But the Waltz; a memoir, Balsamroot; the story of her aunt, Writing Her Own Life: Imogene Welch, Western Rural Schoolteacher.  Her latest book is a novel, Jackalope Dreams, published by University of Nebraska Press.  She has also published three books of short stories, most recently Sister Coyote (2001).  In addition, she has edited two collections of Idaho essays—one on water, one on fire.  Her own most recent book of essays is Bone Deep in Landscape (2001).  Her stories have been reprinted in both the Best American and O'Henry collections.  She was twice the recipient of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, once in fiction and once in nonfiction. In 2004, she received the "Distinguished Achievement Award" from the Western Literature Association.  She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Idaho.

FLEDA BROWN, Poetry, Nonfiction

"I’ve taught many kinds of workshops—one-shot 3-hour sessions, weekend retreats, and semester-long creative writing classes. Sometimes students come into a workshop simply wanting a push, sometimes they need help finding their voices. Everyone talks about “finding a voice,” as if we all knew what this means. We don’t. I don’t. What I can do in a workshop is to help students allow themselves to be clumsy, foolish, and sometimes nuts in their writing, while loosely hanging onto the reins. What are the reins? I don’t know that, either, but we can figure it out by looking closely at the best work we can get our hands on. No one ever had a “voice” that came from nowhere. It develops partly from bouncing off other voices—the ones in the workshop, and the ones on the page. I dearly love being around when the bounce lands in new territory."

Fleda Brown is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Reunion, winner of the 2007 Felix Pollak Poetry Prize, published by the University of Wisconsin Press.   Her others are The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives (Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, 2004),  Fishing With Blood (winner of the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, Purdue Univ. Press, 1988), Do Not Peel the Birches (Purdue, 1993), The Devil’s Child (Carnegie Mellon, 1999), and Breathing In, Breathing Out, (winner of the Philip Levine Prize, Anhinga Press, 2002). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, and many other journals and anthologies, and they have been used as texts for several prizewinning musical compositions performed at Eastman School of Music, Yale University, and by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. She has published a number of essays in journals such as Image, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, RiverTeeth, and Arts and Letters. In 2004, she won the Ohio State Univ/ The Journal award for creative nonfiction. A memoir in essays is forthcoming.  She has written on teaching poetry and on the craft of writing, and she is co-editor of Critical Essays on D.H. Lawrence (G.K. Hall). She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas and taught at the University of Delaware for 27 years, where she directed the Poets in the Schools program. She served as poet laureate of Delaware and now lives in Michigan.

KEVIN CLARK, Poetry

“One of my goals in the writing workshop is to help students enhance what is idiosyncratically best in their writing while they simultaneously try other directions. There’s a context for this kind of teaching. The short story writer Al Landwehr once told me that the act of writing well is like the act of reading the best book you’ve ever read. You are utterly transported, ecstatic. But, as Al noted, the next day you come back to your work and you realize that what you have written is not the best thing in literary history. In fact, it can’t walk; it has warts; it hacks like a consumptive. As a writing teacher, I hope to help you readily achieve the first ascendant state of creativity and quickly overcome the second deflating state of starting over. The whole enterprise need not be a jaw-clenching struggle; it should be a habitual, quotidian pleasure."

Kevin Clark’s textbook, The Mind's Eye: a Guide to Writing Poetry, was recently published by Longman.  His first full-length collection of poetry, In the Evening of No Warning, was published by New Issues Press (March, 2002). The Academy of American Poets selected In the Evening of No Warning for a grant from the Greenwall Fund. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines and collections, including The Antioch Review, The Georgia Review, College English, Gulf Coast, Kestrel, and The Black Warrior Review. He also won the Angoff Award from The Literary Review for best contribution in a volume year. Clark has written essays about numerous contemporary American poets, including John Ashbery, Sandra Gilbert, Sandra McPherson, Ruth Stone, and Charles Wright. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in many journals and collections, among them The Iowa Review, Papers on Language and Literature, The Southern Review, Contemporary Literary Criticism, The Georgia Review, and Poetry International. He was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, CA, where he teaches poetry writing and modern and contemporary American literature.  He lives in San Luis Obispo with his family. For expanded biographical notes, please see his web site at www.calpoly.edu/~kclark.

