The Recording Angel: Writing about Family with Marjorie Sandor SORRY-THIS WORKSHOP IS FULL!
The Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg once said she wanted to be “the recording angel” of her family—to practice a kind of compassionate detachment as she wrote. We’ll use her image of the recording angel to catch and fleetingly hold our own nearest subjects, those characters, times, and domestic spaces capable of stirring our most dangerous feelings of attachment: old angers, older fears, great passions, and the desire to protect—all of that—with the goal of releasing those characters and places into vivid, unsentimental life on the page. We’ll write “just to the side” of these difficult subjects by focusing on childhood houses, domestic objects, old family photographs, and lost family figures, to see what they still have to tell us.
 
Marjorie Sandor's most recent book is a memoir, The Late Interiors: A Life Under Construction (Arcade/Skyhorse Publishing, May 2011). Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal, and the Pushcart Prize, and in such journals as the Georgia Review, AGNI, and TriQuarterly. She directs and teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

In Partnership with the Spirit of Writing with Luis Alberto Urrea SORRY-THIS WORKSHOP IS FULL!
Every successful piece of writing breathes and has a soul. Our job is to find ways to unleash that life in our text. What we are after is no less than a black belt in writing-fu (we will be reading The Wen-Fu of Lu Chi, among other sources). If we work in cooperation with our words -- not in opposition or competition -- they will help us as we strive to tell our stories. Writing is alive; writing is responsive. In this workshop we will attempt to set those spirits loose. Technique and wen-fu must work together. It's time to play; I am not interested in what you've already written, but I am interested in exploring inspiration. For me, Fishtrap was always about inspiration, not fame, fortune or careers. Our aim is not for a perfect manuscript, but for a basketful of perfect beginnings. You can pick nourishment out of that basket for the rest of the year.

Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer Prize finalist and member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame, is the best-selling author of 14 books, including Queen of America, The Hummingbird's Daughter and The Devil's Highway. Recipient of an American Book Award, Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize, Lannan Literary Award and a Western States Book Award, Urrea has published extensively in all of the major genres. Born in Tijuana, Mexico, to an American mother and a Mexican father, Urrea uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph. This will be his sixth stint teaching at beloved Fishtrap. Urrea lives with his family in Naperville, IL, where he is a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago. 

Story Catching: The Outpost Workshop with Ellen Waterston
And to that place to which your best dreams take you there are those that have been waiting.
We all have stories and poems we catch and then release, either as a finished piece or as an aborted effort. But what about the ones that got away, the ones we didn’t even notice? Over the course of this five-day retreat, relying on prompts, brief supplemental readings and hand-outs, as well as hikes led by naturalists and botanists to further immerse us into the landscape of this magnificent cleaved plateau, we will coax to the surface stories, poems, and short memoirs we never knew were there, waiting. 
Ellen Waterston writes essays, poetry and fiction from The Boathouse, her bungalow on the Deschutes River as it flows through Bend, Oregon. Where The Crooked River Rises, a collection of Ellen Waterston’s award-winning personal and nature essays about Central Oregon’s High Desert, was published by OSU Press Fall 2010. Her poems have appeared in numerous reviews and anthologies and awards include the 2009 and 2005 WILLA Award in Poetry for the collections Between Desert Seasons and I Am Madagascar, respectively, and the 2007 Obsidian Prize in Poetry. Cold Snap, a chapbook of poetry and short-form prose that grew out of her Werner Residency in 2011, was published by Fishtrap in December 2011.

The Outpost Workshop on the Zumwalt will run July 8-15, 2012. Participants are expected to be comfortable tent camping, and tent spaces will be provided both at the Nature Conservancy Summer Camp and at the Wallowa Lake Camp. The camping site is adjacent to the Conservancy's bathroom facilities and is accessible by vehicle. Fishtrap will provide van transportation from the Fishtrap office in Enterprise to the Zumwalt Preserve and back to the Wallowa Lake Camp, and registration covers the cost of tent sites. Participants are expected to have good mobility and be able to fully participate in camp activities, short hikes and be comfortable sleeping on air mattresses in tents, or if the weather allows, under one of the most vibrant skies in the American West. A digital packet, including a packing list and itinerary, will be emailed to participants before the workshop. If you have any questions about whether the Outpost workshop is right for you, please call Fishtrap at 541-426-3623

[More on Outpost here]register now

Maps and Other Chords with Kirsten Rian
John McPhee once wrote, “Ideas are where you find them...” This workshop will explore those findings and turn them into prose writing including nonfiction, flash fiction, and playwriting. We’ll string words together; bridging what is gathered and distilled inside ourselves, with the rest of the world that exists outside. Additional activities may include exploring the Wallowa Lake area for migrating stories, selves, and ways of seeing. 

