Northwest Writers' Weekend

Classes Offered

Poetry led by Kate Gray After living in Oregon for 26 years, I’ve started to rust, not tan. An awful experience in a Delaware boarding school sent me fleeing to Oregon but was the basis for a recently completed novel called Skin Drag.. Besides writing fiction, I write and publish poetry. My first full-length book of poems, Another Sunset We Survive was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in 2007 and followed chapbooks, Bone-Knowing (2006), winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Prize and Where She Goes (2000), winner of the Blue Light Chapbook Prize. I live in Portland, Oregon, and teach at a community college.

Creative Non-Fiction led by Marie Eaton Marie Eaton has been wrestling with various forms of memoir writing for years and finds that sometimes memory shows up in song, sometimes in story. Marie is a faculty member at Fairhaven College (Western Washington University) where she teaches courses in a number of areas, including songwriting, poetry and lyric, and creative non-fiction (particularly memoir writing). In American Childhood: Memoir and Memory, she and students explore the landscape of childhood as ‘remembered’ in varied books and films and write memoirs to connect these memories to personal experience. Her memoir work is guided by the following quotes: “Our lives may be determined less by our childhood than by the way we have learned to imagine our childhoods.” (James Hillman, The Soul’s Code) and "There is fiction in the space between/ The lines on your page and memories/ Write it down, but it doesn’t mean/ You’re not just telling stories." Tracy Chapman, Telling Stories.)

Songwriting led by Linda Waterfall Linda Waterfall grew up in a musical family with early training in classical piano, music theory, composition and voice. Her music reflects many influences. Seattle Times critic Paul de Barros characterized her work as a "...Whitmanic embrace of the American panorama, mixing vernacular and highbrow culture, and everything in between." When she performs, she accompanies herself on both guitar and piano. She tours periodically as a solo musician, composes choral and vocal music, and works in the studio as both a record producer and session musician. She has been songwriting instructor at Cornish College of the Arts since 2005.