STEPHEN COREY, Nonfiction, Poetry

"I am an editor because I am a writer; I am a writer because at some point--I believe I was in my mid-twenties--simply taking in the world no longer seemed enough, and because I have crazy but loving dreams of whacking a few readers in the gut the way my favorite writers have whacked me. I try to edit via compassionate insinuation [from the Latin "insinuare": to introduce by windings and turnings], doing my best to enter the intention and spirit of a piece to determine how it might be finished more completely and accurately. But I also edit via compassionate fiat, because some things just don't work if you fail to handle them thoughtfully enough. In one sense, I suppose, there's what a good editor must strive to be: thoughtful enough. And, I would argue, good writers must be so as well. Once I sat at a dinner gathering of writers and said, 'For a piece of writing to be genuinely great, someone has to want to kill you for having written it.' This isn't true, of course, but I think it's next door to something that needs to be true."

Stephen Corey is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, the latest being There Is No Finished World (White Pine Press, 2003), and six chapbooks. His poems, essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in dozens of periodicals and anthologies, among them The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, The Kenyon Review, Yellow Silk, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, and The 'Poetry' Anthology, 1912-2002. He has co-edited three books in as many genres, most recently (with Warren Slesinger) Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry (The Bench Press, 2001). He has worked as a literary editor for some thirty years, first with The Devil's Millhopper from 1976-1983, and since then with The Georgia Review, where he currently serves as editor. He lives in Athens, Georgia and serves as Editor-in-Residence in the MFA Program at PLU.

GARY FERGUSON, Nonfiction

Gary Ferguson first answered the call to adventure at age 12, loading up his purple sting-ray bike with camping gear and riding with his older brother through the central Midwest. By age 18, he made his way across North America by rail and by thumb. At 25, Ferguson plunged full-time into the freelance writing life.  He is the author of 16 books on nature, science and history, including The Great Divide: The Rocky Mountains in the American Mind, Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone, and Hawks Rest (National Geographic), which became the first book to win nonfiction Book of The Year from both the Pacific Northwest and Mountains and Plains booksellers associations. His nature and science-based essays can be heard on National Public Radio affiliates throughout the country.  He is currently serving as the William Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer, University of Montana.

GREG GLAZNER, Poetry, Mixed-Genre, Criticism

"I love the reciprocal relationship between technical matters on the one hand, and subject matter on the other.  I’ve been focused for years on how the explosiveness of just being alive can call into question the aptness of one’s acquired technique.  Equally, I’ve been fascinated with how a technical revision—cutting a weak stanza, say, or letting the sound of a word dictate a next phrase that unmoors some of a poem’s original intended meaning—can sometimes result in vastly livlier subject matter.  I think that the most difficult and rewarding thing about being a writer is that we are forced to honor two opposite and essential necessities at once: the necessity to learn and master craft, and the necessity to be given over to a process that takes us beyond our conscious intentions into something more akin to dreaming.  I go to lengths to make sure that my workshops and mentor relationships honor this rich doubleness."

Greg Glazner is the author of two books of poetry, Singularity (W.W. Norton, 1996) and From the Iron Chair (1992), which was chosen by Charles Wright for the 1991 Walt Whitman Award. His chapbook, Walking Two Landscapes, was published in 1984. A recipient of the Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, his poems have appeared in Ironwood, The Laurel Review, New England Journal, Pequod, Quarterly West, The Southern Poetry Review, and The Texas Review.  He received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2005, and is currently at work on a multi-genre book called Zeno's Cure (his poetry/music project is called Zeno's Run).  He is a professor at the College of Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

ADRIANNE HARUN, Fiction

"I don't believe there's any one route to writing good fiction, and sorrowfully, I also have come to believe that the magic book or teacher possessing the secret of fiction writing does not actually exist.  I do, however, believe in the great promise of intuitive leaps, emotional honesty, constant exploration, and the relentless practice of craft through revision.  As a mentor, I ask a lot of questions, and I tend to prod my students also into asking questions of their own work.  I will always suggest far too much reading, but I'll also point writers toward other arts--music, architecture, visual arts--and other literary genres--mysteries, poetry, plays--when I feel a connection is in the offing or needs to be considered.  My goal as a teacher is to act as an informed yet curious companion--sometimes guiding, always listening--as my students find their own paths."