Kirsten Rian is the author of an anthology of Sierra Leonean poetry, Kalashnikov in the Sun and co-author of Walking Bridges Using Poetry as a Compass. Her poetry and nonfiction appears in numerous magazines, international literary journals, and anthologies, and she was recently nominated for inclusion in the Best New Poets anthology. She leads workshops internationally in locations like Sierra Leone and Finland, facilitating writing as a tool for literacy, healing, and storytelling within the refugee/immigrant and homeless communities. She teaches writing at Portland State University. register now

Architecture of the Longer Narrative 
Jane Vandenburgh

Jane Vandenburgh offers a year of individual instruction, practical guidance and spiritual encouragement to writers who have a book-length project already underway. Memoir, fiction, and non-fiction narratives are all welcome. A book length work — be it a novel or a collection of linked stories — often fails to be completed for reasons of its own length: the narrative weight of all its novelistic material so easily defeats a story’s need to feel effortless. Structural problems are, in fact, almost always the reason these good books of ours are not completed.  By working closely with the knowledgeable and engaging instructor first at Summer Fishtrap, then in monthly telephone conferences, students develop those habits and skills critical to getting the whole story down and bringing it to a successful conclusion. Jane Vandenburgh is herself a prize-winning novelist and memoirist: her recent book on structuring the book-length narrative, The Architecture of the Novel: A Writer's Handbook, is quickly becoming the standard of the industry.  Why? Because she's broken what might seem the too-ambitious journey into a series of rewarding steps.

Yesterday Is All That Counts: A Yearlong Course in Book-Length Historical Fiction with Karen Fisher is concluding at Summer Fishtrap 2012. Karen's first novel, A Sudden Country was cited by reviewers around the country as one of the best novels of 2005. It won numerous awards, including the Washington State Book Award and the 2006 Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, and was named finalist for the PEN/Faulkner. She lives on Lopez Island with her three children and a herd of horses. She is at work on a second novel set in part in the Snake River country. Karen taught a popular one-week workshop in Historical Fiction at Summer Fishtrap 2010. At the request of her students, we have invited her to teach this longer form course.

[MORE DETAILS on YEARLONG WORKSHOPS HERE]

David James Duncan
David James Duncan is a father, a fly fisher, a practitioner of what he calls “small-scale compassion-activism,” and the author of the forthcoming two-volume novel Sun House, the novels The River Why and The Brothers K, the story collection River Teeth, and the nonfiction collections My Story as Told by Water and God Laughs & Plays. He is also co-author of two fast-response activist books, The Heart of the Monster (2011, co-written with Rick Bass)and Citizen’s Dissent (2003, co-written with Wendell Berry). Duncan's work has won three Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, two Pushcarts, a Lannan Fellowship, the Western States Book Award for nonfiction, an honorary doctorate from University of Portland, and inclusion in more than forty national anthologies including Best American Essays, Best American Sports Writing, Best American Catholic Writing, and Best American Spiritual Writing (six times). The Brothers K was also a New York Times Notable Book but, says Duncan, "that doesn't necessarily mean it's no good." 

David’s essay, stories, memoirs and interviews have appeared in scores of magazines, most often, recently, in Orion, Portland, and The Sun. He has spoken all over the U.S. on rivers and wilderness, imaginative and spiritual freedom, the nonreligious literature of faith, the tragicomedy of the writing life, the increasingly practical charms of the contemplative life, and the irreplaceable importance of the Interior West’s fast-vanishing wild salmon. Mr. Duncan lives with his family in western Montana. At this writing, Sun House is scheduled to appear (edited by Michael Pietsch and published by Little Brown) in December 2012.

Don Snow
Don Snow is a professor, editor, writer, and activist with more than 30 years’ experience in environmental and natural resource issues in the American West. At Northern Lights Institute in Missoula, he was the founding editor of  Northern Lights Magazine and the Chronicle of Community.  His essays and articles have appeared in High Country News, Orion, Sierra, High Desert Journal, Environmental Law and Montana Magazine. His books include Northern Lights: A Selection of Writing from the American West; The Next West: Public Lands, Community and Economy in the American West; Across the Great Divide: Explorations in Collaborative Conservation; and The Book of the Tongass.  He teaches Environmental Humanities at Whitman College in Walla Walla.