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Winter Fishtrap Gathering

February 23-25, 2007 -Wallowa Lake, Oregon

Howard Berkes - Bill Bishop - David Romtvedt

Winter Fishtrap is always about some issue of writing and public policy. In the past, we have considered "Fire," "Water," "Violence," and "New Wealth in the Old West." Presenters have included novelists, poets, journalists, lobbyists, psychiatrists, and economists. The trick is to find a theme that is at the edge of thinking among creative writers and public policy makers–and of a wide spectrum of writers, readers, and thinkers in the West.

In this election year, we have been bombarded with stories of Red and Blue, Democrat and Republican, city and country, east and west. It has seemed like a game, an exercise by someone in sorting the entire country, all 300,000,000 of us, into opposing camps. Are we indeed sorting ourselves into two–or even three or four or five–camps?

I recently read an essay by David Romtvedt in The Sun: "Red Politics and Blue in Wyoming." Wyoming, the "equality" state, where women gained the vote 50 years before they did in the whole USA. Casper, Wyoming, that "red neck" town, with a young gay mayor. And a State Poet Laureate married into a ranching family, living on the blue side of politics, talking with the Republican Governor about arts funding and poetry! So I began wondering about the divides and how real they are. I called Howard Berkes, who lives in Salt Lake City and covers rural America for National Public Radio. He agreed to join David at Winter Fishtrap. As did Howard’s friend, Bill Bishop of the Austin American-Statesmen in Texas, who is writing a book about how America is segregating itself, "by race, by skills, by the way we form our families, live our lives and, in the end, by our politics." Now this sounds like a good conversation for a long February weekend at the Wallowa Lake Lodge. First come, first served!

Presenters

Howard Berkes became NPR's first rural affairs correspondent in March 2003. His focus includes the politics, economics, and culture of rural America. This is a natural extension of his two decades of reporting for NPR. In 1981, he pioneered NPR's coverage of the interior of the American West and public lands issues. He's traveled thousands of miles to every corner of the region, driving ranch roads, city streets, desert washes, and mountain switchbacks, to capture the voices and sounds that give the region its unique identity. Berkes has covered Native American issues, the militia movement, neo-Nazi groups, nuclear waste, the Unabomber case, polygamy, western water issues, and more. His stories are heard on "Morning Edition," "All Things Considered," and "Weekend Edition."

Bill Bishop is currently completing a book on political segregation, soon to be published by Houghton-Mifflin. Bishop has worked for papers in Lexington, Kentucky, and Austin, Texas, specializing in coverage of rural development, city growth, and political demography. In 1996, he was the Ford Foundation Writer in Residence at MDC, Inc., a rural development think tank in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1989 and in 1996 won the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism, given by the Anderson School at UCLA. He has written for Newsday, The New York Times, The Mountain Eagle, The Washington Post and The Texas Observer. From 1983 to 1988, he and his wife owned and operated a weekly newspaper in rural Texas.

David Romtvedt was born in Portland, Oregon and raised in Arizona. He graduated from Reed College in 1972 and received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was a graduate fellow in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. Romtvedt, who has lived in Buffalo, Wyoming, since 1984, is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, including the National Poetry Series selection A Flower Whose Name I Do Not Know. He is also a member of the musical group The Fireants, which has performed at schools, libraries and festivals throughout the state and region. His work has appeared, most recently, in Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, and North American Review. Romtvedt is a recipient of the Wyoming Governor’s Arts Award, and is currently Poet Laureate of Wyoming.

Kate Power and Steve Einhorn, Fishtrap’s 2007 "Songwriters in Residence," will join us in words and song for the weekend.