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Debra Gwartney

The Integration of Place in Memoir
Sorry this workshop is currently FULL! (You may sign up for the waiting list)

In this memoir workshop, we’ll concentrate on setting, and the strong sense of place that is often critical to creating tension in a piece of writing. When describing a setting as ominous or beautiful or bucolic, the writer must recognize how this description adds to the meaning of the story and to the reader’s overall experience of the story.
We’ll look at examples of specificity related to place, and study passages that use a sense of place to add tremendous tension to narrative. We will do plenty of writing, discovering how details about one’s own place can add texture, depth, richness, and complexity to memoir.

Roberta Lavadour

Places and Spaces: The Topography of the Sculptural Book

We’re going to add a dimension of physical interaction to the book that will allow words and/or imagery to be revealed, concealed, nested, uplifted and intricately wedded to the page. Borrowing from children’s books and recent innovations in the field of book arts we’ll create a small collection of sculptural works that engage the reader in unexpected ways. Participants will gain a good understanding of sound bookbinding structure and technique. No previous experience is necessary.

Sandy Osawa

Sandra Sunrising Osawa is an independent filmmaker and a member of the Makah Indian Nation. An early advocate for the right of Native Americans to tell their own stories in the media, Sandra has produced several films, shown on NBC and PBS and at the Sundance Film Festival. Her latest film, about Osage ballerina Maria Tallchief, began airing on PBS in 2007.
Sandra’s video work has been featured at many film festivals, including the Sundance and Margaret Mead festivals. Her work has been featured at the Museum of Modern Art. She is a member of the Professional Screen Writers Guild and owns, with her husband, Upstream Productions in Seattle.

Words in Motion: Writing for Film

Finding words to fit the image is a process for writers of any genre. You need not be a filmmaker; we will examine the process of writing for film and explore tools that may help with your writing, regardless of genre.
My filmmaking practice has been to make Native American stories less abstract and more personal, intimate, concrete, and multi-dimensional. Our workshop will emphasize moving away from generalities and toward the particular human story. We will devote some attention to the oral interview as a basis of knowing your subject and as an art form. My goal is to help you create a fluid feeling in your work, to put the right words to the right image in the right rhythm.

Kirsten Rian

Kirsten Rian’s poetry has appeared in national literary journals and anthologies, and was recently nominated for inclusion in the 2008 Best New Poets anthology. She leads workshops internationally, including locations like Sierra Leone and Finland, using poetry as a tool for literacy, healing, and storytelling within the refugee/immigrant and homeless communities. A resident of Portland, Oregon, she works with students of all ages through Literary Arts, Saturday Academy, the I Have a Dream Foundation, Multnomah County Library, and others. As a poet in residence at Atkinson Elementary School, she worked with five different multi language classes, resulting in 850 poems and a school anthology.

Seeing the Stories: The World At Our Feet

Young authors turn their words into rich, imaginative poetry and prose by exploring and writing about the world at their feet. Our days will be filled with looking for the unusual in the usual, finding and recognizing the stories we each carry, and those we invent, writing, sharing, reflecting, revising. I will place emphasis on image, description, and voice. Our activities may include a trip on the Mt. Howard tram, hiking near Wallowa Lake, and other daily adventures to prompt our writing and seeing.

(For youth ages 8-14)

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Jack Shoemaker

Over the course of forty years, Jack Shoemaker has owned or managed a number of important literary bookshops, and established several small fine presses.

In the 1970s, Jack served on the Literature Panel of the National Endowment of the Arts. In 1979, he co founded and served as editor-in-chief at North Point Press, whose books and authors won many awards, including MacArthur Fellowships, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and others. In 1994, Jack helped found Counterpoint Press, which now consists of three imprints, and brings together the backlist titles of several founding authors, including Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, MFK Fisher, Evan Connell, Robert Aitken and others.

From Writer to Author, For Better or Worse

While writing is an art and publishing may be artful, the process of seeing a book into the hands of readers is a mechanical matter involving the writer at various stages, as it turns The Writer into An Author, for better or worse.
I will give a detailed overview, including finding an agent, finding a publisher, vetting a contract, and the whole process from there to the moment when your phone stops ringing. A general discussion will follow if time allows.

