3rd Annual Lost Horse Writers' Conference
May 2, 3, & 4, 2003

Join some of the Northwest's most renowned writers for a weekend of workshops, readings, panel discussions and recreation on the shores of Lake Pend Oreille in the north Idaho mountains.

Please download conference information in .pdf format. (You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader, which you can download here.) For more information email us, or call Lost Horse Press at 208.255.4410.

THE WORKSHOPS & FACULTY

Marvin Bell:

Poetry

Intensive poetry workshop with in-depth study and discussion of student writers' poems.

Marvin Bell, author of sixteen books of poetry and essays, has been the recipient of the Lamont Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia. He is a longtime member of the faculty of the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he is Flannery O'Connor Professor of Letters. In the year 2000, the state of Iowa named him its first Poet Laureate.

Rick Bass:

Process, Patterns, Language, Structure in Fiction, Presence of Charged Elements, Boundaries and Borders, The Organic Birth of Awe, Interior and Exterior Tensions.

Novelist, essayist, and short story writer, Rick Bass's works are concerned with the nature of the human heart and the heart of nature. Bass moved to Montana's Yaak Valley in 1987, where he finds the isolation he requires to write. He regularly publishes articles in magazines such as Field and Stream, Sports Afield, Gray's Sporting Journal, Outdoor Life, and others. The stories in Bass's first short story collection, The Watch, which won the 1988 PEN/Nelson Algren Award in 1988, are generally set in Texas. His other works, however, concern the West. Bass published his first novel, Where the Sea Used to Be, in 1998. His most recent fictional work is a short story collection, The Hermit's Story: Stories (2002). Most of his other recent works have been nonfiction, including The New Wolves (1998), Brown Dog of the Yaak: Essays on Art and Activism (1999), Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had (2000), and The Roadless Yaak: Reflections and Observations About One of Our Last Great Wilderness Areas (2002).

Mary Clearman Blew:

Fiction or Non?

This class is an exploration of the dark and shady territory between fiction and nonfiction, the advantages and disadvantages of both genres, with exercises to test my theories and stimulate new work from the participants.

Mary Clearman Blew is author of the acclaimed essay collection All But the Waltz; a memoir, Balsamroot; and three books of short stories, most recently Sister Coyote (2001). She has also edited Written on Water: Essays on Idaho Rivers by Idaho Writers. Her own most recent book of essays is Bone Deep in Landscape (2001). She has won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award twice, once in fiction and once in nonfiction. She teaches at the University of Idaho.

James Grabill:

The Essay

This workshop is open to anyone working on a type of creative nonfiction, including personal essays, memoirs, literary journalism, short pieces, and nature or science writing. We'll discuss shared reading and participants' manuscripts with an eye toward process, structure, language, accuracy, useful techniques, and the intersection of genres. Bring a nonfiction work in progress, extra paper, and energy.

James Grabill's second collection of essays, Actual Energy, will be published by Lost Horse Press later this year. This spring, Lynx House Press---in conjunction with Michigan State University Press---will release his seventh collection of poems, An Indigo Scent after the Rain. In 1995, his Poem Rising Out of the Earth and Standing Up in Someone was awarded the Oregon Book Award for Poetry and his Through the Green Fire was selected as a finalist for the Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. His work has appeared widely in periodicals across the country.

Greg Glazner:

Poetry and the Seductions of Boundaries

We will discuss the appeal of contemporary poetry that pushes the boundaries of the poem toward prose and committed content in one direction, and toward the pure language event in another. Discussions of student writing will be focused with a question: how can the poem be given enough room to become itself more fully, in terms of form, subject(s), and the essentials of craft?

Greg Glazner's books of poetry include From the Iron Chair, which won the Walt Whitman Award, and Singularity, both published by W.W. Norton. Other awards include The Bess Hokin Award from Poetry and residencies from The Lannan Foundation and The Ucross Foundation. Excerpts from his manuscript-in-progress, Zeno's Cure, have appeared recently in Colorado Review, Ploughshares, Volt, Pool, The Canary River Review, Salt, and Poetry International. Glazner was the founding director of the Creative Writing Program at the College of Santa Fe, and the co-founder, with Jon Davis, of Countermeasures, a nationally-distributed magazine of poetry and ideas. He also served recently as the literary editor of James Enyeart's Photographers, Writers, and the American Scene. His literary section of the anthology features new work by Robert Hass, Jorie Graham, Denis Johnson, Debra Earling, Jay Wright, and ten other writers.

Robert Glatzer:

Screenwriting

The focus is to help the writer realize his or her own creative film vision, without being shoehorned into a formulaic straitjacket. Participants are asked to bring a completed draft or a full treatment for presentation to the group. Discussions will be frank but constructive, with the goal of honoring the writer's intentions at all times. Participants should be acquainted with Todd Solondz's film Storytelling and Tom Tykwer's film Run Lola Run. (Both are available on DVD and VHS.). Participants bringing completed scripts should register them with the Writers Guild of America prior to the seminar. Copies will be made and distributed to participants prior to the seminar weekend, and students are expected to read them before the Conference.

Robert Glatzer is a film critic and screenwriter in Spokane, Washington, where he hosts the weekly NPR show, Movies 101. A former film director in New York and Hollywood, his films have won awards at festivals around the world. He has taught film at New York's School of Visual Arts and at Eastern Washington University. His book, Beyond Popcorn: A Critic's Guide to Looking at Films, was published by EWU Press.

Quincy Troupe:

Poetry. Transcircularities: The Intersection of post-Moderism, Surrealism, Jazz, Rap, American Language, and Poetics

Poet, performer, and editor Quincy Troupe's books of poetry include Choruses: Poems (Coffee House Press, 1999); Avalanche: Poems (1996); Weather Reports: New and Selected Poems (1991); Skulls along the River (1984); Snake-Back Solos: Selected Poems 1969-1977 (1979), which received an American Book Award; and Embryo Poems, 1967-1971 (1974). He is also the author of Miles: The Autobiography (1989), which received an American Book Award; James Baldwin: The Legacy (1989); and the memoir, Miles and Me: A Memoir of Miles Davis (2000). He is Professor of Creative Writing and American Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Dorianne Laux & Joseph Millar:

Poetry: Deep Water: Writing About Family

The Family: Everybody has one, whether traditional or non-, an underground confluence of riptides and eddies that buffets and buoys us forth, confused, inspired, wounded, into the flow of the world. This workshop, directed toward the various aspects of kinship, will be a forum for discussion and development of our own work, using models for exercises poems by such writers as Philip Levine, Marie Howe, Sharon Olds, and BH Fairchild. Open to all skill levels.

Dorianne Laux worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, a maid, and a donut holer before receiving a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988. Laux is the author of three collections of poetry: Smoke (BOA Editions, 2000), What We Carry (1994), and Awake (1990). Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize, an Editor's Choice III Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Laux is an Associate Professor at the University of Oregon's Program in Creative Writing.

Joseph Millar holds an MA in poetry from Johns Hopkins University. His poems of work have appeared in Shenandoah, DoubleTake, New Letters, Ploughshares, Manoa, and others. His collection of poems, Overtime, was published in 1991. Millar teaches literature and creative writing at Oregon State University in Corvallis. He is the recipient of a 2003 NEA Poetry Fellowship.