Adrianne Harun is the author of  The King of Limbo and Other Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), a Sewanee Writers Series selection and a Washington State Book Award finalist.  Her stories have garnered awards from the Chicago Tribune (Nelson Algren Award), Story Magazine, and other journals, and have been noted in Best American Mystery Stories.  A long-time resident of Port Townsend, WA, she has taught workshops throughout the state and currently works as an editor.  

LOLA HASKINS, Poetry

"For me, mentoring is helping students say what they came to say.  I love it when they finally, clearly, hear their own voices. And it thrills me to have been part of making good work all it can be.   In group situations, I believe in two things: kindness and honesty.  It isn’t kind to give dishonest praise.  But without kindness, raw honesty is counterproductive.   I see workshops as, essentially, cooperatives.    I may have had more experience than my students, but I’ve never thought I had all the answers.  Besides, anyone who thinks there’s only one answer to anything hasn’t lived long enough yet. What happens in groups is that we learn from each other.   And in the end, what really happens is that we teach ourselves."

Lola Haskins published two books in 2007: a poetry advice book (Not Feathers Yet: A Beginner's Guide to the Poetic Life, Backwaters Press) and an illustrated book of fables about women (Solutions Beginning with A, Modernbook).  Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Christian Science Monitor,  London Review of Books, Beloit Poetry Journal, Georgia Review, Southern Review, etc. and has been broadcast on NPR and BBC.  Her collections include Desire Lines, New and Selected Poems  (BOA, 2004), The Rim Benders (Anhinga, 2001) , Extranjera (Story Line, 1989), Hunger (Iowa, 1993). and Forty-Four Ambitions for the Piano (University Press of Florida, 1990).  Her awards include the Iowa Poetry Prize (for Hunger); narrative poetry prizes from Southern Poetry Review and the New England Review; the Emily Dickinson/Writer Magazine Award from the Poetry Society of America; two NEAs and four grants from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs.   Besides writing poetry, Ms. Haskins enjoys performing it, especially in collaboration.  Most recently, she shared the title role of Mata Hari with a dancer in a ballet whose libretto she wrote for Dance Alive!, a touring dance company.  She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

ROBIN HEMLEY, Nonfiction, Fiction  (on leave 2007-2008)

Robin Hemley was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2008.  He has published seven books of nonfiction and fiction. Invented Eden, The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003) which deals with a purported anthropological hoax in the Philippines, was an American Library Association's Editor's Choice book for 2003.  His memoir, Nola: A Memoir Of Faith, Art And Madness (Graywolf, 1998), won an Independent Press Book Award for Nonfiction. His popular craft book Turning Life Into Fiction has sold over 40,000 copies and will soon be reissued by Graywolf Press. He is also the author of the novel, The Last Studebaker (Graywolf) and the story collections, The Big Ear (Blair) and All You Can Eat (Atlantic Monthly Press).  His awards for his fiction include, The Nelson Algren Award from The Chicago Tribune, The George Garrett Award for Fiction from Willow Springs, the Hugh J. Luke Award from Prairie Schooner, two Pushcart Prizes, and many others.  He is currently the director of the nonfiction program at the University of Iowa.

JIM HEYNEN, Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction

For me, the greatest pleasure in teaching is spotting what is most promising in a poem, story, novel, or essay—and going from there.  Finding the possibilities in a piece of writing requires generous and attentive reading.  It is hard, empathic work but can be far more rewarding than starting with the critical scalpel and going flaw-hunting.  The flaws tend to dry up and flake off the page without much messy coercion if the reader and writer agree on what and where the real promise is.  One of my favorite metaphors I draw from the sport of curling: when teaching, I like to think of myself as the person with the broom clearing the way for another’s earnest intentions.

