"Writing Wild" theme of Story Catcher workshop

The general workshop fee is $150 and includes access to workshops, events and reception, as well as continental breakfast and refreshments.

Complete workshop information is available online. For registration and workshop questions contact scoughlin@csc.edu.

 

 

The Story Catcher Writing Workshop and Festival keynote reading Sunday is free and open to the public.

The reading, at 6 p.m. in the Mari Sandoz Chicoine Atrium, will feature Kim Barnes, professor of English in the MFA program at the University of Idaho, and Robert Wrigley, who has taught at Lewis-Clark State College, Warren Wilson College, the University of Oregon, the University of Montana, Warren College, and the University of Idaho.

The festival Sunday from 8:30 a.m. to noon in the same location is also free and open to the public. It will include an open mic by workshop participants and a special presentation from Alan Wilkinson, who hails from Durham, England.

Barnes and Wrigley are a married couple and will serve as workshop and festival’s Fiction Writer in Residence and Poet in Residence, respectively.

Barnes is the author of “In the Kingdom of Men,” named a best book of 2012 by the San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, and The Oregonian, and long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, “A Country Called Home,” winner of the 2009 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, was named a best book of 2008 by The Washington Post, The Kansas City Star, and The Oregonian.

She is a recipient of the PEN/Jerard Award in nonfiction for her first memoir, “In the Wilderness,” which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The New York Times, WSJ online, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Fourth Genre, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly and the Pushcart Anthology.

Wrigley was the first in his family to graduate from college, and the first male for generations to escape work in a coal mine, Wrigley earned his MFA from the University of Montana, where he studied with Madeline DeFrees, John Haines, and Richard Hugo.

His poetry examines the influences of the physical world on daily lives. His poems are concerned with rural Western landscapes and humankind’s place within the natural world, and he said he aims to “tell all the truth, but make it sing,”

“Poetry can have a redemptive function. It can look at the chaos you see and make a kind of sense of the smallest part of it,” he said.

His collections of poetry include “Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems” (2006), “Lives of the Animals” (2003), winner of the Poets Prize, “Reign of Snakes” (1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, and “In the Bank of Beautiful Sins” (1995), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets.