Mountain Writers Series

Press Club

Please join Mountain Writers Series the third Wednesday of each month for literary readings at SE Portland’s most literate wine café, The Press Club, at 2621 S.E. Clinton.

June 2009

Wednesday, June 17th @ 7:30 PM

Tom Crawford and Carlos Reyes

Tom Crawford is the author of five books of poems: If It Weren’t for Trees; Lauds, winner of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry; China Dancing; The Temple on Monday, winner of the ForeWord Book of the Year Award; and Wu Wei (Milkweed Editions, 2007). Widely published in journals and anthologies, Crawford has been recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Oregon Arts Commission. For thirty years he has taught throughout the Western U.S. as well as in the People’s Republic of China and at Chonnam National University in Kwangju, Korea. In 2008 he was Poet in Residence at Harborview Hospital in Seattle. He lives with his partner Mary and their dog Walt in Santa Fe, NM.

Carlos Reyes is a noted poet and translator. His latest book of poetry is At the Edge the Edge of the Western Wave (2004). His The Book of Shadows; New and Selected Poems is due out next year from Lost Horse Press.  A Suitcase Full of Crows (1995) was a winner of the Bluestem Prize. His most recent book of translations is Ignacio Ruiz Pérez’s La señal del cuervo / The Sign of the Crow. Last year he was recipient of The Fortner Award from St Andrews College.  He has been an Oregon Arts Commission Fellow,  a Yaddo Fellow, a Fundación Valparaíso Fellow, (Spain), a Heinrich Boll Fellow (Ireland) and most recently was poet- in- resident at the Joshua Tree National Park.

July 2009

Marianne Kleckacz & Dick Bakken

Marianne Klekacz lives and writes in Oregon’s Coast Range Mountains. A native of Oregon, she returned there after a journey that took her from the wilds of Alaska to the deserts of Arizona, to San Francisco, Switzerland, Denmark, England, The Philippines, the Caribbean Islands, and through many of the fifty states. She has been a cowgirl, police woman, race car driver, life guard, and a technical specialist in computers and telecommunications. She helps nurture (with husband Ben) 100 acres of mixed-tree forest. A river runs through it. Any or all of these things are likely to show up in her poems. Her first chapbook, Life Science, won the Edna Meudt Memorial Award in 2003. She was awarded a B.A. in English and Writing from Marylhurst University and an M.F.A. in Writing from Pacific University.

Dick Bakken lived in Portland ten years, where he taught English and Creative Writing at Portland State University 1966–70, published an internationally reviewed anthology of contemporary inflammatory Bengali poetry in 1967, co-directed the Portland Poetry Center at University of Portland in 1968–70, made a celebrated resignation from PSU on National General Strike Day 1970, originated the USA poetry gathering icon the Portland Poetry Chicken in 1972, co-founded the Portland Poetry Festival in 1973–74, was one of the three speakers at the Governor’s inauguration of William Stafford as Oregon State Poet Laureate in 1975, as well as being sued for $75,000 over dirty words in his anthology of works by children in 1975, and much more. His most recent book—”Greatest Hits 1967-2002*—includes six created while living in Portland.

August 2009

Wednesday, August 19th @ 7:30 PM

Paul Merchant & Jerry Harp

Paul Merchant is William Stafford Archivist at Lewis & Clark College, Portland. A native of Wales, he taught for many years at Warwick University before taking up residence in Oregon. His fourth collection of poems, Some Business of Affinity (2006), was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award. His third volume of translations from modern Greek, Monochords by Yannis Ritsos, was published in 2007 by Trask House Press.

Jerry Harp's books of poems are Creature (Salt 2003), Gatherings (Ashland Poetry Press 2004), and Urban Flowers, Concrete Plains (Salt 2006). With Jan Weissmiller he co-edited A Poetry Criticism Reader (University of Iowa Press 2006). His For Us, What Music: On the Life and Poetry of Donald Justice is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. His essays and reviews appear regularly in Pleiades. He teaches at Lewis & Clark College.

September 2009

Katherine Dunn

Katherine Dunn will be reading from her new collection of essays on the sport of boxing, One Ring Circus.  These pieces range from portraits of legendary fighters such as Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Marvin Hagler, and Mike Tyson to the unsung stories of trainers, amateurs and promoters. She has written about and reported on the sport of boxing since 1981. Her prize-winning boxing journalism has appeared in many publications from The Ring and KO Magazine to Vogue, Esquire and Playboy. Her column, Punch Lines, ran weekly in The Skanner Newspaper in Portland and Seattle from 1982 to 1995. Katherine Dunn is the author of the novel Geek Love, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1989. Dunn’s other publications include the novels Attic (1970) and Truck (1971). She also wrote the text for Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective's Scrapbook (1995), a book of homicide photography; the humorous The Slice: Information with an Attitude (1989) (also published as Why Do Men Have Nipples? And Other Low-Life Answers to Real-Life Questions (1990), which contains her collected newspaper columns from Willamette Week. Katherine Dunn lives and works in Portland.

October 2009

Gina Ochsner

Gina Ochsner lives in Keizer, Oregon and divides her time between writing and teaching with the Seattle Pacific Low-Residency MFA program.Ochsner has been awarded a John L. Simon Guggenheim grant and a grant from the National Endowment of Arts. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Glimmertrain and the Kenyon Review. She is the author of the short story collection The Necessary Grace to Fall, which received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the story collection People I Wanted to Be. Both books received the Oregon Book Award. Her novel The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight (Portobello Press) is a finalist for the 2009 Oregon Book Award for Fiction.