Best known for his short-short stories about 'the boys,' Jim Heynen has published widely as a writer of poems, novels, nonfiction, and short fiction. His stories about the boys have been featured often on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," as well as on radio in both Sweden and Denmark. Astronaut George Pinky Nelson took a taped collection of the stories for bedtime listening on his last space mission. The most recent collection of these stories, The Boys' House, was named Editors' Choice for Best Books of 2001 by The Bloomsbury Review, Newsday, and Booklist.  He lived for many years in the Northwest and received a Northwest Booksellers Award for one of his story collections. He has received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in both poetry and fiction and in 1978 was selected as for a US/UK Bicentennial Exchange Fellowship to England.  He has published two YA novels with Henry Holt and has just completed an adult novel.  He currently lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

DAVID HUDDLE, Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction

"Listening has become a philosophy for me as both a teacher and a writer.  I've become a better writer by way of paying more attention to what my writing is trying to convey to me as I'm working on it.  I've become a better teacher by way of giving my students more "say" in the classroom.  As a reader, I'm often trying to help other writers discover their work's "truest" impulses.  And though I've been teaching for thirty-two years now, I still get chills when I read a terrific passage in a manuscript or when a member of a workshop speaks with illuminating generosity.  It's not that I don't have opinions that I'm eager to share--in recent years, I've even found myself pounding the table and surprising myself with the passion of my words, something I was far too cool to do in my first twenty-five years of teaching."

David Huddle is Professor of English at the University of Vermont and the Bread Loaf School of English. Winner of two NEA fellowships, he is the author of many collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His novel, The Story of a Million Years (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) was named a Distinguished Book of the Year by Esquire and a best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times Book Review.  His most recent books are a novel, La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), and a collection of poems, Glory River (LSU Press, Spring 2008).

JUDITH KITCHEN, Nonfiction, Fiction, Criticism, (Poetry)

"I believe in passionate memory, remembered passion, and the long, slow, often lonely, labors of the writer. That said, I also believe in the joint effort that can result in inspired revision. My deepest interest is in how to shape material, how to discover the underlying issues and then find a structure to enhance them. In both fiction and nonfiction, I like to see where personal experience intersects with the imaginary (or the critical) way of thinking. I look forward to a freewheeling discussion where questions count more than answers."

Judith Kitchen is the author of a novel, The House on Eccles Road, winner of the S. Mariella Gable Prize from Graywolf Press, two collections of essays, Distance and Direction (Coffeehouse Press) and Only the Dance (U. of South Carolina Press), as well as a critical study of William Stafford, Writing the World (Oregon State University Press). She is co-editor of two collections of short essays, In Short and In Brief (both W. W. Norton), and the editor of a third collection, Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction. Her awards include an NEA fellowship in poetry, a Pushcart Prize in nonfiction, and recognition as a distinguished teacher of adults. She has been the invited guest at many residencies, including Centrum, Split Rock Arts Program, The Vermont Studio Center, and the Chautauqua Writers Institute. Kitchen has judged a number of national awards, including the Pushcart Prize for poetry, the Theodore Roethke Prize, the Anhinga Prize, the AWP Nonfiction Award, the Bellingham Review's Annie Dillard award for creative nonfiction, the Bush Foundation fellowships, and the Oregon Book Award. She is an Advisory and Contributing Editor for The Georgia Review where she regularly reviews poetry. In addition, she has the distinction of being called—by Newsday—the Evel Knievel of literature.

