NWWS: Saturday afternoon workshops

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.

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  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.

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  Jennifer Burns Bright

  Spicing Up Travel and Migration Narratives with Food, led by 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.

The symposium includes panel discussions, writing workshops, a keynote talk, author conversations & readings, book signings, and discussion. Our theme is “Crossing Borders: Women’s Stories of Immigration, Migration, and Transition.” How have our migrations and moves contributed to or instigated our writings? What do we move away from, and what do we go toward? What are the historical, political, and personal currents that influence our transitions—from one country to another, from one state to another, from city to country, from mountains to sea, from one marriage or partnership to another, from one career to another, from one self-view to another? “Crossing Borders” is a multi-layered theme that will open the door to fruitful discussions of craft, creativity, challenges of survival, making room for others, and community. This theme promises to open conversations about border politics; poverty; racism and xenophobia; climate change; ongoing effects of colonialism and genocide; family dynamics; agricultural patterns and enslavement; overpopulation; human migratory patterns; fleeing war and abuse; moving on; and traveling for discovery, growth, and as part of our archetypal human journey.

Saturday May 7 Events / Eugene Public Library / 100 W. 10th, Eugene, OR 97401

Saturday Events include a morning panel and four afternoon workshops followed by a reading/talk from author Ariel Gore. As part of the SOJC Page Turner program, essayist, journalist, and memoirist Debra Gwartney will give a reading & talk directly following Ariel Gore’s presentation. Location: Downtown Eugene Public Library at 10th and Olive (100 W. 10th St., Eugene, OR  97401)

Hosted by the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon in cooperation with Eugene Pubic Library, this symposium is generously cosponsored by Oregon Humanities Center’s Endowment for Public Outreach in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities; UO Libraries; Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies; Department of Women’s and Gender Studies; Department of English; School of Journalism and Communication; School of Music and Dance; and the University Health Center.