Sewage ponds and the "liquid that flowed in the veins of the gods"

Hello Fishtrap Friends,

I visited a couple of outlying Fishtrap programs over the past week. First it was to Harney County in southeast Oregon, home of the annual John Scharff Migratory Bird Festival, held on the first full weekend each April. At an elevation of over 4,000 feet, Burns was still more winter than spring. In between walks alongside the city’s sewage ponds, where 1,000, no 2,000, no, maybe 5,000 snow geese gabbled in the warmth, I met with this year’s Writer-in-Residence, Kristy Athens.

As Kristy emailed some friends a couple of weeks ago, “I am smack-dab in the middle of a two-month adventure in the Oregon outback. This is an amazing experience. The first week, I worked with the kids in Frenchglen, a town with 36 registered voters. In this two-room school, I worked with the K-3 grades (ten students) and then moved over to the 4-8 grades (four students). The younger kids drew ‘Word Pictures;’ the older ones went on to write fantastic Plein Air pieces.”

When I visited, Kristy was coaching some adults through another Pleir Air writing exercise. Lacking the warmth of the sewage ponds, these folks suffered gamely. Wrote one writer, Linda Harrington, “These are the hardest days for me in Burns. The ones where the wind howls and hisses and bellows at me as if to say, ‘Go away, newcomer, you will never adapt to this place.’ It is tough country.” (See www.fishtrap.org/eowir_hc.shtml for Linda’s full piece). Tough country, great material for writing. Thanks, Kristy and Harney County volunteers Kate Marsh-Copeland, Carolyn Koskela, and Peg Wallis, for making the Writer in Residence program a success this year.

Then it was down to Imnaha, where writers have been staying for a week or two during the month of April. I got there just in time for fresh steelhead. A big thank you to Penny Hetherington, who donated a week’s retreat to another happy writer. After hearing folks share what they’d been working on, I wandered outside and slept under the stars beside the Imnaha River, dreamt of a long-ago love, and woke before dawn to drive home past tentative deer and turkeys by the dim roadside. To learn more about the Imnaha Retreat, go to www.fishtrap.org/imnaha.shtml. There’s still plenty of room in October.

If you are in Wallowa County, go to the Mid-Valley Theatre performance of To Kill a Mockingbird this weekend at the Providence Academy in Lostine. Show is at 7 pm on Friday and Saturday, and Sunday at 2 pm. I have heard that it’s been standing room only at this “best-ever production.” Kudos to the all-volunteer cast, which has put in 3,000 hours of time to date.

The second edition of Fishstock will be upon us before you know it. Join us in The Dalles on May 15 for a fun afternoon and evening of book signings, music, and readings, with Robin Cody, Clem Starck, Rosalie Sorrels, Steve Einhorn and Kate Power, Dan Maher, and others. Thanks to Klindt’s Booksellers, Columbia River Music, and The Dalles Area Chamber of Commerce for their support. Tickets are $25, available at http://fishstockoregon.net.

A few days before Fishstock, we will be hosting the 2010 Oregon Book Awards Author Tour, sponsored by Literary Arts. Join us on Wednesday, May 12 at the Fishtrap house to hear John Kroger of Salem, winner of the Sarah Winnemucca Award in Creative Nonfiction for Convictions: A Prosecutor's Battles Against Mafia Killers, Drug Kingpins, and Enron Thieves, Donna Matrazzo of Portland, author of Wild Things: Adventures of a Grassroots Environmentalist, and Jon Raymond of Portland, winner of the Ken Kesey Award in Fiction for Livability. The event is at 7 pm and is free to the public.

Summer Fishtrap is mostly sold out, although we do still have some room in the songwriting workshop with Cosy Sheridan, Kirsten Rian’s writing workshop for kids 8-12 years old, and the teenagers’ writing workshop with Beth Russell. See www.fishtrap.org/sft2010.htm for details on these workshops.

And if you’d like to watch a 2-minute trailer for a film about Gary Snyder which we will be screening at Summer Fishtrap, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRS-UO8wOQU.

One night in Burns, a group of us ate food we’d never tried before, and played “fictionary.” You know, use the dictionary to pick a word that no one knows, and make up fake definitions to fool everyone else. Cut-throat contestant Terry Keim turned some of our favorite words of the evening into a poem:

Conenose

Oh, to knight or knout
the pesty conenose?
A bite from which then
flows a gloze
of ichor,
indicating either

you are easily wounded, or

you are a god.

Until next time,

Rick Bombaci
Executive Director