DINAH LENNEY, Nonfiction

“As an actor and a writer, I’m interested in overlapping craft, in strategies having to do with cultivating voice – finding it, honing it, applying it, and getting it right, whatever it is. “Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life… Know your own bone, gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still.” So wrote Thoreau, and the words are comfort and inspiration both, as they apply to craft, and to our personal themes, whatever they are. The arts – all of them – are about a quest for connection and understanding; the quest itself makes life worth living for artists, and, if you ask me, artists make life worth living for everyone else. The work is occasionally frustrating, sure – but none more rewarding. Martha Graham wrote to Agnes DeMille: “…It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable it is… Keep the channel open, no artist is pleased… There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than others…” A bit bleak that, but what a relief – a delight, in fact -- to keep company with a community of like-minded people…”

Dinah Lenney, a working actor in Los Angeles, is the author of Bigger than Life: A Murder, a Memoir, excerpted in the New York Times Magazine, and published by the University of Nebraska Press in Tobias Wolff’s American Lives Series. Her reviews and essays have appeared in national newspapers and journals, including Agni Online and the Los Angeles Times. Dinah holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she’s served as nonfiction faculty, and teaches in the MPW program at the University of Southern California. She lives in Echo Park – just over the hill from Dodger Stadium -- with her husband and two children.  www.dinahlenney.com

SUSAN LUDVIGSON, Poetry (on leave)

"I encourage workshops characterized by mutual support, openness to various modes of expression, and honest criticism. I think it worthwhile, in the process of developing a voice, to experiment with a variety of approaches to writing poems, and I encourage such experimentation through assignments and through conversation with individual student-writers. I believe that all writing is exploration, and that a teacher's job is to help (and push) people to discover the processes that lead them to their best poems. I do not identify myself with any particular 'school' of poetry, for I think good and great poems have been and will continue to be written in every tradition."

Susan Ludvigson's most recent collection, her seventh book with LSU Press, is Sweet Confluence, New and Selected Poems (2000). Other recent books from LSU Press are Trinity, Everything Winged Must Be Dreaming, and To Find the Gold. Among the journals in which she has published poems are The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ohio Review, Gettysburg Review, and The Georgia Review. Her poems also appear in more than a dozen anthologies. She publishes essays on the arts in literary magazines and in the photography journal 21st. She has twice served as editor for the Associated Writing Programs Intro Awards, and as final judge for many poetry contests. After receiving Guggenheim, Fulbright, National Endowment for the Arts and Witter Bynner fellowships, she was invited to be a panelist for the NEA's individual artist awards and served on two additional NEA panels. Her own awards also include a Rockefeller-Bellagio fellowship and grants and fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council and the South Carolina Arts Commission. She has represented the U.S. at writers' congresses in France, Belgium, Canada, and Yugoslavia and given poetry readings in those countries and throughout the U.S., including at the Library of Congress. Since 1975 she has taught at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, SC. In the spring semester of 2000 she served as Poet-in-Residence at the University of South Carolina.

REBECCA McCLANAHAN

"In my workshops, I am not interested in “fixing” so-called flawed texts; fixing is the work of morticians. I am interested in helping writers discover what their drafts want to be when they grow up. How do we locate the essay hiding within the messay, the memoir stalled on a ME-more track, the poem trying to sing its way out of the journal’s pages? Our task as writers is not only to pay attention to our world but also to use the materials of the world in extraordinary ways. To do this, we must uncover the subtle design, the “figure in the carpet” that is woven into even the most everyday events. Often we must proceed without knowing what form the work will finally take. We write our way into the question, into the mystery. Writing begets more writing; meaning grows on the page."

Rebecca McClanahan’s most recent books are Deep Light: New and Selected Poems 1987-2007 and The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings, which won the 2005 Glasgow Award for nonfiction. She has also published four previous volumes of poetry and three books about the writing craft, including Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Best American Essays, The Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Boulevard and numerous anthologies, and her awards include the Wood prize from Poetry, a Pushcart Prize in fiction, and (twice) the Carter prize for the essay from Shenandoah.  She lives in New York City.