November 2009

Roger Wendlick

Roger Wendlick was born in Portland, Oregon, where he worked for most of his adult life in heavy construction. Roger also lived a parallel life as an antiquarian book collector. In 1980 Roger began to obsessively collect materials related to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, making it his goal to assemble the world’s most complete collection of printed materials relating to the Expedition. In 1998 Roger achieved his goal and devoted himself full time to study and teaching about the Expedition.Wendlick will be reading from his book, Shotgun on My Chest: Memoirs of a Lewis and Clark Book Collector, which is the chronicle of one man’s obsession with book collecting.

December 2009

Lex Runciman & Carlos Reyes

Lex Runciman has lived most of his life in Oregon's Willamette Valley.Starting from Anywhere (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2009) is his fourth collection of poetry, following Luck (1981), The Admirations (1989), winner of the Oregon Book Award, and Out of Town (2004).A co-editor of two anthologies, his own work has appeared in several anthologies including From Here We Speak and Portland Lights. He is Professor of English at Linfield College, where he received the Edith Green Award in teaching in 1997.

Carlos Reyes is a noted poet and translator. His latest book of poetry is The Book of Shadows: New and Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2009). Among his other volumes are The Shingle Weaver’s Journal (1980), At the Edge of the Western Wave (2004), and A Suitcase Full of Crows (1995), winner of the Bluestem Prize. His most recent book of translations is Ignacio Ruiz-Pérez's La señal del cuervo/The Sign of the Crow. Last year he was recipient of The Fortner Award from St Andrews College. He has been an Oregon Arts Commission Fellow, a Yaddo Fellow, a Fundacion Valparaoso Fellow, (Spain), a Heinrich Boll Fellow (Ireland) and most recently the poet-in-resident at the Joshua Tree National Park.

January 2010

Jim Kopp

Jim Kopp is Director of the Aubrey R. Watzek Library at Lewis & Clark College in Portland. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from George Washington University and other graduate degrees in history and library science. His undergraduate degree in history and English is from the University of Oregon. His book, Eden Within Eden: Oregon’s Utopian Heritage (OSU Press, 2009) surveys nearly three hundred communal groups attempted or planned in Oregon over the past 150 years. He has written and presented on several aspects of utopian studies in both its literary and communal manifestations. His extensive private collection on the works by and about Edward Bellamy and of American utopian literature is described in a book published last fall by Berberis Press at Lewis & Clark. He lives with his wife, Sue, appropriately in Aurora, Oregon, which was the earliest communal settlement in the Pacific Northwest. In addition to his varied scholarly pursuits, Jim is completing a children’s book on Aurora Keil—the daughter of the founder of the Aurora Colony and for whom the colony was named—who died of smallpox in 1862 at the age of thirteen.

February 2010

Wednesday, February 17th @ 7:30 PM

Bill Siverly & Barbara Drake

Bill Siverly was born and grew up in Lewiston, Idaho, and he has lived in Portland since 1972.  He has published three books of poems:  Parzival (1981), Phoenix Fire (1987), and The Turn (2000). Hel taught literature, composition, and creative writing at Portland Community College for twenty-five years. Since 2002 he has been co-editor with Michael McDowell of Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, which features poetry of the Pacific Northwest and appears twice yearly on the equinoxes. His most recent book of poems, Clearwater Way, was be published by Traprock Books in August 2009.

Barbara Drake’s most recent book of poetry, Driving One Hundred, was published in 2009 by Windfall Press. Other books of poetry include What We Say to Strangers, Love at the Egyptian Theatre, Life in a Gothic Novel, Bees in Wet Weather, and Small Favors. She is also the author of Writing Poetry, widely used as a college textbook, and Peace at Heart: an Oregon Country Life, a memoir, which was an Oregon Book Award finalist in 1999. Born in Kansas, she moved with her parents to Oregon as a small child and grew up in Coos Bay. She earned her B.A. and M.F.A. degrees from the University of Oregon, and subsequently lived in Michigan for sixteen years where she taught at Michigan State University before returning to Oregon to teach at Linfield College, from 1983 until her recent retirement. The author and her husband live on a small farm in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range.

March 2010

Wednesday, March 17th @ 7:30 PM

Tom Bremer & David Filer

Tom Bremer was born in Cincinatti and grew up in California. He has a B.A. from St. Mary’s College and an M.A. in Creative Writing from Colorado State University. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he was co-founder of the Portland Poetry Festival in 1973 and a charter member of the board of the Oregon Writers’ Workshop. Now retired from many years of teaching English, he is the author of three collections of poetry, Par Amour (1986); A Bird That Changes Trees, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in 1988; and Just Once (2001).

David Filer grew up in the California desert, took degrees in English from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and taught in San Diego and Eugene. He then took a law degree from the University of Oregon and has been engaged in the practice of law for a federal agency in Portland. He lives with his wife Marlene Anderson and has a son, Curran, who lives in Chicago. He has published in numerous literary journals. His first chapbook, Night Verse, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2005 and in 2009 his chapbook, The Landscape There, was published by Stone City Press.