Ed Skoog

Ed Skoog’s first book of poems, Mister Skylight, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in June 2009. His poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and Narrative. He has been a scholar at Bread Loaf and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and was selected for the 2007 Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. He grew up in Topeka, Kansas and has lived in Missoula, New Orleans, and southern California. He is currently the writer in residence at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle.

Fire Balloons: A Poetry Workshop
Sorry this workshop is currently FULL! (You may sign up for the waiting list)

At twenty, Percy Shelley sent his Declaration of Rights from the coast of Wales toward Ireland in fire balloons fashioned from silk and cowgum, propelled by spirit soaked wicks. Our workshop will work with this radiant, dangerous information as a model, for every poem is a new approach, a sudden invention that forgets the last poem: a revolution. This workshop will provide participants the space to invent and propose new poems, and the encouragement to revise them into works of greater intensity and surprise, through critique and attention to particulars of craft but also through receptive eagerness for buoyant and illuminating ideas.

Kim Stafford

Kim Stafford is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, most recently The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft, and has worked as an oral historian, letterpress printer, editor, photographer, teacher, and visiting writer at a host of small towns in the Pacific Northwest. He served as a writer in the schools in Wallowa County for three months in 1978, a time when the county began calling him to listen, with others, in this place.

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The Fishtrap Writing Outpost at Billy Meadows
Sorry this workshop is currently FULL! (You may sign up for the waiting list)

“Have you given no thought to the people of this place,” asks Fox of Coyote in the Nez Perce creation story. We will gather at Billy Meadows for writing devoted to the Wallowa country. By walking on the land, listening in the pines, stargazing, and sharing stories and questions and local concerns, we will write in multiple genres in devotion to the center of the world.

Billy Meadows is an historic US Forest Service facility built by the CCC. Situated in a pine grove between the Zumwalt Prairie and Joseph Canyon, it is about 40 miles north of Wallowa Lake. Participants will be driven to Billy Meadows on Sunday afternoon, and will return to Wallowa Lake on Thursday. The workshop will conclude on Friday.

Robert Stubblefield

Robert Stubblefield has published fiction and personal essays in Dreamers and Desperadoes: Contemporary Short Fiction of the American West, Best Stories of the American West, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Left Bank, and others. Awards include the Georges and Anne Borchardt scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Fishtrap Fellowship, and finalist standing and publication for the Doug Fir Fiction Award. An eastern Oregon native, he lives in Missoula, where he teaches at the University of Montana.

All That Coming and Going: A Short Fiction Workshop

We will explore the role place plays in fiction as a catalyst. Attachment to or dissatisfaction with place can provide a powerful dynamic for setting a story in motion. We will study plot, form, structure, and essential elements of successful short stories such as believable, compelling characters, convincing dialogue, consistent point-of-view, and openings that beg the reader to turn the page.

Plan to bring one story-in-progress and to generate a substantial amount of writing throughout the workshop. We will focus primarily on participant work, but will also read and discuss stories by Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Ford, Pam Houston, and Chris Offutt. Writing is an exercise in faith and doubt. We will work to sustain your faith and overcome your doubts.

Linda Waterfall

Praised by the Seattle Times as “Seattle’s Top Singer/Songwriter,” Linda Waterfall has released twelve recordings of original vocal music. Critics’ comments include “... mixing vernacular and highbrow culture, and everything in between” and “simply one of the finest fingerpicking guitar players alive on planet Earth today.”

Linda has performed all over the U.S., combining the intimacy of folk with the high energy of rock and roll. She has also composed choral and vocal music for numerous grants, commissions and institutions. Linda currently teaches at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle.

The Creative Potential of the Unknown in Songwriting
Sorry this workshop is currently FULL! (You may sign up for the waiting list)

Venturing into unknown territory produces excitement, curiosity, apprehension, and tremendous energy. How does the unknown show up in your process? By trying something new on your instrument? Trying a less familiar instrument? What about writing without using the instrument at all?

Exercises and discussions will help take you into your unique inner wilderness. We will also focus on what to do with fragments when they mystify us. Exercises will serve as springboards into new song ideas, with the possibility of having a new song or two by the end of the week.

John Daniel

Author of three memoirs, two volumes of personal essays, and two collections of poems, John Daniel has won two Oregon Book Awards for Literary Nonfiction, the PNBA Award, and a fellowship from the NEA. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and James T. Thurber Writer in Residence at Ohio State University, Daniel lives with his wife, Marilyn, in the Coast Range foothills west of Eugene, Oregon. His most recent books are The Far Corner (April 2009) and Rogue River Journal.