KENT MEYERS, Fiction, Nonfiction

"I’ve heard writers say that, to avoid influence, they never read fiction when they’re writing it. I, on the other hand, want to be influenced—by everything: the shadows on the sidewalk, the expression on a stranger’s passing face, the music from an open window and, yes, other writers. I want to borrow power and style and voice, use them to challenge and stretch me. If that influence is too strong in the first draft, by the time the novel or story has gone through several revisions, it will have subsumed all those influences, taken them in and become its own thing. The same ought to be true for a writing workshop. We should be influenced and challenged by all those other minds—and yet in the end, emerge with our own, unique voice, an amalgamation that isn’t an amalgamation at all."
                                                           "There's always one more thing you can read."
                                                           "I think the greatest risk a writer can take may be writing in the first person, nonfiction voice—
                                                                    in other words, in one's own voice."
                                                            "I've never taken a creative writing class."
                                                            "If you're going to write prose, write every day."
                                                            "A writer finishes."                                                              —from an online Interview with Catherine Tudor

Kent Meyers' third novel, Grammar of a Killing, is forthcoming from Harcourt Brace.  He is the author of two other novels (The River Warren and The Work of Wolves), a book of short stories (Light in the Crossing), and a collection of personal essays (The Witness of Combines).  Two of his books were listed as Notable Book of the year by The New York Times and his work has been cited in Best American Short Stories and Best of the West.  His most recent novel, The Work of Wolves, received the Mountains and Plains Bookseller's Award in 2005 and was listed as one of the best books of 2004 by The Christian Science Monitor.   A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he has also received distinguished teaching awards from both the Faculty and Student Senates at Black Hills State University where he is Writer-in-Residence.  He lives and works in Spearfish, South Dakota.

BRENDA MILLER, Nonfiction

"As both a writer and a teacher, I'm so interested in how we make authentic connections, especially in a world that has grown so busy and ‘digitized’ that such connections can be rare, fleeting, and absolutely stunning.  I look forward to being witness, cheerleader, mentor, and companion as you find your true voice in creative nonfiction.”


Brenda Miller is the author of Season of the Body (Sarabande Books, 2002) which was a finalist for the PEN American Center Book Award in Creative Nonfiction.  She has received four Pushcart Prizes, and her essays have appeared in numerous periodicals such as The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Utne Reader, and The Georgia Review.  She co-authored, with Suzanne Paola, the textbook Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction (McGraw-Hill, 2003). She is Associate Professor of English at Western Washington University and the Editor-in-Chief of The Bellingham Review.

ANN PANCAKE, Fiction, Nonfiction

"My greatest commitment as both a writer and a teacher is to writing that originates in deep personal investment because I believe that only by writing from this place in ourselves do we produce real art. For this reason, I think the most valuable expertise I can bring to my students is not my education in literature, nor what I've learned about craft after practicing it for twenty years, although I'll bring those, too. It's my ability to listen: to students, as they describe their interests, backgrounds, and aspirations, and to their drafts, from their earliest conceptions to their final stages. Through this kind of close listening, I help students find their passions. I guide them towards discovering and developing their own authentic voices. And I teach them to identify and then realize their drafts' richest potential."

Ann Pancake’s novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been, was published by Shoemaker & Hoard in Fall 2007, and featured in Oprah Magazine and the New York Times.  Her collection of short stories, Given Ground, won the 2000 Bakeless award and was published by the University Press of New England in 2001.  Other prizes she has received include a Whiting Award, an NEA Grant, a Pushcart Prize, the Glasgow Prize, the New Millennium Award for creative nonfiction, and creative writing fellowships from the states of Washington, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.  Her fiction and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies like Glimmer Train, Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and New Stories from the South.  She holds a PHD in English Literature from the University of Washington.

LIA PURPURA, Nonfiction, Poetry

"For all the necessities of solitude (depth of concentration, ruthless candor, reverie, license to fail grandly) eventually most writers need a reflective ear, a fellow maker's focused reception. Without impassioned attention from the wider world, solitude cannot continue to offer its secrets. I look forward to the essential exchange that will take place in this community of writers and to reflecting for students their own efforts-a practice ripe with surprise and generative energy for everyone involved."

