Schedule for Saturday, May 7

May 7, 2016 Saturday Schedule

Saturday Events include a morning panel and four afternoon workshops followed by a reading/talk from author Ariel Gore. Location: Downtown Eugene Public Library at 10th and Olive (100 W. 10th St., Eugene, OR 97401).

Saturday Writers Panel: 9:30 a.m. – Noon

On Saturday, the symposium will convene at the Downtown Eugene Public Library in the Bascom / Tykeson rooms with a panel of our featured writers on the theme “Crossing Borders: Women’s Stories of Immigration, Migration, and Transition.” Each author will read selections from her work and answer questions about her writing life.

Panelists include:

Reyna Grande, author of the memoir The Distance Between Us and the novels Across a Hundred Mountains and Dancing with Butterflies.
Ariel Gore, the editor & publisher of the Alternative Press Award-winning magazine Hip Mama and the author of eight books, including the memoirs The End of Eve and Atlas of the Human Heart.
Ana-Maurine Lara, is a national award-winning fiction author and poet. She was awarded the Oregon Arts Commission’s 2015 honorary Joan Shipley Award, and is also a recipient of PEN/Northwest, the Barbara Deming Award, and the National Latino/Chicano Literary Contest Third Prize. Her novel Erzulie’s Skirt (RedBone Press 2006) was a Lambda Literary Finalist. She draws from her experiences as a Dominican-American writer of Native, African, and Jewish ancestry to produce literary works and performances that blur the boundaries of artistic genres and cultural traditions.
Gabriela Martínez, Associate Professor, UO School of Journalism and Communication, is an international award-winning documentary filmmaker who has produced, directed or edited more than twelve ethnographic and social documentaries, including Media, Women, and Rebellion in Oaxaca and Keep Your Eyes On Guatemala.
Moderator: Barbara Corrado Pope, novelist (Cézanne’s Quarry; The Missing Italian Girl; The Blood of Lorraine) is also professor emerita of UO Department of Women’s and Gender Studies.

Saturday Afternoon Workshops: 1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Saturday afternoon workshops will be limited to 20 participants each. Although all events are FREE & open to the public, starting April 11, you will be able to preregister for limited spaces in Saturday afternoon workshops by calling Eugene Library at 541-682-5450 (Press 2). Please do not call before this date.

Traveling through the Landscape of Our Lives: Going Beyond Gendered Traditions, a memoir workshop led by Ariel Gore. Workshop Description: Migration jolts us out of our routines, dazzles us with sensory details, stresses our ordinary coping mechanisms, and allows us an intimate experience of self beyond the ordinary trappings of geography and circumstance. No wonder so many memoir stories are set on the road. Traditionally, male writers have told tales of outward exploration while women have relayed “journeys of self-discovery.” In this workshop, we’ll explore a balance of internal and external storytelling—going beyond these gendered traditions to tell our unique tales as travelers through the landscapes of our lives.Ariel Gore is the editor & publisher of the Alternative Press Award-winning magazine Hip Mama and the author of eight books. Her most recent book, The End of Eve, chronicles her years spent caring for her dying mother and was awarded both the Rainbow Award 2014 for Best Lesbian Book and the 2014 New Mexico Arizona Book Award in the Gay/Lesbian (GLBT) category. Her lyrical memoir, Atlas of the Human Heart, a recounting of her travels as a teenager, was a 2004 finalist for the Oregon Book Award.

Miriam Gershow

Setting: More Than Just a Backdrop, a fiction workshop led by Miriam Gershow. In this workshop, we will investigate how to use the place of your story to bring a scene to life. A vivid and specific setting can convey mood, develop character and highlight the themes of your story. Join us for an afternoon of writing exercises that play with place in order to build convincing, evocative scenes. This workshop experience can be applied to all genres.

Miriam Gershow is a writer and teacher living in Eugene, Oregon. Her debut novel, The Local News, was called “deftly heartbreaking” by the New York Times. Her short stories appear in The Georgia Review, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Journal, and Gulf Coast, among others. She is the recipient of a Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, as well as an Oregon Literary Fellowship from Literary Arts. She has taught fiction writing to everyone from first graders to adults.

Penelope’s Loom: A Poetry Workshop, led by Ana-Maurine Lara and open to writers of all levels. Workshop Description: This poetry workshop will draw on the metaphor of Penelope’s loom (from Homer’s Odyssey) as a framework for considering our individual and collective migrant weavings and unweavings of memory, story and place. We will also draw from global current events to think about our own and migrant women’s strengths, circumstances and resilience.Ana-Maurine Lara is a national award-winning fiction author and poet. She draws from her experiences as a Dominican-American writer of Native, African, and Jewish ancestry to produce literary works and performances that blur the boundaries of artistic genres and cultural traditions. Her multigenre piece Cantos was released in September 2015 at Cave Canem’s headquarters in New York City. Winner of the 2015 Oregon Arts Commission Joan Shipley Award, which supported the development of her performance poetry project “Landlines,” Ana-Maurine Lara presented this piece in August 2015 as a public event exploring the ideas home and homeland in Eugene. The Sephardic Jewish notion of kasa inspired two public processions that reflected on what home means for the multiple communities—Black, Native, Asian American, Jewish, Latino—that constitute Eugene.
Jennifer Burns Bright

Spicing Up Travel and Migration Narratives with Food, led by Prof. Jennifer Burns Bright. Workshop Description: Some of the best stories of visiting foreign lands or starting a new life as an immigrant include vivid descriptions of encountering different food cultures. In this workshop, we will analyze and mimic the techniques of several masters of traveling food writing who illustrate landscape and life transitions with delectable dishes. Bring recipes and your own drafts, if you have them, for class exercises.

Jennifer Burns Bright is a food and travel writer based on the Southern Oregon coast who also teaches humanities and food studies courses at the University of Oregon. Her stories and interviews have appeared in various print and recorded media and in her award-winning food blog, Culinaria Eugenius. She has been a columnist at Eugene Magazine and a contributor to AAA’s Via magazine, NPR, and other publications and radio programs. She has traveled everywhere—from Amsterdam to write about Dutch pickles, to a Hamtramck bakery to write about her own family’s migration to Detroit.

Saturday, May 7 at 4 p.m. Reading by Ariel Gore at Eugene Downtown Public Library.

Ariel Gore is the editor & publisher of the Alternative Press Award-winning magazine Hip Mama and the author of eight books. Her most recent book, The End of Eve, chronicles her years spent caring for her dying mother and has been described as “Terms of Endearment meets Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? This memoir was awarded both the Rainbow Award 2014 for Best Lesbian Book and the 2014 New Mexico Arizona Book Award in the Gay/Lesbian (GLBT) category. Her lyrical memoir, Atlas of the Human Heart, a recounting of her travels as a teenager, was a 2004 finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She won the LAMBDA Literary Award in 2010 for her anthology Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City. A graduate of Mills College and the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, she has taught at The Attic Institute in Portland, Oregon, at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and at the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Currently she teaches online at Ariel Gore’s School for Wayward Writers.

Saturday, May 7 at 5 p.m. Reading by Debra Gwartney
at Eugene Downtown Public Library (An SOJC PageTurner event).

Debra Gwartney will read from her book Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir. Gwartney is a member of the nonfiction faculty for Pacific University’s MFA in Writing program. Her memoir, published in 2009, was a finalist for an Oregon Book Award, PNBA Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award. Debra is also co-editor, along with her husband Barry Lopez, of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, published by Trinity University Press in 2006. She has published essays in many magazines, newspapers, and literary journals, including American Scholar, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Salon, Tampa Review, Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, The New York Times (“Modern Love” column), and others.