Click here to read John Daniel's essay "The Mother of Beauty" on Open Spaces

Telling the Truth in the First Person: A Yearlong Course in Memoir

If only memoir – writing from memory – were as simple as it sounds. The memoirist must locate the story he wants to tell, discover by writing his way into it the constellation of experiences that compose the story, and bring the story alive on the page, shaping it there as painstakingly as any fiction writer shapes a novel. It is a difficult voyage of discovery, but an exciting and rewarding one.

The aim of this course is for each participant to write, over twelve months, a substantial draft of a book length memoir. The course begins and ends with a workshop at Summer Fishtrap, 2009 and 2010, with a briefer session in January 2010. Between these workshops participants correspond with the instructor individually, sending 25 to 30 pages per month for discussion. Previous publication credits are not required.

Jane Vandenburgh

Jane Vandenburgh is the author of two novels, Failure to Zigzag and The Physics of Sunset, as well as the just published memoir A Pocket History of Sex in the 20th Century, out in March 2009. The Architecture of the Novel, her book on the craft of writing the longer narrative, which has been developed from the experience of teaching the year long workshop, will be published in January 2010.

A fifth-generation Californian, Jane has taught literature and writing at U. C. Davis, at Georgetown and at George Washington University in Washington, DC, and will be Writer in Residence at St. Mary's College in Moraga, California.

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Yearlong Novel Workshop

The Yearlong Novel Workshop, which started at Summer Fishtrap in 2008, will conclude in July 2009. We will have three (we hope) completed manuscripts and good starts by five others. All eight will take part in a panel discussion, open to all Fishtrap participants, to share their experience of this experiment in offering a structured approach to the longer narrative project.

Horace Axtell

Horace Axtell, 84, has received numerous awards, including an honorary doctorate from Lewis Clark State College. He has been featured in several documentaries about Nez Perce culture. Current leader of the Nimiipuu Longhouse, Horace is also a World War II veteran, tradition bearer, mentor, storyteller, and hand drum maker.

In the late 1980s, Horace taught the first Nez Perce language class at Lewis-Clark State College. Margo Aragon interviewed him for their collaborative memoir A Little Bit of Wisdom: Conversations With a Nez Perce Elder, and is currently working with him to translate the oldest book in the Pacific Northwest, Nez Perces First Book: Designed for Children and New Beginners.

Fellowships
Each year up to five Fishtrap Fellowships are awarded. Fellows receive workshop registration, featured reading spots, and room and board for the Fishtrap week. The call for Fellowship applications goes out in November, and submissions are due at the end of January. There is no reading fee. The judging is “blind,” and Fellowships are awarded on the basis of writing quality alone. All submissions are first read by two local judges drawn from current and former Fishtrap board members. The final judge for 2009 was award-winning Oregon author John Daniel. Fellows will be announced on the Fishtrap web site.

Scholarships
Fishtrap awards scholarships every year. The Sally Bowerman Scholarship, given in honor of a long-time Fishtrapper, goes to a working woman; the Frank Conley and Bryn Lunde scholarships help studenets and young adults. Frank was on the original Fishtrap board and later managed the office; Bryn was a local student with a passion for music and words. If you are interested in a scholarship, please contact Fishtrap.

Elise Paschen

Elise Paschen is the author of Bestiary, Infidelities, and Houses: Coasts. Her poems have been published in the New Republic, the Hudson Review, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. She is editor of the New York Times best-selling anthology Poetry Speaks to Children and co-editor of Poetry Speaks, Poetry in Motion, and others. Former Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America, she is the co-founder of “Poetry in Motion,” a nation-wide program which places poetry posters in subways and buses. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lynnell Edwards

Lynnell Edwards is the author of two books of poetry, The Highwayman's Wife (2007) and The Farmer's Daughter (2003). Her short fiction has been published in literary journals such as New Madrid and the Connecticut Review. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky where she directs the writing center at Bellarmine University and is associate director of the InKY reading series in Louisville. Prior to that she was Professor of English at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Registration opens April 1. Many workshops were so popular last year that they filled before some of you even had a chance to consider them. This year we will regard all registrations as equal until April 15. On that date if a workshop is more than full, we will draw names from those who indicate that workshop as their first choice. After that, it is strictly first come, first served. We will try to get you into your second choice if you do not get into your first choice.