Lia Purpura's new book of poetry, King Baby, won the 2007 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books.  Her collection of essays, On Looking, Sarabande Press, 2006 was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Her collection of essays, Increase, won the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction and was published by the University of Georgia press in 2000.  She is also the author of Stone Sky Lifting  (poems), The Brighter the Veil (poems), and Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash (translations).  She has published poems, essays and translations and reviews in many magazines, including American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Agni Review, Double Take, Parnassus: Poetry in Review and Ploughshares.  She has served as writer-in-residence at the Thurber House in Ohio and has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pushcart Prize.   She is currently Writer-in-Residence at Loyola College in Baltimore, MD. 

MARJORIE SANDOR, Fiction, Nonfiction (on leave 2008-2009)

“One day in college, my favorite teacher came to the limit of her patience with me. I had nearly suffocated a personal essay full of similes and metaphors and the word  "I."  She looked at my five drafts, handed them back and said, "You can do better than this. Just tell the truth.” The simple rightness of this struck me like a blow to the head, and still does: it is a model of great teaching. Of course I still commit, on a daily basis, the sins of over-decorating, of willful obscurity and unmediated anger and blindness to irony, but I know, thanks to her, that there is another way. And I try to follow her example as a teacher, too.

“The Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg once said she wanted to be "the recording angel" of her family. I like this idea, and even better, her example. Her sentences are laconic, unadorned, stripped down in language and tragic in historical context, but rich in compassion, humor, and irony. She regards her characters with an astonishing tenderness, from a little distance, as if she hovers just above the earth's surface, still part of its atmosphere, but not confined by its petty passions. Another great writer, Nadine Gordimer, says you must write as if you were already dead. I almost know what she means, and I will spend the rest of my life reaching to accomplish it, if only in a single sentence that bears witness to the beautiful failures we are bound, by our humanness, to create. I read for it, write toward it, and teach with it always in mind.”

Marjorie Sandor is the author of two short story collections: A Night of Music (Ecco, 1989) and Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime (Sarabande Books, 2003), which was awarded the prestigious National Jewish Book Award in 2004.   Her collection of personal essays, The Night Gardener: A Search for Home (1999, The Lyons Press) won the 2000 Oregon Book Award for literary nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories 1985 and 1988, the Pushcart Prize XIII, The Georgia Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. She is on the faculty of the M.F.A. program at Oregon State University in Corvallis and in 2004-2005 she served as President of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).

PEGGY SHUMAKER, Poetry, Nonfiction

"Language is one way we make our way in the world. Our intensive sessions will involve writing new material for poems and working on drafts we've generated. We'll also practice reading as writers--looking at poems and prose to find tools we can adapt for our own uses. My own work comes from two deserts--the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona and the subarctic desert of Interior Alaska. Most of my poems depend on images and sounds to create their worlds. Right now I'm at work on a nonfiction book and a book of new poems."

Peggy Shumaker's books of poems include Underground Rivers (Red Hen Press), Wings Moist from the Other World and The Circle of Totems (Pitt), Braided River (Limner Press), and Esperanza's Hair (U. Alabama Press). Blaze, a poetry/painting collaboration with the Alaska artist Kes Woodward, was published in 2005 by Red Hen Press.  Her memoir, Just Breathe Normally, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2007.  Her essays have appeared in such journals as Prairie Schooner and Ascent.  She has won a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and several awards for teaching. She is professor emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks. Peggy Shumaker grew up in Tucson, and earned her BA and her MFA from University of Arizona.  She worked for years doing residencies for the Arizona Commission on the Arts, with prison inmates, honors students, gang members, deaf adults, teen parents, little kids and elderly folks. She has given readings in art galleries, a governor’s mansion, a clearing in the woods, an abandoned bank, on reservations, in libraries, at a gold dredge, under the hoodoos at Bryce Canyon, on a riverboat, and at many bookstores, community centers, and universities. 

SHERRY SIMPSON, Nonfiction

2007 Guests

2006 Guests

2005 Guests

2004 Guests

Sam Hamill, Copper Canyon Press
Recipient of the Stanley W. Lindberg Editor's Award

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Past Faculty

Jonis Agee, Fiction

Marvin Bell, Master Class in Poetry

Sharon Bryan, Poetry

Justin Cronin, Fiction

Scott Ely, Fiction

Stephen Kuusisto, Nonfiction