View the printable registration form here.

Fees & Payment

We want attendance at Fishtrap to be determined by desire, not limited by means. We try to keep our costs as low as possible, and some scholarships are available. A $100 non-refundable deposit reserves your spot. Final payment is due June 15. A $30 discount is available to those who pay in full by June 1. We do accept VISA and MasterCard. If you have Internet access, we encourage you to register and pay online.

Cancellation Policy

Your deposit is non-refundable. Any other payments you have made will be refunded if we receive your cancellation by June 15. If it is necessary for Fishtrap to reschedule or cancel a workshop because of lack of enrollment or other unforeseen circumstances, you will be notified promptly and may choose to enroll in another workshop or receive a full refund.

Lodging

Summer Fishtrap is based at Wallowa Lake Camp and Retreat Center. You can choose from three levels of lodging at the camp. Wooden yurts can fit one to three people, and have their own bathroom; sheets, blankets, pillows, and towels are supplied. Rustic bunkhouses have bare mattresses, with bathroom facilities in nearby buildings; you should bring your own sleeping bag, pillow, or other bedding. There are also RV and tent spaces; campers use the same bathroom facilities as bunkhouse occupants.

You may also choose to stay in lodging other than that offered by the camp. For information on other lodging, see the information at right, or contact the Wallowa County Chamber of Commerce at 800-585-4121 or www.wallowacountychamber.com

Fishtrap handles reservations for Wallowa Lake Camp only.

Meals

Meals are served cafeteria style at Wallowa Lake Camp, and feature fresh local produce. Please indicate on the registration form if you prefer vegetarian or vegan fare.

Cancellation Policy

Your deposit is non-refundable. Any other payments you have made will be refunded if we receive your cancellation by June 30. If it is necessary for Fishtrap to reschedule or cancel a workshop because of lack of enrollment or other unforeseen circumstances, you will be notified promptly and may choose to enroll in another program or receive a full refund.

Additional Information

You may wish to bring a seating cushion – like people use at ball games – as some of our seats are old fashioned and hard. NO PETS ARE ALLOWED AT WALLOWA LAKE CAMP; however pets are allowed at some other lodging sites at Wallowa Lake.

Notice of Non-Discrimination

Fishtrap, Inc. prohibits discrimination, on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, or age, within its organization and during the conduct of any of its programs.

Directions
Click here for a map and driving directions. (.pdf file)

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Camping and RV spaces are available at:
Wallowa Lake State Park
(238-7488 in Portland or 800-452-5687)

There are RV spaces at:
Scenic Meadows RV Park (541-432-9285)
Park at the River (541-432-8800)
Five Peaks in Joseph (888-432-4605)
Mountain View Motel & RV Park (866-262-9891)
Log House RV Park & Campground (541-426-4027)

For those who appreciate more
creature comforts:
Eagle Cap Chalets (541-432-4704)
Wallowa Lake Lodge (541-432-9821)
Flying Arrow Resort (541-432-2951)
Matterhorn Swiss Village (541-432-4071)
Wallowa Lake Resort (541-432-2391)
Heidi’s Cabins (541-432-0303)
Timberline Vacation Ranch (541-432-5052)
The Nutcracker (541-386-1163)
Trouthaven Resort (541-432-2221)

In Joseph:
Indian Lodge Motel (541-432-2651)
The Barn House (503-881-5008)
East Street Cottages (541-432-2651)

B & B’s include:
1901 Eagle’s Haven B & B (800-819-9544)
Alder Slope B & B (541-398-1688)
Arrowhead Ranch Cabins (541-426-4220)
Barking Mad Farm B & B (541-426-0360)
Belle Pepper’s B & B (866-432-0490)
Bronze Antler B & B (866-520-9769)
Chandler’s Inn (541-432-9765)
A Cowboy’s Riverfront Retreat (541-432-1775)
Cowgirl Heaven B & B (541-432-0229)
Green Valley Inn B & B (541-426-3747)
Little Ranch B & B (541-432-3706)
Whitetail Farm B & B (541-432-1630)
Northend Crossing (888-897-8020)

Private cabins:
Wallowa Lake Vacation rentals (541-426-2039)

For information on additional nearby lodging, call the Wallowa County Chamber at 800-585-4121, or visit their web site at www.wallowacountychamber.com. It includes links to lodging providers above and more.